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- [00:00]
Rid
Lovable is one of the fastest growing companies in the world right now. So what are they looking for as they try to scale their design team?
- [00:07]
Nad Chishti
I'm looking for a gut reaction in the first few seconds, the same way that I would do with a product or with a brand. That's what this is. It's product work and brand work. You're trying to scale yourself to someone else who's never met you before.
- [00:18]
Rid
How do you stand out in a sea of design candidates?
- [00:21]
Nad Chishti
We're really looking for high slope individuals. And so this means people who will just get things done end to end, people who show that they have a very high learning aptitude, people who don't let their title or let their role limit them.
- [00:36]
Rid
Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid, and this is where designers never stop learning. This week's episode is with Lovable's head of design, Nad Chishti. And for context, over the last couple of months, they've been hiring designers from the Dive Talent network. So we got to talking and we came up with an idea. What if we filmed an episode that was all about how to get hired as a designer at Lovable? And this is that conversation that it's about as practical as it gets. We even break down the portfolio of one of the recent design hires to dissect what exactly is working. So let's start by hearing from Nad how he views the current landscape and all of the different ways that that's influencing the type of designers that they're trying to hire.
- [01:23]
Nad Chishti
At Lovable, I think the most prevalent trend that we're seeing is this trend towards generalists. And, you know, it was only like, what, like maybe a year, two years ago, where generalist was like a genuine dirty word, as if it was specialist versus generalist. But we're seeing that the most successful people internally today are people that are incredibly multidimensional. And my thesis is really simple. It's really smart. People can actually just do multiple things and that's it. But I think we actually went down a couple of wrong tracks as an industry, pretty much. And I've been racking my brains and I've been talking to as many people as I can to try and try and assess this. And I have this kind of forming thesis that I'd love to get your take on as well. So two kind of spicy takes. Spicy take number one. When Spotify glorified cross functional squads, we set up this system where you needed eight to 10 people to make a single decision. You'd be like, okay, engineering Manager, relevant engineers per platform design lead, maybe a researcher, maybe an analyst, etc. Etc. And suddenly you've got eight people who need to collaborate on absolutely everything to do one thing. And we know, and I can tell from the Smile interface, we know, that this is not the optimal way to work whatsoever. And so we went down this whole cross functional trajectory, shall we say, as an industry, for quite a while. The other thing that I think we did, which was way more innocent but actually also in some ways damaging, is with really, really good intentions. We really wanted to grow people, so we created like IC tracks and we'd be like, okay, if you come in as like an IC3, we're going to grow you towards a 4 and 5 in these dimensions in this way, et cetera, et cetera. And at the same time you want to hire from other companies. And so you end up with company A that designs a track this way, company B that designs a track that way. You want to hire from each other and you end up kind of normalizing them. But as anyone knows, you normalize lots of things from lots of sources with different goals. And it's designed by consensus and in some ways it's kind of a race to what is the common denominator. And so again, very well intentioned. But in reality you end up drawing boxes around people and you say like, okay, you're going to come in as a specialist and here is your pigeonhole that you will just fit into and then that's that. And so what we're seeing is that we don't need to lean on too much into this kind of specialist way of thinking. The most successful people internally are incredibly cross domain. Either they've held lots of roles in lots of teams, or they've just worn lots of hats at smaller growing teams. But they've got incredible intuition across multiple domains, really, really good judgment. They can run things end to end and when they have blind spots, they do one of two things. Either AI can fill in gaps because AI is kind of okay at most things, not great, but enough that you can 0 to 1 something in almost any domain or any specialism. But critically, they can run things end to end, use AI as a core part of their workflow, and hopefully also know their blind spots so that they know when to work with specialists. So like take something from 80 to 100. And so we're seeing that generalists actually can just do really, really well, which is like super different to how we thought about the best quote unquote person for a given job, even like two years ago.
- [04:34]
Rid
Real quick message. And then we can jump back into it. If you're still designing in Figma and rebuilding in Framer, then you're doing twice the work with Framers design pages. You no longer have to jump between tools. In the last page that I made for the Dive website, I explored and built entirely in Framer, you can sketch, iterate, structure and publish to the web all from same place. Framer isn't just a site builder. It's a design tool for your entire workflow. And you can start creating today for free@framer.com and if you use the code RID, you can unlock a free month of Framer Pro. Big News animations just launched in Mobin. So you can see how world class apps use motion to guide, delight and create seamless experiences. It's just another reason why Maubin is an absolute cheat code for your entire design team. We use it all the time. And I can't wait to start sending animation ideas to the rest of the team. So head to Dive Club slash Mobin to check it out today. That's M O B I N. Okay, now on to the episode. If you're hiring a lot of generalists, do you kind of just toss out the idea of looking for specific combinations of people? Like how does it influence the way that you're thinking about hiring in aggregate versus more of an individual basis evaluation process?
- [05:56]
Nad Chishti
We still look for things like what do people want to be truly world class at and where do they care about being a world class specialist? But on the generalist front, we actually used to have something in our handbook which we've taken out now because it was too abrasive. But we used to say something in the spirit of, you know, you're doing your job correctly when someone else tells you that you're stepping on their toes. And it was so good because it was this counterbalance to, you know, joining a company. You're kind of nervous, you don't want to look dumb. You come in, you spike something, you socialize it, and then, you know, it's weeks of collective energy before, like doing something compared to just doing something and then getting opinions on it, pretty much.
- [06:35]
Rid
Can we add a little bit more clarity around what it looks like to do something end to end? So if you think about the traditional box of responsibilities that we're all kind of familiar with as designers, listening to you talk, what are some of the activities or responsibilities or outputs that a designer might do or pursue that exists outside of that box that you're seeing? At lovable or maybe would hope to see more of as you scale the team.
