Inside Segment Design: Meet Hareem
Inside Segment Design is a series designed to shine the spotlight on the talented team of designers and researchers that make up the Segment design team. We’ll publish a series of articles that will follow each team member on their career path and journey to Segment. Want to be a part of the fun? We’re hiring!
Medium, meet Hareem — a Senior Design Manager here at Segment, famous for her impeccable puns, enthusiasm (via the term juicy coupled with many emojis), and her eye for design. 👀
So Hareem, where are you from?
I grew up in Maryland — and like many people from Maryland, I grew up there, moved to Virginia, and worked in D.C. #DMVLyfe #eastcoastbestcoast #goterps
How did you get into design?
I got into design the same way most people do — through an existential crisis, of course!! I woke up one day and realized I just couldn’t be a dentist like I was planning to. (SMH) The world was my oyster. (But I was still grateful because if I were a dentist, the world might instead be my open mouth.) I had stumbled on this idea of user experience and design in the research job I had at the time, and couldn’t let it go. I decided to pursue it.
Several months of studying, one bootcamp, lots of free work for non-profits in the area and two side projects later, I had my first design job at a small consulting shop in D.C. I loved it. I got to work on amazing projects with amazing teammates. The cool thing about consulting is that you get a lot of experience at once, and the cool thing about government consulting specifically is that all the work you do is at massive scale — not just in the number of people it affects, but also designing for varying levels of tech literacy.
How did you make your way to the Bay Area/Segment?
Eventually, I knew I wanted something different. The other thing about consulting is there’s just no ownership of the work. At the end of the day, you can work your very hardest, but the product isn’t yours to make decisions about. I really wanted to be able to own an end-to-end product experience.
I found Segment while easy-applying to jobs on Linkedin while watching the Office from my couch with my cat. After that, it’s safe to say Segment found me. It sucked me in. I had never met so many incredible people — so smart, humble, energized, and fired up about building this incredible product. I ended up moving to SF to be a product designer at Segment a little over two years ago.
What is your role at Segment?
During my tenure at Segment, I got to work on a bunch of different teams and get a bunch of really amazing product experience. I joined Personas, one of our most successful products, one day (!!) after it launched to General Availability. Now THAT was interesting. It was so fun being able to take a product from launch to its next stages of growth and iteration. And just as I was starting to wonder what it might be like to build a product from scratch, I got to join a new team — our Privacy team — and design Segment’s Privacy product from the ground up and launch it at our user conference.
But that was then! Now, I’m a senior design manager, where I lead our product design team. It’s such a fun job: working with a wildly talented team of designers to solve tough problems (and as you know, there are no shortage of those here) while having the best time doing it. I get to work day in and day out on helping empower, enable, and grow our team. The team makes the job easy. I’m obviously constantly impressed by the talent on our team, but my favorite thing about us is probably how much we genuinely enjoy each other’s company. It’s one of my favorite things about working with great people — being able to enjoy people personally as much as I do professionally.
Why did you choose Segment?
I touched on this before, but honestly, the second I walked into the office I knew I had to work here. There was something about the ~ energy ~ at Segment, about the genuine excitement and desire to tackle really, really tough product, engineering, and design problems with deep customer focus and a genuine willingness to be wrong, get up, and try again that I just couldn’t resist.
There’s also an incredible design culture here. Designers at Segment aren’t just thinking about what the product looks like — they are expected to play an active role in trying to figure out what problems to solve in the first place. That strategic voice in product strategy on the ground level was so important to me and proved to be really valuable in being able to have a meaningful impact right away.
What’s a recent project you’re working on?
These days, I’m thinking a lot about a bunch of different things. First of all, since we’re remote for a while — and especially as a team who was used to hanging out in person — I’m iterating alongside our team to think about how our meetings and collaboration should go. Zooms can be exhausting, but it’s important to create space for the casual hangouts we used to be able to get so easily in person too! And then how do standing meetings like critiques and design collaborations and brainstorms evolve in a remote world? There’s a lot there.
The other thing I’m super excited about these days is this massive project to up-level our design system, Evergreen. We recently underwent a big re-brand (check out our public site 😄), and our product needs that same level of fundamental re-thinking (read some of Kate’s thoughts about that here) and… well, re-juicing if I do say so myself. This is proving to be a surprisingly challenging and detailed project, and I’m learning a ton from designers and engineers on the project on what exactly it means to re-imagine each component from scratch and how to make it extensible for years and designers to come!
What has surprised you most about your time at Segment?
Probably the extent to which the job is yours to make. The coolest thing about Segment is there is literally no problem that is too big or too small for you to solve. Do you want to spend days redesigning a single radio button component? Go ahead. (Ok, maybe not that many days.) Want to write up a doc on how PMs and designers should collaborate together? Go for it. Notice no one is solving this really big customer problem that you feel is important, even though it touches three different product areas? Go off sis.
I really never imagined that a job could be so much more than the posting described — but at Segment, it’s almost like a trampoline. Or a rocket ship. Trampolines don’t really go that high. Anyway. You can just kind of land here and just take off. Some people’s trajectories here (and then even beyond here, once they leave) just renders me (yes, even me) speechless.
What’s one really good piece of advice you’ve received lately?
Recently, I’ve been thinking about this piece of advice my boss gives me all the time around “ripping the floorboards”. What would you do if you could start all over on something? What’s not giving you the best output it could right now — whether it’s a process, a meeting, a design, a document, a part of the product, whatever — and how would you start over?
It’s interesting because when I was chatting with some of my friends about it, it’s actually an instinct I think women — especially women of color — are usually not so inclined to have naturally. It’s not because we don’t have what it takes… I think it’s because of the smaller spaces we occupy. And maybe a little bit with how we are raised. We tend to think (and be told) the things that are in place are in place for a reason, and that reason makes more sense than any desire we might have to change things.
But I’m so grateful he pushes me to take up more space with this kind of thinking. Like wow, the power of being able to start over and truly iterate on things that feel immutable — processes, meetings, culture — it’s been really freeing. To rip out the floorboards of meetings I never found productive, parts of the designer interview process that never gave us any real signal, start over with our design system, with our brand, with building a team, building process, building culture… it’s been awesome.
I will say though, you can definitely take it too far. Not sure how much my cats appreciate how many times I am “ripping out the floorboards” in trying to re-decorate our apartment.
What’s a guilty pleasure right now?
One of my friends got me into Selling Sunset. I don’t want to talk about it. But also if you watched the trailer for Season 3… DM me.
Follow Hareem for more juicy content: Hareem Mannan
Shoutout to Tess Hannel for the beautiful illustrations! 🎨
