by
Valeria Coll
August 2, 2024
Truly supporting employee growth is essential for fostering innovation and maintaining a competitive edge in any industry. At MonetizeNow, we pride ourselves on enabling all of our employees’ individual growth by encouraging them to attend industry events and courses that spark their interest and fuel their passion. We believe that continuous learning and exposure to innovative ideas are crucial for personal and professional development.
Our Lead Designer, Valeria (Val) Coll, recently spent a few days at Figma’s Config 2024: The Conference for People Who Build Products. This premier event attracts the brightest minds in design across various industries, so it was no surprise when Val expressed a desire to attend.
Val’s experience at Figma’s Config 2024 has enabled her to bring back fresh insights and advanced techniques that she now seamlessly integrates into her daily design work at MonetizeNow. Her newfound knowledge, combined with her already exceptional talent, not only enhances MonetizeNow's product development, but also empowers our entire team to push boundaries and continue to strive for increased excellence.
We asked Val to share her experience at the conference, and share a peek into her daily design life at MonetizeNow. She graciously provided her unique design insights, which you can explore below. Check it out!
🌟 Val’s Take: Lessons for Start-up Designers from Figma’s Config 2024
As a B2B company, solving user problems is at the core of what we do. As a software product, we understand that design is what gets us there.
As the lead designer, I am striving to establish a solid foundation of design principles to guide our product growth and impact. This means I have to learn as much as possible and get as much help as possible from outside sources.
To do this, MonetizeNow has invested in our design team to attend events like Config, Figma’s annual design conference. This experience has been invaluable to my individual growth as a designer and my ability to show up for my team to guide product development.
Although Config provided me with extremely valuable advice, I realized that some of the things I learned don’t always apply to the start-up world. Companies in the early stages must move quickly, establish their position in the industry, meet customer needs, and compete with existing companies in the space all at the same time. Unfortunately, this does not always make for the best circumstances to come up with perfect design solutions.
After my reflection, here’s my take on the most impactful lessons from Config 2024 as they apply to design for a start-up, like MonetizeNow.
🌟 Val’s Take: Try the Hard Thing First, but Make Incremental Progress Where Possible
When starting a new project, it's important to gather context on the user journey and needs. This helps our team have empathy for our users and the clearest understanding of the problem at hand to determine an appropriate solution.
Usually, this process reveals some edge cases. The reality is that when there’s a tight deadline, specific technical requirements, and limited bandwidth (among many other circumstances that naturally come up in start-up land), it's very easy for these edge cases to fall to the wayside as better short-term solutions arise. Moving forward with short-term solutions can result in long-term challenges concerning the scalability of designs, limited user functionality, and quality management of the product.
At Config, Joel Miller, a Product Designer at Figma, reminded the audience that:
“Good design requires understanding of the most complex case scenario and consideration of how that might impact your solution. Keyword: Consideration.”
Many circumstances might impact the design solution you chose. Not every design solution can always solve every edge case scenario, but considering choosing a design that can SCALE up to the ideal solution is sometimes the best we can do.
Trying the hard thing first helps fill in the map of the user journey by acknowledging all pain points. Working backward from there while keeping the “hard thing” in mind ensures incremental improvements are scaling up to the ideal solutions.
🌟 Val’s Take: Grounding Conversations Are Good and Necessary for Balance
Start-ups are volatile spaces that are constantly changing, failing, learning, and growing. The pressure of moving and learning fast can quickly blur the primary objective.
One way to prevent this is by having Grounding Conversations with your team throughout the development of a project. These discussions consist of:
Sometimes, it can be challenging to justify making time for these discussions, but it's important to keep in mind that no one remembers a deadline, budget, etc. - only the output.
As a designer, communicate quickly and often, revisit your goals, and push back where necessary to make sure designs are meeting the project goals.
🌟 Val’s Take: Good Design Takes Thought, Time, and Intentionality
Excellence is achieved through messiness. No design journey is perfect. It requires a lot of thought, iteration, feedback, and repetition.
Yes, circumstances are significantly telling of the output - especially in a start-up, where all resources necessary for a perfect solution are not always at your disposal.
But, there are a few things we can control, and our work quality is one of them.
Making time to evaluate your intentions, objectives, and user stories before designing can make or break the outcome of your work. These elements should be your guiding pillars for design to ensure a quality outcome no matter how messy the journey becomes.
Want to learn more about Valeria Coll? Check out her LinkedIn, here.
About MonetizeNow
Founded in 2021, MonetizeNow is revolutionizing GTM operations for B2B SaaS Enterprises of any size. At MonetizeNow, our mission is simple: to make B2B commerce completely frictionless and provide a delightful experience for your customers to do business with you.
Our innovative platform combines Quoting/CPQ, Metering, Billing, and Reporting, to deliver a truly plug-and-play Quote-to-Cash experience across all sales channels.
It’s time to empower your Sales, RevOps, and Finance teams with an all-in-one solution that will revolutionize your entire business. Reduce manual tasks, allowing a stronger focus on strategic pricing and innovative GTM strategies. Generate complex quotes quickly and enjoy full automation of your billing processes. Easily handle proration, co-term agreements, and renewals for seamless operations.
Bring your GTM vision to life. All channels. All sales motions. One platform.
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