- [06:59]
Nad Chishti
I think a lot of companies say this, but we really, really mean it in terms of as a designer, you are talking to the users, you've got access to all the data, you are fully empowered to decide when we build something or pushing or to push back on building something in the first place. You're also fully empowered to delete stuff as well. So if you do something and it doesn't work out, it's also on you to follow up on that feature after it's rolled out, etceter, et cetera, and figure that out. So I think designers here do a lot of what product managers would do in other teams. And so right now we have like, we've only got one product manager in the entire company and they basically work on, you know, setting up the infrastructure needed for the company to be able to operate and, you know, figuring out the overall structure. But within the teams, it's just designers and engineers like pairing on things. And so the shorthand thing is, I guess doing anything that a product manager might do in a lot of other teams is just expected of designers here. It's that process of running things end to end. So figuring out what to build, figuring out when stuff is working, figuring out when to remove stuff as well and just really pairing with, with engineering.
- [08:03]
Rid
And I think that's kind of an important lens to give people for the rest of this conversation too is we're very much so talking about a startup that is scaling, that doesn't really have a ton of legacy infrastructure. And there's probably people listening that work at. I'm not going to name specific companies, but you know, they've been around a long ways. There's trenches and ways of working that are simply not going to change. You know, the engineering product triad is cemented at every single level. I think that's fantastic. I personally am much more interested in kind of what you're describing. And there's a whole category of designer that would listen to you that hear that as well. They just want me to do more work. I'm like, yeah, no, like you get to make real impact. You get to make strategic decisions, you get to make the call. I think designers are probably the best equipped to do that.
- [08:52]
Nad Chishti
That, yeah, 100%. And I think the other thing that I'll maybe add here is I'm super confident in what I'm saying. Directionally, we're blessed because as a team, we're like a year and a half old and so we get to start without, as you said, no legacy. But I'm seeing more teams with the shape. I speak to as many people as I can, especially in person in really great events and try to get people's opinion off the record in terms of what kind of trends they're seeing internally. And this is true in big companies as well. Like the most. Again, I won't name names, but it feels like there's a way of carving out this way of working within large orgs to really get things done. And the other thing is we've done this before. I'm just about old enough to remember professionally when I first started you needed to have dedicated database admins in a cross functional team. You couldn't build a feature without having a DBA who would think about the schema and running the infrastructure and all the rest. And then, you know, things like DevOps platforms become more prevalent and then that you can kind of unify those around a single backend engineer and then a single full stack engineer and so on and so forth. And now the shape of teams are just completely different. And so this is no different. We've done this before and we'll do it again. And so I just think it's not inevitable but I'm like super confident in this as like a trend line same.
- [10:07]
Rid
And it's pretty much the only type of company that I've been focusing on, even thinking about the dive talent network and what I want to facilitate there. So I kind of want to use this as an opportunity to just go into pretty much every step of your hiring process and pipeline and try to make this as practical as possible for people listening. Because the reality is you could be hiring a lot of designers in the next quarter.
- [10:31]
Nad Chishti
Half.
- [10:32]
Rid
So let's set people up for success to really understand what it takes to get a job at Lovable. And we did do some sourcing of questions before this on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, try to get a diverse set of inputs and there were a lot of questions simply about just how you're sourcing designers and how many of them come from referrals versus cold applications, how you even get through all of those applications. So can you talk to us a little bit just to set the stage about what your top of the funnel looks like when you're hiring designers.
- [11:04]
Nad Chishti
It's pretty mixed. Obviously we post stuff online and then we get, we get people that apply. That's at our scale like very, very high reach. But finding the signal and finding the real standout candidates is a bit of a challenge. And so we put a lot of hours into sifting, but at the moment it's not the number one source, I'd say, actually, which is interesting. The other places that have been really good for us have been things like the Dive Talent Network, where we basically get vetted referrals from yourself with an excellent eye for what good design looks like and, and all the rest.
- [11:39]
Rid
Hey, real quick, if you want to get hired at companies like Lovable 11 Labs and some of my favorite startups, the Talent Network is free to join. Just head to Dive Club Talent. All right, back to it.
- [11:50]
Nad Chishti
So that's been really successful. And the other thing that's been really good has been cold outreach. And so a lot of people on the team actually just spend time online. I mean, we all do because we're obsessed and we just drop a note to anyone where we love their work. And that's very, very work driven. It's very much that micro interaction that you shared was incredible, or I really love this write up that you did on your take on this thing or whatever. And then we just literally say hello to people and then try and talk to them and see if there's a spark. Pretty much.
- [12:22]
Rid
Is this coming from anywhere other than Twitter?
- [12:25]
Nad Chishti
Twitter, sometimes LinkedIn, but that's rare. Also started on Instagram as well. We've tried to get outside of our comfort zone a little bit and just sort of see like, see who we're missing and like what are our own blind spots as well.
- [12:38]
Rid
Let's talk about portfolios for a second. Let's assume that someone is going in cold and given the metaphorical stack of portfolios that you have to get through, you're having to make some really quick decisions. So what are some of the shortcomings that you might see that we get somebody tossed into this discard pile pretty quickly?
- [12:58]
Nad Chishti
One thing is I think that as designers, we're gifted with a superpower, which is that literally we're professionals at communicating information at scale, right? And so we have to figure out what is this germ of an idea, what is this well formed idea, how do we scale it to millions of people through this interface or whatever. And so I think we can borrow from that entire library of knowledge into this conversation we're having. And so every single thing that we know about, I don't know, optimizing landing pages where we measure bounce rates in milliseconds rather than seconds, and so on and so forth. And I don't know if we were to do watch a YouTube video with designers doing teardowns of SaaS, landing pages where we're like the hero section and the headline makes no sense, blah, blah, blah. All this kind of stuff, all of it applies. And so I'm looking for a gut reaction in the first few seconds, the same way that I would do with a product or with a brand. That gut reaction, if I had to try and deconstruct it, is really coming from initially, the design basics of visual rhythm, composition, typography, spacing, use of color, et cetera. And if you're putting together a website or a resume, like all of that should be on point, I'd say just take care of the basics is like thing number one. Just use your superpowers to make something that impresses people within milliseconds of them seeing it. And by the way, you'd be surprised how many people use weird material, UI generated resumes with bad PDF formatting. And so don't do any of that. Like, take the care. Like, if you're going to put together an artifact which is like a single PDF, like, make it a good one, because that's what we're going to look at. And yes, I'd say just really take care of the design basics and push yourself the same way you would in any product work or brand work. That's what this is. It's product work and brand work. You're trying to scale yourself to someone else who's never met you before.
