Staff Designer

Our new Manager of Product Design, Andrew Domozych started on June 10, just a couple of weeks ago. Formerly Director of Design, I’m now Staff Designer. My Design Team and I benefit from my return to IC work for reason I outline below. Before getting into those benefits, rest assured that this transition is desired, delivers value to Zello, the Zello Design Team, and with regards to my own life goals. I’m excited, and I feel great.^[1]

I was promoted to Design Director from team lead following our December 2021 brand update, taking on a marketing designer and junior product designer as direct reports, and managed them for a year and a half before growing the team.

Zello’s 2023 Product organization was built upon three pillars — Core,^[2] Growth, and Enterprise — and we decided to hire a Product Designer for each, which required I offload my remaining IC work, primarily design and development for zello.com. I hired a talented Design Engineer to own zello.com while adding other technical skills from high fidelity prototyping to video editing, and a Product Designer for Enterprise. My earlier designer worked in the Core team, and we brought over a high-potential Junior Product Designer from our Product Advocates for Growth.

The designer on Enterprise didn’t work out, and then his successor received an unbeatable offer from Spotify only a month after starting this last November. Shortly before his hire, I’d let my inherited product designer go. It was a rough half year. I went into 2025 expecting to replace one of the lost product designers, and cover the remaining gap myself until the team’s output has stabilized.

This size of team meant that I could reliably provide product design IC work for our Core and Enterprise teams — with any more reports, I would’ve been precluded of IC availability. We’d found that the Core team needed a deep degree of Zello product and platform knowledge, and that was difficult to hire for while not having a margin for labor hours. However, we added a fourth team tasked to reassess old and new product problems with new AI technologies, and once again we needed increased design resources.

We started the year seeking a new product designer, but with the passage of time it became increasingly intimidating to accomplish this while keeping apace with my own life goals. Darien and I had planned to leave Texas following the election and our wedding. Moving back from Pittsburgh was not permanent, and leaving Texas for a blue state was a given.^[3] Now, we doubt that by the time our eventual^[4] children are in school, that the remainder of the country will be meaningfully more hospitable than the Hell we call home. Of the few things the Heritage Society and I agree on: there’s no time like the present.

So we segued from hiring a senior IC to hiring an experienced manager, looking to this role less to increase IC bandwidth and more to perform my managerial responsibilities and broadening our team’s abilities. For example, a manager with research experience, or with hardware experience, would’ve excelled. We still needed an individual who could do the work themselves and to our benchmark, but certainly no full-time IC.

In early June and the end of my directorship, the team was Sam Valdez, a wildly talented marketing designer turned visual and brand designer, Riley Sheehan, Design Engineer focusing on design and development for zello.com, and Angela Cerrillo, a Product Designer focused within Zello’s Growth team. I was split between our Core and AI teams, with Enterprise occasionally needing attention, and working with Angela on larger projects for Growth.

Rewind to October 2021, and I’m discussing design career paths with my manager,^[5] and how we can build out both experienced IC and managerial tracks. We want to grow our team with minimal managerial overhead while optimizing for internal growth and expertise. I wanted managerial experience for myself, but felt strongly that with a relatively junior team at the time, my primary value was as an IC. After three and a half years, we’ve found ourselves now back in that position. I’m glad to have had the experience, and that I can now choose to apply it elsewhere in the future. Now, I look forward to learning from another’s example while reflecting on my own.

I’ve been fortunate at Zello to often do whatever I’ve wanted. They hired me as a student, and despite being an Austin-based company, retained me while I studied a semester in Lyon, continued to work with me when I moved to Belgium for two years, and then again as I moved to Pittsburgh for two years. I joined the company at such a stage that I could shape Design’s role at the company — our team owns the marketing website because I was both a designer and engineer, and we needed to bring the project in-house. The company I first started working with had contracted UI and visual designers, but never prototypers, researchers, and full-stack product designers. We’ve had the privilege of shaping our role via the value we deliver, and that’s only limited by our skillset.

Unfortunately this mindset became detrimental to myself and my team where following years of, arguably, over-indexing on my IC skills and working as a ”player-coach”^[6] manager meant that we had high output but lacking strategic leadership. Their leader was elbows-deep in the muck.^[7] Within the last six months and desiring to return from IC work to a leadership role, the IC demands on my time were such that I simply couldn’t do both. I had spent disproportionate time over the last year first addressing difficulties within my team, and then supplementing the lost IC bandwidth. At this point, I could rinse and repeat, or work towards our planned move and try something else.

”Something else” is the intersection of multiple goals. I return to a Staff Designer role, and hire a design manager. This maintains current design bandwidth while adding a manager to handle team internals and hiring, which previously took my time from backfilling our IC bandwidth. This allows us to again leave Austin.^[8]

Importantly to Zello, this introduces an experienced leader with both practiced and new ideas to both my design team and to our greater leadership. While I demonstrably enjoyed my IC work, I was increasingly concerned with our hiring strategy. Leadership increasingly stretched my IC bandwidth between multiple teams, and I worried that this would continue despite my growing inability to meet demand. Increasingly often until in full, we had to cut usability testing from new projects because we lacked labor hours. When advocating to hire specialized roles — at different times a visual designer, a motion graphics designer, or a researcher — those who celebrated my team’s diverse specializations asked “why can’t the visual designer run a usability study?”^[9] This was difficult to address while struggling to meet demand for design output, and now I can focus on those parts I know how to do, and learn from a more experienced manager’s example.

I enjoyed much of my former position. As Director, I could affect a greater degree of design continuity between organizations, and was more involved in broader product strategy than I will be as a focused Staff Designer. I had a freedom to jump between projects and focuses and the company scaled, and maintain a similar vantage to my early perspective in the company, despite the company’s output having grown dramatically. I could proactively make the design and product teams into teams that I, with my limited perspective, assumed other designers would want to work for. I tried to balance Zello’s engineering and product biases with design-driven ideation and user-centered concerns. While I can now apply these to my own projects and advocate for them in the larger organization, my impact is limited to my appeal, and I’m no evangelist. As time stretched, I realized that I both wanted for myself and the team to do more, and I did not know how to broaden our reach. We wanted research, but struggled to meet IC quotas. We wanted rapid experimentation, but struggled to meet production and implementation timelines. Having increasingly felt impotent in the face of theses catch-22s, I felt that this was no longer for me.

I’m relieved to sit back, to do what I do best, and to see how an experienced manager develops our design team, brings new practices to the company, and furthers the place and function of design within our leadership. In the meantime, I can focus on my goals while doing what I do best.