Interviewing with all 3. Curious if anyone has worked at more than one or just general thoughts about Product Design roles at these spots. Data driven? Visual design driven? Any thoughts welcome! Would be moving from NY to SF.
Skip Amazon. Apple and FB understand Product Design. Amzn is what you ship as quickly as possible. Amzn also doesn’t understand front end engineering yet. Give it a couple more years.
Thanks for the candid input. It’s the only option to not have to move to the Bay. Wish NY Product Design could catch up already.
100% agree with that. Product at amazon is all about strategy, less about an outstanding execution. If you care about the customer experience, we fall short. If you care about thinking big, we are fantastic.
I’ve worked at all three and agree with DEP^. If you’re between Apple and FB, it really becomes a question of style: Apple is extremely precise and hierarchical, FB is more organic and chaotic. I prefer FB.
Totally agree - skip AMZN if you want to move around later. My SO is a hiring product design manager interviewing almost daily in FB and we have many UX friends in all three. The longer you stay in AMZN, the hard you move to the other two. AMZN has a certain design mindset that is a lot different than F/B and makes it hard to pass their interviews.
It’s all team dependent. Apple probably does the best work, and obviously champions design. FB has some great people, but lots of mediocrity too. And Amazon. Well...in theory it should be great. Senior level designers command a lot of respect but there’s tons of bureaucracy at times. I’m in AWS, which is highly technical but also the CEO (Jassy) and SVPs take UX extremely seriously. The frustrating part is the central design language team that requires five steps of review and approval. It used to be you could just make shit happen, but now it’s way more complicated and cumbersome. But depending on your skills and interests, you can have tremendous influence over strategy and implementation. It’s not just strictly product design—it really is looking at the whole experience. And as for Ux on the retail side, very hit or miss. I mean, you’ve seen the site. It’s brutal. There are plenty of issues with talent, leadership, and process. Amazon is data-driven but don’t play that card too hard. It’s more about sound thinking and decision-making, in which data plays a role but you still need to show ingenuity. What do you work on at Spotify? I’ve often wondered what design is like there.
Thank you for your thoughtful response! The role at Amazon is fashion related so, yeah, your point about retail is quite relevant. We have a team that owns the core design of the mobile app. There’s a bit of bureaucracy in championing any UI change, which sounds not too dissimilar to your experience at Amazon. But no love for web consistency, strangely enough.
Be very wary of the fashion team. Shaky leadership, lots of politics. Or, there had been—it may be better. Push-back is vital at Amazon, so if you pursue this be ready to assert your position strongly and with a lot of smart thinking. Spotify seems to do design well. I’m able to find new music all the time and keep my playlists in order mostly. Indifferent to consistency or lack thereof; make things clear and simple and all’s good, as far as I’m concerned.
I have yet to hear good things about the Amazon work situation. I've heard mostly good things about the other two.
I heard amazon is about design thinking not pixel pushing so if you’re looking for a challenge go for Amazon but if u want to be a pretty willy go for others.
Facebook all day long. Design has a huge seat at the table. You’ll drive product strategy as well. You won’t be pigeon holed into one function or vertical and will own a product area.
I know it’s a noob question but wtf is TC you peeps keep talking about? And how is that important from senior positions?
Believe it’s Total Compensation (salary + equity/benefits). Companies tend to have different experience/steps frameworks, TC is a decent way of determining equivalencies. At least that’s how I use TC.
Not all hero wears cape. Thank you.
Plenty of ownership, strategy, decision making opportunities for designers at Amazon. Strong emphasis on problem solving not pretty UIs.
Amazon intentionally calls it UX because the expectation is that you think in terms of experience, not just “product.” Depends on your skill set and what you want to do; I found Facebook’s designers to be bland, small thinkers who can’t see beyond the edges of an app. Can’t say about Apple. But at Amazon you can go from designing everything from how a customer finds and buys stuff, to how that stuff is packaged and shipped, to how it’s delivered, to the interactions with technical infrastructure that power everything behind all that. There’s more opportunity to do legit service design in addition to pushing pixels around.
+1
Seems like asking about the company as a whole is challenging because teams can greatly impact the experience. My question is “which teams at each respective company are amazing for a designer?” Considering domain, roadmap, peers, cross functional talent, leadership and maturity all play into it.
So which teams at Airbnb are amazing for a Designer?
China is really exciting because the talent there is strong and they’re building for a different user base/market. Luxury Retreats if you’re into service design and merchandising products in marketplaces. Platform/DLS has been on a tear building out the design system and only getting started. Host teams if you like building tools and the new Homes President has been doing a great job focusing efforts since joining from Amazon. I would say all of them but I haven’t been able to keep up with every team to say why.
Why you leaving Spotify? Also TC?
Senior IC. TC is notoriously low, per our reputation. Only really good if you’re on the right team and/or you’re being groomed. Hard to grow or move around the org. All the cons of a startup (still) without the pros of a more mature tech company.