- [14:53]
Rid
I love that. And it ties back to something that I've been tweeting a lot over the years, which is like just thinking more about yourself as a product and the website as a product marketer, marketing example, rather than this portfolio, we put portfolio in a box and just assume that people are going to give us the time of day. And what you just made me think of for the first time. That takes me back to my experience hiring for maven years ago, and I tried hiring before we had finished this branding process with Fuzzco and our website was trash. It was like purple intertext. It was made by engineers and none of it was good. And you very quickly realize there is no chance that I'm going to get a talented designer to want to work with me. If this is the website, they will bounce in three seconds and say, these people do not care about design. I'm out. And if we're going to have that perception of product companies, then we have to expect them to have that exact same reaction to the first three seconds on our website too.
- [15:58]
Nad Chishti
I completely agree. There's obviously all the wisdom around, like, don't judge a book by its cover. But I think, you know, as an entire industry, we practice using visual design as a tool. I think it's just paramount, especially when it's so competitive. I don't know if I'm sifting through literally hundreds of applications and I'll whittle down to like a dozen shortlist and then I'm asking myself out of this dozen, who do I truly want to move forward with? These details matter. And on an aside, I don't want to get stuck in a rabbit hole and in the weeds. And I feel like I'm putting a target on my back by even offering to say this. But I also think this is why UX designers, as in pure ux, is also where they're almost trending against it as well, where people who identify only as UX designers can't display these visual skills. And so it's really difficult to be intuitive about what you're really great at and how you might function in a more generalist environment if you can't put these things on display.
- [16:53]
Rid
And it's easy to strawman what you're saying as well. Those are just pixel level details. But I do think there is this element of as a designer, you're a creative storyteller. You're creating some type of a digital experience that helps people understand or that positions whatever you're selling as like, you know, unique and standing out and worthy of time. Like that is the lens that you should use for your own website. And if you can't do that, you can't just point and say, well, those are pixel level details. No, like that's what being a designer is 100%.
- [17:29]
Nad Chishti
It's like the web and interfaces are a material and they're the material that we work with like day in, day out, hour in, hour out to build products and to communicate them. I'm going to use the same materials to review applications. So use the materials as well as you can and then that's it. Yeah, it's that simple.
- [17:47]
Rid
I want to get back to that point in a second here, but maybe to flip the table a little bit. I want to talk about a very specific portfolio of someone that you hired recently from the Dive Talent Network, Matt, who I got to know as well. He helped me with a lot of the shadow tokens actually for theming in inflight and was just amazing. Yeah, he was amazing. That was how I met him. And I want to just screen share his portfolio and we could talk about it. And because he's obviously did something correct. You're sifting through applications, you open up this portfolio. Talk to me about some of those initial reactions. What stands out, what's working, what makes you curious?
- [18:30]
Nad Chishti
The aesthetic is super clean. And so this is a design that serves the content and the content is on point as well. And so, like I remember even reading through and it was the 20 years of experience spent at 12,800% zoom. I just have this, like, I can picture the Adobe suite and Photoshop and just literally the UI like printing 12, 800% in my head as soon as I saw that. So the fact that the content is great and it's completely not fluffy, it's to the point, super high signal. And then seeing you here, get over to the micro interactions immediately. The person that made this cared, and it's that simple. Like the same way that you, you know, if you touch a product, you're like, okay, the team behind this cared. And that's the sense that I got from Matt straight away as soon as I landed on his website. And so even if you click through to the case studies as well, so on any of these, the work itself is super thorough. But I'm not reading every word. So all I'm doing is I'm scanning up and down and I'm looking at the work and I'm asking myself two things. Do I like the work? Is there something subjectively where it sparks joy for me and is there any evidence of it fulfilling something objectively as well? And so was this built within a team that had some goals and how did it track against those goals and stuff like that? Those are the two things I'm looking for. Signal on. I don't really care so much about process.
- [19:55]
Rid
I was about to say I'm going to call it out here because there is not a single piece of text below this paragraph. It's one paragraph and then images Talk to me about how that resonates.
- [20:06]
Nad Chishti
There's two things that I care about. One is the work. It's, you know, what is the reality of the work that you're doing? What is the bar that you put on yourself and is that evident? And so I'm looking for that. And, you know, in this case, it's like, you know, the visual and interaction execution is on point. I look at the iconography and I'm like, okay, like you don't create these icons by accident, right? You have to sit down and they have to be a labor of love. So the work is like the first thing and the second is, does this person care? It's obviously, do you care? From the website alone, but I don't need the okay, we started out with post its on a whiteboard and all the rest. I'm going to trust that you used some process and so we'll find out more about that later when we talk. And I'd much rather not sift through 100 applicants with 100 different ways to explain their process as well, because then I have to spend 100 times more energy trying to interpret a hundred different ways to explain it.
- [21:01]
Rid
My takeaway there is you just kind of have to understand what part of the process that you're in. You're not doing the hard sell. You're just trying to get someone to say, sure, I'll bump them to the next round and actually figure out how they work and how they think next.
- [21:15]
Nad Chishti
Exactly. And I'd say also like over explaining your process and being explicit about it is also quite risky I think sometimes because as a hiring manager you're also looking for soft skills, strengths and weaknesses. If, for example, your portfolio piece only talks about qualitative research, because maybe that's just whatever you had the most photographs of or screenshots of or whatever, and maybe you just didn't have access to your high fidelity stuff or whatever happenstance meant that your case study is biased or shaped one way. I'm going to assume that that's your individual bias, but maybe that's not the bias that we're looking for in this next kind of upcoming hire. It's just best to champion the work. In product marketing, you have this phrase of product is hero. You want your product photography to really make the product the hero rather than the components inside it or whatever it might be. And you want the use cases to be the hero. And I think for a portfolio you want the work to be the hero rather than the process behind the work. And yeah, I think you can give signal on the wrong things if you show too much process.
