Designer spotlight: Yang You, Head of Design at Paradigm
Yang and I chat about her career journey into design from federal consulting to pushing new boundaries of design in crypto.
Note: The written post has been edited for clarity from when it was mailed out the morning of June 7. The voiceover remains the same.
This interview is our last in our first topic arc on core design skills. Our next topic arc will be on building emotional capacity.
I started Detach Instance to give tactical frameworks and authentic examples that help designers navigate the waters of tech. Our next topic arc is on a less-discussed skill, building our emotional capacities as designers to become a function that can thrive in tech. I’m excited to take the squishy realm of emotions and feelings, and arm designers with practical methods for building emotional resilience to become more effective leaders and collaborators within our organizations. The next arc starts the week of June 19th. Stay tuned!
But first, today we’re sitting down with Yang You, Head of Design at Paradigm, a research-driven investment firm. Yang is deeply immersed in realm of web3 and crypto. Her expertise, combined with her natural ambition, fuels her drive to use design to advance the human capacity for technology. Today we’ll hear about her journey into design and get a glimpse into how she thinks about design’s role in this space.
Designer profile
Name: Yang You
Role: Head of Design at Paradigm
Motivations: leading with design, leveling up the people around her
Skill to swipe: designing the thing right while designing the right thing
You can find Yang on LinkedIn and Twitter. Yang is also active speaker in the design community. Hear more from her in her past talks:
Designing for the humans of web3 at ETHDenver
Designing for web3 & the future of investing on the WLDShow
Product design implications in web3 on an ADPList group panel
Who are you?
I'm Yang. I am a designer, and I've primarily been working in web3 and crypto in the recent years.
Currently, I'm a Head of Design at Paradigm, a research-driven investment firm. I support the portfolio via advising, pixel-level design, and experiments that challenge what we can do with frontier technologies.
How did you get into product design?
Design found me in a way. It was curiosity in chasing after where I can make the most impact given my unique skill set.
I started my career as a technology consultant for the federal government. I was writing queries in a database language called SPARQL. Naturally, I found myself expressing my ideas via either drawing on a piece of paper or via a stylus on an iPad and sharing those ideas with my team.
I realized that amplified my voice and expression of ideas. It also helped align people in a space that was chaotic and had multiple stakeholders.
How did you transition from working as a consultant to product design?
I was a consultant until I transitioned to be a full time designer on a project.
My first design experience was at the consultancy designing a data visualization tool for Border Patrol agents to track down the bad guys. You can imagine a screen of nodes that represented people and lines that connected them all. My first task was identifying a better way to design how those nodes are shown.
I was lucky to work on a project we were building in-house. I saw the way that our engineers worked with designers, who worked with business folks to gather requirements. Imagine a little startup environment within a larger firm.
How did you gain the skills to become a product designer?
The process was long. The way that working at a consulting firm works is you typically devote 80% of your time to your main client project, then your other 20%, you're encouraged to do other things for firm building or market development.
With that extra time, I chose to do things like graphic facilitation, which was drawing on the whiteboard as a meeting is going on and designing infographics. That led to one of the senior partners helping me develop those skills further.
At a certain point, I knew that I needed a baseline of UX strategy and research so I took some courses.
What was your first product design role?
I started working in fintech at Capital One.
Getting that first design job did take some time and it was grueling, but I became a product designer at Capital One. Working with a much larger team, the entire company had 500 designers or so, I got to really absorb how design works within a bigger company.
What were your career aspirations then?
When I started, it was really about just becoming a damn good designer, creating something people use, but also leveling up.
The biggest thing was, aside from visual design and communicating your ideas clearly, how we build and how we design. Not just pushing the right pixels and sharing that out, but communicating in a way that really resonates with people, and also bringing people along on the journey. For example, running workshops and mapping out the user journey flow in a way that stakeholders are not just bought in, but the ones championing for it too.
What happened between then and now?
I think of my career so far in four phases: learning the rules, applying the rules, breaking the rules, and then finally writing the rules.
First in learning the rules, that was at Capital One when I was in New York. It was a big team and a very supportive culture. It was a place where I learned how to set up design for success, working with a great design system team, working hand-in-hand with product managers, and also running design thinking workshops to help teach business folks how we think from the user-centric perspective.
I applied the rules at Anchorage, which was a new domain of web3 and crypto as well as, being the first in-house designer at a startup of around 30 people at the time. It was applying everything that I learned, as well as systems design and creating what I had seen from the ground up.
Next, I moved to a different startup called Syndicate. I call this phase breaking the rules because I was challenged to design based on research vs. anecdotal research, and forming judgement to know what route to take. We were challenging the existing venture model via investment clubs, and through design, showing people what they couldn’t do before.
Today, I’m re-writing my own rules at Paradigm. We’re helping shape how web3 products & protocols are designed, gathering insights from builders on the ground, and contributing to the shared brain for the firm.
What considerations did you make transitioning to work in startups?
I was considering things on multiple scales: the manager, team, the size of the team, who I wanted to learn from, industry, and phase of the startup lifecycle.
The biggest thing was my role. Am I stepping into a team of a few designers that were super talented, or do I put myself into this unknown situation of just myself and setting up all the foundations?
The pivotal question: What’s the path you’d regret not taking? For me, that was the solo designer route at a startup & industry with an unmatched upwards trajectory.
What’s drawn you work in crypto?
I never and probably will never explicitly choose to specialize in just one thing as a designer. So far, crypto’s drew me in because this is one of the highest congregation of beautiful problems and brilliant world-builders.
