Last year on the blog, we shared our point of view on product design and research, two of the three main responsibilities of the Design team at Cockroach Labs. The one that we haven’t discussed yet is brand. Despite having a distinct and memorable name like Cockroach Labs, nailing our brand hasn’t been simple and is still a work-in-progress. From day one, our mission has been to make data easy. But what does a brand that makes data easy look like? That’s the question that keeps the design team up at night. Eight months ago, we attempted to answer this question in a true startup fashion: pick one aspect of the visual system that’s representative of the brand, launch experiments, and iterate until we find what sticks.

Some of my colleagues have children to tend to after work and many are night owls who are most productive during the wee hours while I’m drooling in my sleep. While I’m trying to figure out how to best work with them, they’re also trying to figure out how to work with me. Is it okay to send me Slack messages after 7pm? What is the best way to give me constructive feedback?

The design team at Cockroach Labs recently doubled in size (Hooray!). During the hiring process, I got many questions about the company culture, specific projects that a new product designer would be working on, and of course, personal growth. The most common question, however, was surprisingly about what exactly a product designer does. Product design encompasses a wide range of responsibilities. Depending on the person and their company, the typical day of a product designer can vary quite a bit. Some write thorough code for their mockups, while others write clear, witty copy. Some craft pixel-perfect icons, while others excel at prototyping animations and user flows. If you're attracted to working at startups like me, then you're probably drawn to wearing many hats. Since resources are scarce, product designers sometimes manage projects, conduct interviews, create mockups, and take on prototyping. And if you're working on a product for which you aren't the primary the user (like a database), one skill that's crucial to success is the ability to leverage knowledge from your fellow coworkers so they can help you arrive at great solutions. A product designer at Cockroach Labs has three main responsibilities: research, translation and facilitation.

I recently came across an old piece on The Atlantic on design research. Author and educator Jon Freach wrote, “Design can exist without ‘the research.’ But if we don't study the world, we don't always know how or what to create.” His words resonated with me. Designers are innate problem solvers. Without “the research,” we wouldn’t know what problems to solve and for whom we create solutions. One may argue that people generally don’t know what they want, and it’s up to us creating something new to spark desire. Yet, that creation process isn’t sheer magic being pulled out of thin air. The creation process usually involves painstaking investigation of the world and deep inquiry on how we can make it better. In other words, the shiny new wonderful thing that everyone wants is just a reincarnation of a similar idea but thoroughly interrogated and researched. Smartphones existed before the first iPhone was introduced. Group chat was invented long before Slack was a company. Similarly, databases are not a new topic. When I started several months ago, I wanted to do “the research” to figure out how this new database with a funny name could spark desire. My first quest was to investigate pain points people have with their current database solutions, and how they first hear about, test and adopt alternative options. Having not been properly trained as a researcher, I hacked together a study with the help of GV’s extensive resources and recruited and interviewed a few developers and CTOs. Yet, the data I collected was scattered, with no clear pattern across the demographics. Given how crucial the questions were to understanding of our audience, I decided to reevaluate the research process, and redo the study with some tweaks. Here’s what I’ve learned from doing the same study twice, and why the second study was a lot more effective.

One would think that designing for creative consumers through a massively popular brand would be a dream come true for any young designer. After all, what more could you want than a great company, compelling product, and an engaged team? A bigger challenge, it turns out.