- [22:17]
Rid
Yeah, it's an interesting take. I'm gonna just highlight one thing that stood out to me too, because I'm often evaluating the shell as much as the work itself too. Something that I absolutely loved is this top alignment here. Everything is so intentional. And I think that maybe that's a keyword I'm looking for intentionality at every level of detail, top level story, all the way down to like the tiniest little interactions and layout decisions. And here you have beautiful alignment here, where this is equidistant padding, this is equidistant padding. And then this hover state is like, oh, cool. He actually cared about that. Like, he really put some effort into that. And I might not even love that specific style. I do think it's very cool. But I can tell that he went above and beyond because it was an expression of who he is as a digital creative and that I had a visceral reaction to this hover state in alignment, which might seem like a small detail, but this is the stuff that makes it memorable 100%.
- [23:15]
Nad Chishti
And to back that up, I think if you brought that level of intentionality to 5% of the surface, if your website was literally just your name, beautifully set in typography with one hover state, but I get a sense of that intentionality. That's a huge green flag. I'm going to look at that and I'm going to be like, okay, it's worth us talking. And so I think you hit the nail on the head with. With trying to evaluate intention of whatever.
- [23:40]
Rid
Which I think is what he did. That's a good way of saying, you know, I'm still kind of stuck on what you said about how you almost don't want to create surface area for people to poke holes in. It's not more is not always better. I think that's like a really interesting takeaway from this conversation. And so looking at his website, he just tells his story. He sweat the details on this very specific combination of words that he wanted to do to present himself. He made that the star. And then this is just work. And every little detail is so nice. The inner shadow and the outer shadow, the slight hover of this. He didn't have to make that move. You know, it's wonderful. You're simultaneously putting the work forward while also not giving anybody anything that they could point at to disqualify you. Side note, if you're hiring designers and you want to find the best people, like Matt, who maybe aren't even on the market, I'm giving a few more companies access to the talent network and you can apply today to join. Just head to dive club.
- [24:39]
Nad Chishti
And the other thing that I'm thinking about as well is anytime I'm hiring, I'm asking myself what skills and traits are just evidently on display where this person has this in huge amount of depth versus what is coachable. And somebody doesn't have to be 10 out of 10 on every single dimension, on everything, but I have to be confident that they're displaying some stuff and they're coachable in the other stuff. And I think by just being extremely craft forward in the material you put out there, you show that you can do the craft. It sounds so simple, but I'm like. It sounds like an almost redundant sentence, but you'd be surprised how many designers don't sweat the details and then suddenly you're talking to them and you're like, well, actually I don't know what level you can get to because you haven't shown me. I think don't make people work to have to guess what level you put on yourself or. And what good looks like to you.
- [25:33]
Rid
Yeah, I think that is a great point. It speaks to the power of one really good hover state. Honestly, like just having been someone who scrolls through a lot of portfolios, if I can get one hover state quickly, where I'm like, whoa, that was pretty good, that felt good. Like they really thought about how that should move and what should happen and it wasn't over the top and it was clear that they wanted to showcase something there. Like, you can almost win me over with one really, really good hover state.
- [26:00]
Nad Chishti
Yeah, I completely agree. And I think we're showing our own biases in that. I think we both get excited by incredible hover states. But if you're not that kind of designer, if you're like a systems thinking designer, technical slur, if you are purely UXO research or whatever, then just don't put out bad materials. Just do more with less. Like spend time on your resume, on the typesetting there or whatever it might be, and grab a friend who's better at it than you if you need to. But just make sure that the few things that you give are really good. And I think that, you know, it's just way easier for everyone involved.
- [26:33]
Rid
The reality is that maybe we are the extreme end, but I don't think it's too far of a detour from hiring managers at what I would consider the most desirable companies today who are empowering designers to the degree that you are, and continue to plan to if you want to appeal to those types of companies. It's not about quantity. Like, it's not about the sum of what you can put onto a page. It's very much so about the average in many ways. Like, if you don't have really good work, that's okay in ultra simple websites, have a certain flex about them even. And if that's the case, great. Go really, really deep on the writing. Like the first thing that you mentioned was this 12,800% zoom. That's brilliant microcopy. It's really unique, you know, that did something for you.
- [27:20]
Nad Chishti
Great.
- [27:21]
Rid
Sweat the details on the writing, then make that the point of your story.
- [27:25]
Nad Chishti
Yeah, I completely agree.
- [27:26]
Rid
Is there anything else that a designer who maybe doesn't have the really strong craft background could do to communicate the mindset that sets them apart rather than just the visuals? Like, what are potential signals that you could see where you're like, okay, maybe I'm not quite sold on the craft yet, but I would bump this person to the next round and at least put more time and effort into figuring out if they're a good fit.
- [27:54]
Nad Chishti
I think if you can own your blind spots and if you can communicate where you think you are on any of these dimensions and either there's blind spots you're aware of and you know that you want to level up in them, or display that there's blind spots that you're aware of and you don't care, like it might be that you're just never going to care about any of the details that we're talking about. I think figuring out how to just really own that so that. That it's a part of your narrative is actually really good. And I have had situations where I have bumped people because they've said things like, hey, actually it sounds really silly, but my visual and interaction discipline is actually my weakest because I've been working on these really technically ambitious problems or whatever, and I feel like those skills have atrophied a bit and I need to spend a bit of time polishing them up. Just figure out how to state that sort of between maybe a website, if you have one, or your resume or your portfolio or your application. Highlight what you believe your strengths are as well, and like, where you think your limits are and what your growth areas are. And we pay a lot of attention to that as well. Because again, we're looking for high slope people. We're not looking for people who are 10 out of 10 in every single dimension everywhere. Today we're looking for people who, with the right environment can grow and can move up and move forward, I'm going.
- [29:10]
Rid
To push you a little bit deeper there. The idea of owning your blind spots is interesting to me. Hypothetically, if you were in that situation where you're like, I know what I bring to the table. I'm not going to win someone over in six seconds with a micro interaction. What would you be thinking about or exploring? How would you even approach the problem of, I need to sell myself to someone quickly and I can't lean on.