My longer answer: One of the first things that stood out to me was the people — smart, gritty individuals who have the intuition to think on longer time scales than many others.
There's a narrative that crypto started with anarchists, libertarians, and “rebels” in the space. Gradually, people saw the potential to build an evolved financial system that more people have permission-less access to. That was deeply fascinating.
In terms of a career standpoint, it may be scary, but diving headfirst into an unexplored space well-positions you to shape the way that a generational technology is formed and how how humans interact with it.
What kind of design problems do you work on at an investment firm?
It varies week to week.
Some days we’re working hand-in-hand with a portfolio company or a founder, helping them launch their first website or zero-to-one product. Those are the early stage investments.
Other times we help mid-stage or larger teams in their hiring process, finding their next designer by interviewing and evaluating portfolios.
Other weeks, we focus on in-house projects and support our investing team to connect the dots across the space.
What’s top of mind for you in web3 and crypto?
I've been thinking deeply about which step function improvements are most critical in order for crypto’s potential to be applied more broadly, and what we can personally do to support designers in crypto.
There are newer technical developments such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) that give people the ability to exchange information, while maintaining privacy about who they are and what they own. Foundational pieces like ZKPs are moving from research into the applied phase, so it’s exciting to design for these more novel interactions and use cases. What needs to happen in order for people to understand crypto as a highway when we’ve only travelled on railroads?
As head of design, what aspirations do you have for your team?
We're a small and mighty team of two. We've been quietly supporting projects both internal and external. One aspiration is to partner with more early-stage builders to realize their vision, while making room for intentional “play” time ourselves.
What do you look for in designers entering the crypto and web3 space?
Good design is good design, no matter what you’re applying it to.
Unique to web3 and crypto is having grit and understanding that you're building for the long haul. Token prices can be extremely volatile. We've gone through multiple bear and bull markets already. Be able to zoom out and look at the forest among the trees and see the progression that we’ve already made so far and how much left there is still to do.
Be open-minded enough to take what you know and throw it out the window. We craft new mental models when the foundations look & feel quite different.
What would you go back and tell your early career self?
I would have said, you're doing all the right things by just saying yes and putting yourself out there.
At the time, applying to that first job feels like taking many, many shots in the dark. In hindsight, the dots connect in a beautiful and meaningful way, as long as you trust your intuition. Careers are not linear and you learn things every step of the way.
How have your aspirations changed over the course of your career?
Today, it's less about becoming the best designer in crypto, and more about expanding the playing field of design. How can we push beyond existing patterns & imperfect labels, e.g. the crypto wallet? How do we redefine the value of design to non-designers?
Designers have come a long way from “fighting for a seat at the table.” Through the process, we've also had to translate the value of design into a business sense, like KPIs and engagement. The outcomes of design have been defined by us wedging ourselves into the businesses where we work.
There’s an inherent value in design and the delight of the experience, and that gets lost. I want to look at how to truly lead with design and push forward new ideas in different ways.
I'm also looking at how to use my unique strengths to uplevel those around me. How do we allow humans to do what they otherwise could not? Personally, that means connecting the best people in the space and exploring more novel problems together.
What has been the proudest moment in your design journey?
Taking the leap to become the first and solo designer at Anchorage.
It was very hard. I actually rescinded an offer and made the toughest call in my career, but it was absolutely right. It gave me the confidence to do more and become deeply embedded in the community of builders.
What has been the hardest moment in your design journey?
My proudest moment ironically led me to burn out in spending so much time on work because I was drawn to those hard problems.
I do think it's a privilege to love what you do during your daylight hours, but there's also a strong responsibility to yourself to set those boundaries.
How did you overcome burn out?
For me, it was knowing that I didn’t wake up feeling that same energy when I first joined or at other places.
It took a conscious effort to put energy towards other activities that fed my curiosity. Over time, my definition of productivity expanded to encompass those things.
What’s something that you're still learning for yourself?
I'm still trying to strike the ideal balance of doing the hands-on design work and also higher-level strategic work.
I get the most valuable insights by being deep in the work and in the building phase. Working at an investment firm, you get the zoomed-out view of everything, and you need to know what degree to zoom-in and work on hands-on projects, while at the same time, using that unique vantage point to look across the space.
What skill could you to inject into another designer to immediately up level them?
Interacting with people to make them feel heard. I genuinely believe that there is something to learn from every person we meet.
In user research sessions, the best nuggets will come from taking long pauses and allowing people to reflect or think about the best answer.
Also in working with my partners and teammates, design has a unique superpower in elevating others’ voices and bringing people together. When there is chaos and different types of opinions, design puts a very tangible vision on the board and leading with that.
Bonus question. What would you do if you weren’t a software product designer?
I studied civil and environmental engineering in college and had an interest in urban planning and design. In the built environment around us, where do you place a grocery store or a bike lane? That would be a space I would love to delve deeper.
Health and wellness is also huge for me. My dad was a pole vaulter back in the day, so “health and fitness comes first” was an imperative growing up. I’d be doing something in the fitness realm and helping others achieve those goals too. In the meantime, you can catch me at Barry’s or hot yoga.
That brings us to the end of our conversation with Yang. If you enjoyed learning about her experiences, definitely check out more of her work.
Stay tuned for our next arc in building emotional capacity. This next topic is particularly conducive to discussion with fellow designers, whether you work with them or not. Give Detach Instance a share to get your convo partner or discussion group ready and see you the week of June 19th.