I’m a founding product designer. We work extremely agile (ship in 1-2 days). My boss expects me to design extremely fast, while managing a full fledge design system, handling research, and also think about new features. Recently I had a performance review and the feedback I got was: -Extremely poor attention to detail. -Not fully immersed in the product. -Low confidence to grow the company He didn’t say a single nice thing to me. I feel like the poor attention to detail is because of the time constraints I’m given. Poor attention to detail means forgetting to put borders on certain components, icon padding pixel spacing maybe off by 1-2 px, forgetting a few hover states every now and then. Not fully immersed is self explanatory. I’ve only been there for a few months, so it makes sense. Low confidence to grow the company means I can’t handle being a full stack designer + think of new ideas that could be impactful. Btw, we don’t have a product manager. He asked me what I do on the weekends and I told him I spend my days doing leisurely activities like fitness classes, hiking, taking day trips. He told me I should be spending most of my day trying to improve myself to be the best designer. I work almost 60 hour work weeks and sometimes I just want to relax? Is this unrealistic? I’m starting to think I’m not cut out to be a founding designer. I also got in trouble for taking PTO on a holiday. He said as a team it’s not fair because we all decided we would get a week off for Christmas. This is not design related but why is he coming after me like this? Does anyone have tips on how to work agile while being extremely attentive to detail? I use design systems with nested components but it still takes a while to build this. I need to come up with a better strategy if I want to keep this job. I cried when I got home. Definitely feeling burnt out and depressed :/ Base: 120k Equity: a little less than 1%
Is it worth it?
Tell your boss, you don't need an asian dad
This
Unless they're giving you like 1% of the company, it doesn't make sense to work any harder than you already do
Additionally, no amount of equity will do you any good if you burn out in the short term and start to hate your life.
Additionally #2, if you work out of India, send me a ping.
Is your boss a designer? Does he move that fast? I think its pretty commonly accepted at this point that if you move quickly, you're bound to make mistakes. Like countless case studies have shown this now. As far as the weekend stuff goes... if you're a co-founder and have equal stake as other founders do, and you aren't working as much as them, then it's going to annoy them. I think its a bit strange to have a performance review at a startup though. Especially if you're a founder. Should be pretty clear what impact you're having. If they nitpick small design mistakes, bring up other positive metrics like DAU increase or new users etc.
I’m not a founder, nor part of the founding team. Im just the first designer there
I'd leave then. The world is too big to have to work for a jerk. This place will work you to dust and toss you out when they're done.
Name and shame
And that’s why I steer clear of startups. F that!
So should I be complaining when the designers I work with don't provide hover states, scrolling scenarios, text overflow, loading states, or error states? I thought that was just par for the course. You sound amazing. The ball is on your court whether you put up with this crap.
sounds like the kind of dipshit founder that will fire you just before your cliff
I have worked in pre-seed and series A startups as the first designer in my career. My one and only suggestion - get the hell out of this company. Nothing, mind you nothing is worth your happiness and health.
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