- [29:34]
Nad Chishti
Craft, try and remove any surface that I'm not confident in. And so I'd probably reduce my website down to the bare minimum of name with a contact us button or whatever it might be. Let's say your archetype is you're amazing at systems thinking and product thinking. I would get some good writing up there as well. That shows that rather than relying on showing really, really strong craft led work instead. And so I'd be thinking about things like that. What other materials would showcase your strengths and play into them, essentially. And so it might be writing, it could be something else. But writing, I'd say, is a huge one. I often find myself on someone's website and if they have blog posts, I'm going to skim read them. And so I'm going to look through and be like, okay, what did this person think about this? Or think about that? And it's also okay when the writing's older as well. If I see there's a blog post from 2020 or 2021 or whatever it might be, that's completely fine. But just even seeing that somebody's taking the time and energy out of their life to go and do that in the first place, that's already a green flag. But secondly, then being able to explore more of their thinking if they can't rely on craft is really helpful.
- [30:40]
Rid
I really like that you brought up the writing piece because that's totally a green flag for me too. If I see even three or four simple row items on a website that go to their thoughts, I might not read them all the time, but I definitely have that go in a positive category for me. Right. That's a way of showing that you care about without having to sweat. Visual details for sure.
- [31:03]
Nad Chishti
And you would be surprised at how many people just actually don't have an opinion on things. There's a lot of people where, like, design is a vocation. It's like, okay, like maybe, maybe you did like a boot camp because you heard that you can get paid better than whatever your previous profession was, or maybe you've been somewhere and you've actually had a really well storied career in companies that we all know the names of, but you got a little bit lazy because it wasn't the sort of highest, most demanding environment and so on and so forth. There's like more people that fit the shape than you might think actually, like in the world in general. And that's completely not what we're looking for. Like, we're looking for people who do have an opinion and who do want to learn their blind spots and who do want to learn and who do want to go on this kind of crazy high paced adventure. And so, you know, showing that by displaying that you have a point of view is really helpful.
- [31:54]
Rid
Are you specifically looking for people that go beyond design as a vocation?
- [31:58]
Nad Chishti
Yeah, I think so. I mean, again, I'm going to show my biases here. I'm self taught. And so the best people I've worked with have had an incredibly high learning slope. They've been like, okay, I don't understand this, but I'm just going to figure it out. Or I think I'm okay at this, but I want to be world class at it, and so on and so forth. And I think having the intrinsic motivation to do that is just completely different to if there's an extrinsic factor that, that drives you.
- [32:24]
Rid
You've used this phrase world class a few times now. What are some examples there? A designer who's like, I'm going to be world class at X, like fill in that gap for people, to even help them understand the types of pursuits that are attractive to a hiring manager like yourself.
- [32:38]
Nad Chishti
What I'm trying to do when I, when I meet designers and when I'm trying to figure out if they're a good fit for the team is I'm trying to figure out what does success look like over multiple years. It's not like, okay, can you come in and be productive in the next 30 days? It's what are your deepest dreams and desires and the things that are maybe even a bit embarrassing that you want to say out loud, but the things you want to work towards in the medium term. One example, just from my last company, there was a designer who I was managing who she really wanted to experiment with VR and augmented reality interactions. And so that was her dream that was like, okay, I really want to get into this space and I really want to explore it over the next, you know, the coming years. I don't really have a timeline, but it's like an area that's super interesting to me. And so you can bet that as soon as we had some work in augmented reality, that was the person who got the work. And so when I think about world class, I think about like, where are you going to push yourself to do industry defining work? Like, where are you going to push yourself to do work where you feel like you've maximized like what you want to do in that work? So I'm looking for that, that intrinsic drive Essentially, I think one of the.
- [33:49]
Rid
Ways that I find intrinsic drive is through the side projects and things that people are exploring more greenfield on their own. Can you talk a little bit about the weight that you attach to side projects? When you're looking at someone, you're evaluating them, how much do you care? How high is the ceiling? Like, can someone actually win you over with side projects alone? If all they have to show is a handful of years at some, like, really boring enterprise company? Like, can side projects cut it? How does that fit into your evaluation process?
- [34:17]
Nad Chishti
With Very, very coarsely. I'm looking at both hard skills and soft skills. And I think with side projects you can absolutely display. There's no ceiling to the hard skills that you can put on display in terms of creating something that looks, feels, works great and a little bit harder to assess the soft skills. And so if I'm asking myself, does this person work well in a team? Do they even think about their personal growth, et cetera, Things like that need to dig a little bit. But I'd say that the entire conversation we had of looking at a portfolio website and looking at past work and basically trying to get a sense of, did the person care when they made it? I put the exact same amount of weight on someone's side projects. And so I'm looking at those in exactly the same way and saying, yeah, I mean, for sure. I mean, and a lot of times people will go even further, right? They become fanatical about it. And that's even better because then I get to see if this person does have this intrinsic drive, then what does that look like? And that comes out, like, more often than inside projects. I do think there's one big risk with side projects though, which is when it's ambiguous what your goals are with them. And so I think if there's somebody who has like 10 different side projects, but they also look like they've tried to make it as real startups and then they've all failed. And I'm asking myself, well, is this person like a good designer or are they like a bad founder? Or like, what's going on here? And so I think it's really important to frame side projects. And so if you have a bunch of stuff where you're like, okay, this is just a component play playground, I'm just playing with interactions, then great, just frame it around that. Or if you have been doing a sort of indie hacking thing or whatever, again, just own it. But if you leave it open to interpretation and you have a collection of weird things where it's maybe not easy to figure out a story or a narrative, then that's where I think side projects can be a little bit dangerous, but not overly dangerous. But I'd be cautious if you're not framing them really, really well.
- [36:08]
Rid
If I were listening to that, I'd be so encouraged. You almost don't have an excuse at that point based off of what you just said. It doesn't matter where you work, what your seniority is. You have the Internet tools, you can make anything you want, and you will evaluate those in the same way. As somebody who works at this prestigious company, that's a really big deal. I'm just pausing even for a second because that's a really big deal.
