A day in the life of a product designer at Carta
Hello hello! My name is Chloe.
I’m a product designer based out of San Francisco, working for Carta’s Venture Capital team since January 2021. My team makes it easy to automate running a venture capital fund by building fund administration tools. Beyond the inner workings of my team’s responsibilities, I love being a product designer at Carta. Working on a wide variety of complex and challenging problems within the financial-tech industry allows me to bring entirely new experiences to life by talking to users, mapping out their journeys, and crafting the visuals of a final product.
Carta’s return-to-office policy allows me to work from the office two days a week. Let me take you through a typical day as a product designer…
8:45AM Arrive to the office + get settled
It takes me 30 minutes to commute into downtown’s financial district where our office is located. I love the energy FiDi has in the morning! Our office lives inside of an amazing high-rise building with unbeatable views of the city.
I get settled at my desk and do my morning rounds — say hi to my teammates, make an iced oat latte, and collect my breakfast. My team sits together in a pod of about 50 Cartans amongst the entire Venture Capital R&D and Delivery organizations. This is only one part of the office — we have hundreds of people across multiple floors in SF, which is our largest office.
9:00AM Map out plan for the day
When I’m back at my desk, I like to write out a plan of what I’d like to accomplish for the day. I also catch up on Slack messages and emails. I tend to have most of my meetings in the morning, and reserve my afternoons for heads down time.
10:00AM Scrum team meeting
Within Venture Capital, I’m on a scrum team called Formations. My team primarily works on US legal entity formations for SPVs and funds. We focus on onboarding work around legal incorporation, generating legal documents, and bank account creation. There are 6 members on my team spread across SF, NYC and Seattle — 1 product manager, 1 engineering manager, 3 engineers and 1 designer (me).
Every scrum team within the Venture Capital business unit runs their scrum meetings differently — for us, we track our work on Jira and go over in-progress work and bring up any questions or blockers daily. We’ll start the week together setting goals on Monday, and have retros Friday afternoon giving kudos, reflecting on what could be improved, and assigning any action items required.
One exciting recent development for my team is that Carta acquired Vauban this summer! Carta covers US formations, and Vauban will help us expand formations internationally to the UK, Luxembourg, and British Virgin Islands. My team has been directly working with them on the integration between our two companies — it’s been challenging navigating an ambiguous problem area like this, but I also appreciate working with my product, engineering, and business counterparts to build the integrated vision from the ground up. Some examples from the design perspective I’ve had to think about include: combining design systems, the user experience switching between two platforms, combined product selection, and many more. Since Vauban is based in London, our team has been able to make a trip across the pond twice this year to meet and work on deliverables together in person! 🇬🇧
10:30AM Venture Capital Product + UX team meeting
Every Tuesday, the product designers, design technologists, and product managers of my team meet to discuss ideas, challenges we’re facing, or request feedback for designs or product briefs. Our 2023 theme is “Making Magic”, so we recently ran an exercise answering the question “What are some magical experiences and products we can build to do so?”.
11:30AM Lunch 🍽
We have catered lunch while we’re in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There are large dining spaces in the SF office and it’s a great way to meet new Cartans from across the company! Fun fact: Every Carta office has a freezer fully stocked with ice-cream🍦
12PM VC Got Talent
On Tuesdays, we move from lunch to meeting rooms for VC Got Talent. These are presentations that gather hundreds of Cartans — spanning across R&D, sales, and fund administrators with the purpose of demoing features and collecting feedback. It’s a great way to stay updated on what other teams in our business unit are working on and provide visibility to your work. On Wednesdays, we have a chance to share our work company-wide at a weekly Show & Tell.
As a product designer, I’ve demoed my work in VC Got Talent by using many different forms of design fidelity. From initial user flows, to medium-fi and high-fi mockups — I always receive valuable feedback and guidance. A unique aspect of our business unit is that we are designing products for both external stakeholders like General Partners (GPs) and Limited Partners (LPs) of venture funds, as well as our internal stakeholders like our fund administration and implementation teams dedicated to client service.
1–4:30 PM Focus time
I do my best to keep half of my days available for dedicated working time. My daily tasks vary depending on the stage of the project(s). Some days I’ll be white-boarding initial ideas, working heads down in Figma, writing documents, creating journey maps, conducting user research, or preparing presentations for meetings and design reviews.
Design Review
We have weekly design reviews with the entire 50+ person design org, and business-unit specific design reviews another day of the week. The overall design org reviews are a great way to gather new perspectives outside of your business unit with divergent high level thinking, as well as provide cross-functional visibility to your work. The business-unit specific design reviews are excellent for getting detailed feedback from your teammates who understand the nuts and bolts of the problem you’re trying to solve.
Afternoon Walk/Social time
In the midst of my focus time block, I’ll normally walk around downtown with another designer to grab coffee/a snack. It’s nice to get out of the office and explore the surrounding area! Design team social events are also generally in the afternoon. We host a variety of events ranging from games like Skribbl and Geoguessr to teach-ins and speaker series.
4:30–5PM Wrap up day
As I wrap up my day, I’ll review what I completed for the day, and schedule remaining tasks I need to do on my calendar. Around this time, people will also start making plans if anyone wants to hang out afterwards — our team has social events after work that are completely optional, but personally feel very refreshing to me after 2+ years of remote work.
We’re hiring!
And there you have it! If this day in the life sounds exciting to you, Carta is hiring! You can also follow us on Instagram.
