Building a Design Culture from Scratch

Summary

In 2014, I joined Base CRM. Base was a sales CRM startup headquartered in Chicago with an engineering team in Kraków, Poland — a 9-hour time difference and 6,000 miles apart. The product was gaining traction — it would become the #1 CRM download in the iOS App Store — but there was no design process, no design system, no design principles, and no one else on the team who did what I did.

Then the company raised a $30M funding round and decided to relocate from Chicago to Silicon Valley. When the move happened, I was the only designer who went. None of the others came. So it was me doing the design work, me establishing design operations, me building a recruiting practice and talent brand in a place where no one knew who we were, and me trying to get people excited about designing for a CRM product.

One of the first things I did was collaborate with the CEO and leadership team to build an interview practice rooted in the organizational principles they'd established for the company. This wasn't just about filling roles — it was about creating a system for evaluating talent that reflected the culture we were building.

I was essentially tasked with building an entire design organization from nothing — in a new market, with a distributed engineering team half a world away, while also being responsible for the end-to-end product design across desktop and mobile.

The approach

I started by looking at models that had worked for other organizations. The Spotify squad model was compelling — the idea of cross-functional teams organized around a specific product area, with supporting structures (chapters for functions, tribes for broader alignment) that maintained community across squads. We piloted it for two quarters.

The Impact

Reflection

Base taught me that design skills aren't just for making products — they're for designing organizations. Every challenge I faced there required building something from nothing: a recruiting pipeline where there was no talent brand, a design process where there were no principles, a distributed workflow where the tools were failing, and a team culture where I was the only designer in the building.

What made it work wasn't a playbook or a framework from a book. It was resourcefulness, relationships, and the willingness to advocate for investments — like the InVision enterprise license — that weren't easy to justify on a startup budget but were essential to doing the work well. It was going to college campuses and making the pitch in person. It was sitting with the CEO to design an interview process that reflected the company's values, not just its open headcount. It was building a UI kit with 60+ components so that engineers in Kraków could execute with confidence without waiting for a designer to wake up.