- [36:33]
Nad Chishti
I was asking myself before we talked, what is it that we really care about? And I wrote down in my notes, like Apple notes, like staring out of the window when commuting, going back and forth. And it is literally the two things that we care about are the work itself and does this person care? And that's it. And there's lots of things that ladder out of that. So within the work, like how we might assess that and within somebody caring how much do they care about the teams they've worked in or their own personal growth and stuff like that. But those are literally the only two things that we want to try and get really strong signal on. And I think you can get them with a mixture of experience in really great teams displaying, or if you don't have that, you know, displaying that with side projects. But I think, as you said, there's lots of options to get this stuff out on display.
- [37:21]
Rid
It's even reminded me of somebody very specific that I was looking at for the Talent Network. And if you look at their LinkedIn, it wasn't anything that's going to stand out. You know, like, I don't think they had very senior titles and they were like a senior product designer in their last role. But they'd only been doing this for about maybe five or six years. I didn't recognize any of the companies. The work from the companies was like, it was fine, but you don't really know how much of this is constrained by a design system versus how much Is this your ceiling? And then I clicked this one button that led me to their side project and they made this video of this kind of mishmash calendar to do app. And I was completely sold just after this one thing that they owned end to end. And it was amazing. Like they thought through everything and it was so good and I was like, I don't even care about what you've made for these other companies. Like, that's where your ceiling is. Great. You're in, you know? So, yeah, it's encouraging.
- [38:14]
Nad Chishti
That completely resonates with me. And you, you reminded me that of one anti pattern with the design system comment. I find it really difficult when people overuse the word we. And so if you're showing a project and all of your descriptors are, we did this, we did this, we did this, we did this. I have no idea who we is. I've got no idea what came from you, what came from the rest of the team, what came from the design system, et cetera. And so I think be super predictive around I or the team or the designers who were responsible for blah or whatever and really make that as explicit as possible because it's one of the hardest things to figure out, especially when you speak to designers from really great companies where they've got the entire company's infrastructure behind them. And so if you're talking to a designer or viewing their website and they're just like, we did this. And it's like, well, of course the company did this, but, like, what did you do? That's one of my bugbears, actually. With portfolios, I want to kind of.
- [39:12]
Rid
Move into the rest of the interview process, talk about the stages. I just want a really quick hitting question just to kind of push it to the extreme. As an example. So you click on a website, it's just someone's name, maybe like a line or two of subtext, not that much. And then it's just a single feed, and it's a component playground full of interactions and visual concepts and nothing else. And there's maybe like 12 and they look good. Are they gonna get bumped or do you need to see more?
- [39:40]
Nad Chishti
Hell yeah. Like, if the components are good, then we're good. Like, it's that simple.
- [39:44]
Rid
Okay, all right, all right, all right. I just wanted to push it all the way so you heard it.
- [39:48]
Nad Chishti
And by the way, we have a good track record here, and I think it's specific to us. But we love underdogs. Like, we still think of ourselves as an underdog. We have a really funny age spread internally, at least on the engineering side, where we have a lot of people who are like, a little bit more storied in their career. Maybe they have a few gray hairs like myself. And then we've got a lot of super bright people who are like everything from 17 to 18 to 19 to 20 and 21. And we take bets on that kind of lower part of that age distribution. And so if you show us the work and you show us the drive, then we're super happy to talk and try and figure out how you might thrive in our environment. And so we probably value tenure and titles, I'd say way less than people think, actually.
- [40:34]
Rid
Let's zoom ahead here. Say you bump someone, maybe it's that person in the component playground where you check the visual box in a real way. But basically everything else is a total black box right now. So talk us through for context. What are the typical interviewing stages at Lovable.
- [40:50]
Nad Chishti
So for us, we try to keep things pretty lean. And so we do like an intro round. That's like a very typical kind of hiring manager. We talk. Goal of that is let's fill in any blanks. And so across everything that we've seen so far. So resume, portfolio, application, whatever, just want to make sure that we have the most complete picture of you. And then the other thing that I do in those calls is I reserve almost half of the call for open questions from the candidate side as well. And so two reasons for this. Firstly, hiring is broken. It's a very asymmetric process. Companies get to ask hundreds of questions and candidates can almost ask nothing. So that's just fundamentally broken. And you know, we want people to commit to join us for years. And so I think people need to be well informed in order to make that decision. And so we open up a bunch of space for that. I get so much signal based on what people are asking me. And so if they're asking very cold, badly researched questions or they're asking very interesting, well researched questions, that's incredible signal for me. And so we treat this intro chat as like super two way, essentially, before.
- [41:54]
Rid
You move on, maybe this is too hard of a question, but are you able to give us any examples or point at what a good question looks like or the types of questions that would give you a positive signal?
- [42:05]
Nad Chishti
Having a really strong point of view about the products that we're building essentially is the main thing I'd say. And so that might mean you've used the product and you have specific thoughts. It might mean you know the landscape, you know all of our competitors and you have thoughts or you want to understand our philosophy behind some decisions, but just having a strong point of view and coming in opinionated, not opinionated in terms of here's my opinion, but more so I'm educated enough that we're going to have a high signal conversation, as opposed to I'm uneducated to the point where we'll have a very low signal conversation. That's on the most basic level, what I'm kind of looking for. And that doesn't mean do loads of research either, by the way. It means just know the space and know the room that you're going to be in pretty much. And come in prepared.
- [42:50]
Rid
Keep us going in the process. What are some of the other stages?
