Joining Graduway happened very fast. First week after I landed I applied for a UX UI position at the company, a leading SAAS start-up in the TechEd field.

I didn’t know who they were, their products or anything about them when on the same day that I applied I was asked to make a task to showcase my abilities. I handed the task two days later, then I was invited to an interview and a week later I started working for the company.

Not a standard recruitment process, and a pretty quick one, to say the least, but I understood they were under a lot of pressure from shareholders and high management and needed results fast.

I arrived into a company that had 5 years of experience and was the leading product in the market, and the Next Generation Product (NGP) was in progress. It was supposed to be a more attractive and functional product than the legacy one.

The design team was consisted of 2 graphic designers and they already designed approx. 60% of the screens that needed to be designed.

At first, I designed some screens for the NGP while creating a grid, a basic guideline and basically setting the rules and guidelines for the desktop and mobile devices since there weren’t any existing.

Second, I looked through the designs that were already made and decided to make an upgrade to all of them while overlooking some UX misbehaviours.

To my surprise, I started to receive tasks from other departments as well, such as Marketing, Events, Customer Success, SDR and the CEO himself. It’s a common known that once the performance becomes better, the need for your service increases.

As a multidisciplinary designer with massive hands-on approach I managed to handle the bombarding of the first month with great success, only to realized that this chaotic work method and that this process of delivering projects mainly by oral manners wasn’t effective and that it can’t go on like this. Not to mention that the company got rid of both of our graphic designers almost as soon as I arrived.

A new designer was hired after a short while and an overall change was needed.

In time, a third designer joined due to the pressure the department was experiencing. After leading the general graphic language and receiving compliments for significant results, I started to take responsibility for everything that’s happening in the design department – both positive and negative critic (luckily, didn’t get much of the latter).

And so, I was appointed as Head of Design and in this role I initiated a change in 4 key fields:

1. Re-Organize : 
   First, I set one UX/ UI, one web and one marketing while I filled the role of a hands-on manager to supervise and make sure all designs stand to a requested level, maintain consistency and follow the company’s branding guidelines (the company branding guidelines was not up to date and were very old. A long term task was to recreate and expand those guidelines according to the new company values). 
   Second, Making the Design dep an independent unit within the company rather than a team working exclusively under the product and R&D department. This operation had to go through the CEO and other shareholders, and was acceptable without any setbacks as they saw the increasing need and demand of a high quality and consistent design.
   Third, I set a daily morning briefs with the whole team to review each others tasks and to brainstorm — these meetings lead to collaboration, trust and transparency within the team.
2. Work method :
   Using Asana and and Slack, getting briefs directly from other departments (and not via the senior product team) that are addressed to me. Divided the work between short term tasks, long term tasks and constant work.
3. Cultural:
   Sharing, questioning, exploring, being a doer not a sitter. Initiate creative actions within the office and establishing the “Designers Playground” — a virtual space of sharing knowledge, creative activities and inspirations. 
   I handed responsibility to the team members to make choices, manage their agenda and take responsibility for their work (which was always under my radar) and getting stuff done. This empowered each team member and made them feel as they are trusted and secured.
4. Professional :
   Attending workshops and meetups, spending a daily 1 hour routine on knowledge and inspiration, if the time frame allows it.

We ended up making a more consistent outcome that was created using inspiration of the latest trends and that resulted in a high-level execution.

• Better internal approach and clients conception — Design deliverables were upscaled to a world’s top class standards and constantly on-trend and affected the internal staff approach and also our clients (existing and prospective) conception of the company.
• Design awareness leads to better revenue — Resulted in expanding the effect and the awareness of the design department over the company while increasing the annual revenue as a direct response.
• Higher company value — The CEO declared that the total annual sales and company value increased thanks to outstanding design job, among other things, and that the company is taken much more seriously which leads to a higher company value.
• Make work fun — The department became a place to look forward working in, a place of healthy communication, positive energy and a top class professionalism