Vercel’s Glenn Hitchcock & John Pham - Design engineering deep dive (Dive Club Ep. 46)

Over the last few months, design engineering has by far been the #1 most requested topic. So I wanted to get the inside scoop from the team at Vercel to learn more. In this episode we get to hear from:

1. Glenn Hitchcock -   / glennui   (Director of design engineering)
2. John Pham -   / johnphamous   (Lead design engineer)

The goal of this conversation is to help people understand the role that design engineers play and to outline a path you can take to develop some of these skills. We talk about:

The strategy behind Vercel’s new website
Why Vercel built a design engineering team
How designers collaborate with design engineers
What Vercel looks for when hiring design engineers
How Vercel is always building with re-usability in mind
+ a lot more

Maggie Appleton’s quote on software creation from our group interview - https://anthonyhobday.com/blog/202401...
vercel.com/ship
Framer components - https://drams.framer.website/ (inspired by Dieter Rams’ design principles)
Screwball scramble - https://us.tomy.com/screwball-scramble/
Dead Simple Sites - https://deadsimplesites.com/

Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿

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🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

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Chapters
0:00 Intro
2:20 Why Vercel prioritizes hiring design engineers
3:33 How design engineering sits in the org chart
7:52 How designers collaborate with design engineers
11:58 How Vercel approaches their design system
13:10 Difference between design and frontend engineers (and designers who can code)
21:11 Design engineering's role in creative direction
22:54 How design engineering collaborates with the rest of the team
26:09 Is "design engineer" a temporary role?
31:53 How Vercel spun up a new design org
33:36 How to know if design engineering makes sense at your company
34:56 The strategy behind Vercel's new website
37:47 What Vercel is looking for in design engineering candidates
39:48 The design execution gap

#productdesign #podcast #uiux #figma #design #ux