- [42:52]
Nad Chishti
Yeah. Then we do what we call a past work round. And very deliberately, we do not call this a portfolio round. And so we want to see two projects that you're the most proud of, that you've made, basically, and that's it. And we give you a little bit of guidance on what it is that we're looking for in terms of. We want to understand, like, the team that you worked in. We want to understand the outcome, we want to understand what you do differently if you're working on this and things like that. And the best people here. It sounds so simple. The best candidates pay attention to the prep and they come to the calls prepared to talk about what we sent over in the prep. And the worst candidates are like, they see this and they're like, oh, I've got a portfolio. I'll just show the thing that I already have. And so they'll turn up with the photograph of all the sticky notes on the whiteboard. And we'll be like, we didn't ask to see the process. We asked to see these two or three things. And now we don't understand these two or three things after we started talking to you. And so again, it's very simple. We want to champion the work again. And that's what we want to learn about in that stage. And then the last stage for us is if you're a design engineer, we do some technical screening that's more like some coding challenges to understand where your edges are. But then the last stage for us is we do paid test work. And so we just treat it as dating before marriage pretty much. And we're like, okay, come in for a day. We'll pay you so that you know it's worth your time. And then we'll treat it honestly the same way that we would do the first day on the job. And so we'll be very much like, hey, we're working on this thing. It's super real world. We would benefit from extra perspective. Like, we'd actually like somebody to come in and tell us, like, turn this thing upside down or get this thing over the finish line in whatever way. And we set up a day to work together super closely. Way more signal than we could get from any other exercises like whatsoever. That's been like a huge help for us and something that we feel really good about given the feedback we get from it so far as well.
- [44:45]
Rid
All right, I'm going to look at both of those stages separately so really quickly. Going back to the Not a portfolio review. I can't remember what you called it, but it's not the portfolio review. Past work. When somebody finishes that exercise and you realize they're not a good fit, what are some of the likely reasons that you find yourself pointing to common traps.
- [45:08]
Nad Chishti
Would be on the hard skills side? We just haven't seen the quality of work that we hope to because we literally ask people show us the two pieces of work you're the most proud of. And if they show something that's six years old and we're like really? There's nothing else you're proud of that you've done more recently? Or if they show something that was maybe just unambitious in the first place, it's actually just quite a small scoped thing and we just don't get a sense that this person can work on ambitious things or they can push themselves or they're just not executing on the kind of basic visual craft elements and things like this. Those are probably the common reasons. And then the people that normally do really, really well here, they pay attention to what we send and we just finish the call thinking we can't wait for this person to potentially be contributing to lovable. That's generally what we're talking about in the debriefs.
- [45:58]
Rid
Something that you haven't mentioned is even once in now over 50 minutes. Is metrics quantifiable impact? Anything in that category? Is that an intentional absence? How do you think about that?
- [46:10]
Nad Chishti
I think a lot of teams do goal setting really badly. It's actually really difficult to set goals at scale. Like every single book on okrs completely sucks. You also get better at it by getting the reps in. You only really get the reps in on a quarterly timescale done well. You have top down factors, bottoms up fact. And these things need to meet in the middle and you kind of only really understand whether things are working with three months or something. So it's a bit like throwing a stone into a pond and then you're observing the ripples and then you're waiting for the 20th ripple to know if that was a good throw or not. Almost. And so I think metrics are very difficult because you can make any metric look good if you somehow kind of poke around it the right way. And so we don't put too much emphasis on like, okay, this design lifted this activation thing by like 22% or whatever it might be. We do look at the, for want of a better word, maybe the pedigree of the teams that people have been on. We put weight behind products. People who worked on products that we like or that have worked on teams that we admire in some way. And so it might be that they've worked at a company where we know that there's parts of their product culture that we think is just strong. And if that's true, then we don't have to obsess over, like, does this piece of work state that it improved this thing by 12% or 26%? We don't know what good looks like in those examples as well. Right. Like, we don't have the baseline and we don't know, like if we don't know what's impressive. And so I think goal setting is inherently difficult and therefore measuring metrics is inherently difficult.
- [47:39]
Rid
Okay, let's zoom forward towards the work trial then. You talked about the value of just bringing a fresh perspective to the table. Can we just get really specific there? Because it's not a long amount of time. There's not that many different ways that you can invest your time in that situation. There's not many different angles that you can take in terms of how to make an impression. You kind of have to be strategic a little bit. So what are the through lines between the people that just crush it where you're like, yeah, hell yeah, of course we're going to hire them. We talked about the quality of the work. I guess I'm imagining that this is also probably a little bit more soft skill of an evaluation process. So what are you looking for? What could people use as kind of like a measuring stick or a bar to hit in that type of environment?
- [48:23]
Nad Chishti
So the easiest way I can describe this is there's this really strange phenomenon that I think is true everywhere. And I'm going to ask you to kind of keep me honest. But when you hire somebody in tech and they're joining for a full time role, you kind of have this soft landing process of, okay, here's your onboarding week and talk to these eight people and do this and do that. And there's this kind of soft expectation that you're going to spend a week or two just getting your Feet on the ground and then do something. But then comparatively, if you hire a contractor and you're like, hey, I need you to come in and do this thing. What's your day rate? What's your week rate? Minute two, they're like, boom, we're going to get going and here we go. And that's what we're looking for, essentially. And so we set it up as if it is your first day and we expect you to create structure and create inertia. And we're not prescriptive over what we want to see. At the end of the day, we're not, hey, we expect to see X number of explorations and at least one high fidelity, this or whatever, none of that. We want to get a sense of your productivity, your ability to work on things autonomously and your communication essentially, throughout the entire day.
- [49:38]
Rid
What does it look like for inertia to be created?
- [49:40]
Nad Chishti
Can we get specific there on inertia specifically? I think we want to understand what you would do if you were continuing. We finished the day with a debrief of show us what you did today, essentially. And we want to understand, okay, if this was the real world, first of all, how production ready is that the thing you've worked on? Like, is there anything here where you're like, oh, we could even test this today, like, feasibly, like, if we sat down and just quickly built it, what's usable from that perspective? Or if somebody's not happy with where they ended up? We want to hear that, okay, maybe they went down, like, 10 different wrong paths, but they have an idea of, like, 20 different things they'd do tomorrow or things like that. And so we're looking for, like, momentum, I guess, throughout that day, again, as if it was your first day at work, as if it was like, okay, cool, what are we going to do tomorrow?
- [50:27]
Rid
A few of the questions that people were asking were all about the changing tooling landscape and how that impacts the way that you're evaluating candidates. And you've obviously played a big role in that changing landscape. So when you're looking at either past experience or maybe sitting down after that first day to kind of debrief how much do you care about tool proficiency and how widely it's spread across different.
