Oct 16, 2025
Hey Brian! I know we've talked about frontend and design engineering a bit over the last few years, but are getting more serious about it as a really strategic piece of making a strong first impression with our product as we distribute to a wider audience, plus building trust upmarket. Can you share some of your evaluation criteria for your design eng (at Campsite or Notion)? What are their responsibilities versus other engineers (and designers) on the team? This could be in the interview process or for ongoing performance review on your team. It'll be one of our first specialist eng roles, and we want to make sure we're picking the right person to increase product quality and developer velocity.
There’s no shortcut.
We interviewed a lot of people at Campsite, and it’s pretty obvious within a few minutes if someone notices/prioritizes visual design details, thinks about UX, considers accessibility, etc. From the pool of people who know and care about these things, then you focus on finding people who mostly “get it right” by default — i.e. have they already acquired enough taste and skills to not need much guidance and make things look good + feel right on the first or second pass.
If I remember correctly, our interview exercise was to design a multi-select dropdown menu. You could immediately tell if someone was a good fit if they started thinking about how the items in the menu should reorder based on the selection, how to support keyboard navigation and shortcuts, etc.
We also created a culture that rewarded + reinforced great design-oriented frontend engineering: everyone was hyper attuned to janky animations, dropped frames, misaligned elements, incorrect colors, etc. This “intuition” only comes from constantly sharing when things are wrong and describing why they’re wrong. You have to help people build an intuition for what “good” and “correct” looks like.