Osmond Wu

Today marks a year at Ghost.

It’s crazy how a single year at a startup can feel like three fleeting months and ten demanding years at the same time. As I take a moment to reflect, I’m excited to share not only invaluable professional insights but also life lessons gained during this incredible journey. In this piece, I’ll specifically delve into the design-centric lessons.

My journey started with a 4–5 month internship in ops, where I learned the business from the ground up through manually uploading listings, deck building for buyers/sellers/investors, and contributing to our Series B fundraising efforts. After gaining an understanding of the business and industry, I transitioned to product design where we designed the first iterations of our marketplace.

Why marketplaces are the best places to learn.

I believe marketplaces serve as the best hotspot for learning the fundamentals of product design. To provide some context, Ghost is a private B2B marketplace distributing the best brands in the world. Designing at Ghost is incredibly exciting because we are building a marketplace for an antiquated industry, meaning that we are innovating completely new user flows, features, and visualizations — just like how Uber innovated a way for riders to intuitively visualize the estimated arrival of their drivers with their map feature. Designing an entirely new user journey requires the unearthing of fundamental user behaviors, motivations, and habits that are associated with the pain points of their current workflow. This pushes us to think in first principles, allowing us to be intentional with the way we approach a problem and learn the importance of asking the right questions before designing.

8 Essential Design Takeaways

Intentional Design. “You can distinguish a good designer from a great one by how quickly they log onto Figma — Eli Myers, Head of Design. I’ve come to understand Eli’s message as a measure of intention. Designing at a fast-moving startup is unique. The absence of a robust design process provides the luxury to design creatively, free from red tape and process-heavy blockers. However, it comes at a cost — inconsistencies in design choices. Inconsistencies bring confusion and inaccuracies that unnecessarily slow down the team. This is why intentional design is paramount.

Intentional design is fundamentally understanding who you are designing for and why. When faced with a problem, we often rush into Figma trying to map out fleeting solutions. Although our hustle is commendable, solutions without a proper understanding of stakeholder opinions and data result in assumption-driven designs. Assumptions are inaccurate, leading to meaningless design, meaning time was being inefficiently used. At any startup, time is of the essence.
Context is king. Context is one of the key building blocks of intentional design. Design is inherently social. To achieve a broader understanding of all the moving pieces of a business, we must try to place ourselves in every conversation that provides us with context. Context helps us with our understanding of the fundamental motivations, habits, thoughts, and behaviors of our customers and stakeholders.
Don’t ask, just do. Another way to gain context is to soak in as much knowledge as we can because every job, no matter its scale, has valuable lessons to harvest. The more we understand, the more context we have to make unique connections in interdisciplinary subjects to bring outsized value. For example, manually uploading hundreds of products is tedious but it showed me the process and pain points the itemizing team faced with our product early on. A better understanding of core stakeholder struggles brings context and intentions to my design.
Be specific and literal. Engineers thrive off specificity and often take every design element literally. We must clarify the purpose of every single decision we make to our mockups. Every design choice should be backed up by specific reasoning — having clear design intentions easily solves this problem.
Low lift, high results. Engineers typically prioritize constructing high-quality solutions in the shortest time possible to consistently deliver impactful builds. As designers, we must comprehend the technical implications of our designs in the context of our existing design system and engineering capabilities. This requires us to gain as much context as we can in our product/engineering team. Designers at a startup don’t just design, we design the best possible solution to a pressing problem with the limited resources (time, engineering/product/design bandwidth) we have.
Design in evolutions. I found that designing in V1, V2, and V3 time frames forced me to be intentional with the fundamentals of my vision. V1 is our MVP, where we aim to solve and validate the core needs of the customer. V2 is a fast-follow, allowing us to think of features and elements that elevate the validated solution to help customers more effectively reach a desired behavior. V3 is our future state, how should the product look, feel, and function if we had unlimited technical bandwidth to deliver the best possible solution? Even from the inception of our design process, keeping the three versions in mind imparts structure and vision to our approach. This, in turn, aids in crafting a holistic experience, as opposed to merely focusing on isolated features.
Design as if orchestrating an opulent soirée in your Bel Air mansion. Speaking of designing an experience — In our meticulous focus on perfecting individual designs, we often overlook the narrative presented to our customers. Crafting the ideal party is, in essence, storytelling: from the guests’ initial welcome at the door, their seamless transition to the bar area, the ambient lighting’s nuanced luminosity, to the music harmonizing with the crowd’s vibe. It is crucial not to lose sight of the broader context — consider what users experience moments before and after engaging with the feature you are constructing. Envision the desired emotions you aim to evoke in your users.
Disassociate. It is incredibly easy to succumb to tunnel vision when designing a product or a brand. A powerful approach is to broaden your perspective by contemplating the core functional jobs and seeking inspiration from diverse contexts. For example, one of Ghost’s value propositions is to be secure and reliable. How might we draw inspiration from the design identity of fintech companies like Plaid and Brex, Banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, or even home security solutions like Ring or Yale?

Concluding

Designing at Ghost has truly been a remarkable learning experience, both professionally and in life. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to work with such talented and hardworking individuals at Ghost. Huge thanks to Dee Murthy, Josh Kaplan, Amy Tan, Eli Myers, and the entire EPD team for giving me a chance to learn, grow, and deliver value to this special team. I look forward to witnessing Ghost’s evolution as a company and my own growth as a product designer. If you are interested in learning about the principles in work and life that I have gained at Ghost, check out my upcoming post.

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A Year At Ghost