- [50:53]
Nad Chishti
Tools, we're not dogmatic about, like, okay, if this person has used these kinds of tools, but not those ones, or whatever, or like, if this person is using our preferred tools or anything like that, we don't really care about that. But I would say that we look for a Mixture of techno optimism and maybe AI maximalism as well. And so we want people that are excited to challenge themselves on how tools are evolving. And so if somebody comes in and they're like, yeah, I've kind of heard about these workflows, but I just can't use them in my team because my team hasn't adopted them or whatever, and they're just not playing or they're just not pushing themselves, then that's not a great look for us and probably not the best fit. But if somebody comes in and they're like, oh, hey, I've tried all these things and here's what stuck for me and here's what hasn't stuck for me, they have their own opinion, then that's really, really good. So we're looking for more of that willingness to push themselves and willingness to experiment and willingness to adopt. And now, frankly, it's been two years since GPT kind of exploded. Now I'd say that we're expecting people to be using AI in their core workflows. Something's probably wrong if you're not. And at the most basic level, even just note taking, you could be challenging yourself there or whatever.
- [52:16]
Rid
Let's go a little bit deeper there. What does it look like to use AI effectively? Because that can just mean so many different things. And I know there's at least some subset of people that are listening that immediately translate that to design by prompting.
- [52:28]
Nad Chishti
Only AI is this new material that has all these new factors that we've never had to worry about before. We design stuff and we use it both we're users of technology at the same time as building it. And so if you're not using AI in any capacity, it's a little bit like if you were around in, I don't know, like early days of the web, and if you were like not adopting like digital, like if you were like, no, I know that the Internet looks interesting, but like I still like this pen and paper thing, but I'm just, I just don't use anything digital in my workflow. And you'd be like, well, directionally that's just not where things, things are going. We think we've kind of crossed this chasm of AI is never going to be put back into this box. Like we're never going to have like non AI computing. And so we're expecting that people are using AI products and that they understand how they work and they have even just have an opinion of them as an end user, even if they're not designing AI products.
- [53:29]
Rid
Day to day, even a personal anecdote that is much smaller. But I do think applies to kind of what you're saying is. I remember when I got my first W2 job, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago, I'm not sure because I'd only been doing like freelancing and my own startup up until that point. So I'd never been evaluated by someone as a designer ever. And afterwards the hiring manager told me why he hired me and it was because in my take home they had like a paid take home project. I prototyped it in principal when principal first was kind of getting some traction. And he asked me like, why'd you, like, why would you put this in principle? Like, which is this how you would normally work? And I was like, oh no, like I probably wouldn't use principle here. I just wanted to use this as an opportunity to try some of these new prototyping tools. And I didn't even think about the answer. And then weeks later he told me that's why. That answer was why we hired you, because it showed this like, curiosity in where technology is going. And at that point it was very clear. High fidelity prototyping is kind of what's next.
- [54:33]
Nad Chishti
That curiosity is like what's impossible to screen for with like the hardest thing to screen for rather. And so like anything you can do to like give these little signals of the curiosity or the, you know, the internal drive makes it levels you up like as a candidate, I'd say for sure.
- [54:48]
Rid
Well, we've covered a lot of ground and I really appreciate how practical you've gotten in this conversation to land the plane, let's say someone crushes it in the one day and they are now brought on, they're working full time. It's been a month or two months or something like that. We talked about the value of owning things end to end, but I'm wanting to go a little bit deeper or maybe touch on different elements of really just to get at what success looks like as a designer at lovable. So are there specific traits or behaviors that you would want to see that would make you feel really, really good about hiring that person?
- [55:26]
Nad Chishti
There's maybe two different things. So one is this, this kind of generalist streak. So you know, this ability to be extremely multidimensional and to work on things end to end, living that day to day, week to week, especially when you're working with incredibly smart people who might have a differing point of view to you that you need to get alongside and you know, stuff like that living that I'd say is kind of thing number one of like really, you know, seeing evidence of that day in, day out, week in week out, there should be a few accomplishments. Normally people ship something within the first day or two of joining. And so hopefully like a month in, there's like lots of different things to celebrate. So that's one thing. And the other is, I think I would just characterize it as thoughtfulness. Especially with Genai, you can make a small change that has quite a large ripple effect unintentionally. And so we have actually an incredibly small amount of surface in the product. And so that means that if you add some more surface to it, it can have quite an outsized impact on the overall shape of the product. And so you have to do it kind of carefully. We expect a small amount of surface to do quite a lot. And then likewise in the core, what we call our core loop of you collaborate with AI to build things, very small changes to the AI's behavior can have very far reaching effects in terms of what people can and can't do. And so even though we try to move extraordinarily quickly because we think that's how we maximize our learning, we want people to be thoughtful. And especially with designers, designers often in our internal conversations are trying to hold like the yardstick for what does good look like. Also, like, how do we maintain integrity and trust from everything from the brand level to the product level to, you know, what is the relationship that people have with our product? And so being incredibly thoughtful and trying to promote almost like integrity throughout both the brand and the product. I think if you're doing that as well in your first month, you're also doing an incredible job.
- [57:21]
Rid
I love that. Well, Nat, super appreciate you coming on and pulling back the curtain on all things hiring and everything you're describing. Sounds amazing. So we're going to link the careers page in the show notes and thank you for coming on and talking with us today.
- [57:37]
Nad Chishti
Thanks for having me. And also we'd really love just more input on what other people are seeing as well. And so, you know, we have our own biases, our own blind spots. We're trying to challenge them all of the time. And so if there's other trends or if you've listened to this and you think something's broken, like fundamentally broken out of everything that I've described in our process, genuinely like input, welcome and we'll continue to evolve.
- [58:01]
Rid
Before I let you go, I want to take just one minute to run you through my favorite products because I'm constantly asked what's in my stack. Framer is how I build websites, Genway is how I do research, Granola is how I take notes during crit Jitter is how I animated my designs. Lovable is how I build my ideas in code, Mobin is how I find design inspiration. Paper is how I design like a creative and Raycast is my shortcut every step of the way. Now, I've hand selected these companies so that I can do these episodes full time. So by far the number one way to support the show is to check them out. You can find the full list at Dive Club Partners.