Inside Segment Design: Meet Kwasi

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. Read our previous piece in the series here!

Medium, meet Kwasi — a Product Design Manager here at Segment. Kwasi has been here for a few short months, but is widely respected across the board and has already played a role in shaping our incredibly fun and talented team of designers. 🏆

So Kwasi, where are you from?

I grew up in the suburbs of South Jersey, just 25 minutes outside of Philadelphia. This might be a hot take but the Jersey shore is objectively the best shore (not what you see on tv though 🤦‍♂). Still, I’ve found my home away from home on the west coast.

How did you get into design?

I had a very windy path but like with the design process, you always find clarity in the chaos eventually. I studied civil engineering and pre-medicine with the intention of going to med school after graduating. That is until I decided to take a class called “Entrepreneurship and Finance for Tech Startups” taught by the founder of an angel network named Letitia Green.

She had real businesses come pitch to her in front of the entire class and she’d deliver the most direct constructive feedback I’ve ever heard (honestly, it was better than Shark Tank!!). She encouraged us to enter the E-Cup, UVa’s campus-wide business pitch competition and even coached me personally the next year. These two experiences were my first introduction of how good design could really shape a product and I was astonished at how much it aligned with my interests. I graduated from UVa, enrolled in a three-month bootcamp (during which I crashed on a friend’s couch as a broke recent graduate… story for another time), and landed my first design job at Capital One a couple of months later.

How did you make your way to Segment?

After relocating to the west coast to work at a service design firm called Adaptive Path, I eventually ended up going to Intuit and spending half of my time in Mexico City to launch our Quickbooks office there. During this time, my roommate Daniel had suggested multiple times that I join him at Segment. I resisted as long as I could but when he got the idea into Hareem’s head as well I stood no chance.

It took one conversation with Hareem to realize that Segment was the place I needed and wanted to be (she is an incredibly amazing individual, salesperson, design leader, and maybe… a wizard?!). It also turned out that we were both on the same design panel years back when we lived in DC! Segment had the challenges I wanted to tackle, the space for me to grow, and the people that were going to help me develop all while having a good time.

What’s your role at Segment?

I am a Product Design Manager leading design on Digital, Segment’s team in charge of building self-service experiences both in and out of the product. It is an incredibly cross-functional team that gets to figure out how to take the successes we’ve seen with our very human setup solutions and turn them digital so that anyone can use Segment easily and effectively.

Besides that, I have the fortune of helping to cultivate our culture for our incredibly driven and talented design team. I’ve even had the opportunity to recruit and grow our mighty design team by adding one more designer in my short time here. I find myself constantly learning from every designer, while also sharing what I’ve learned from past experiences with them.

Why did you choose Segment?

If I had to sum up the reason I chose Segment into one word after that conversation with Hareem, it would be OPPORTUNITY.

Beginning with the role itself, I was given the opportunity to develop, empower, and enable designers that report to me, while also having influence in shaping the future of what design looks like at Segment. The coolest part about it is how much of a team effort this is! There’s not a single designer that isn’t contributing to this future in one way or another.

I was also given the opportunity to continue with individual contributor work, which I am not ready to give up yet, all while putting my service design thinking to the test on a complex system. I’ve had the opportunity to work on the rewarding challenge of making Segment accessible to all individuals regardless of technical background and with some of the most brilliant cross-functional partners I’ve seen in my career thus far. If that wasn’t already enough, every person I’ve encountered has been an absolute blast and pleasure to work with.

What’s a recent project you’re working on?

My most recent focus has been around how we could revamp our first-time user experience so that customers can start realizing the benefits of Segment faster and more seamlessly. Segment is a product that customers try because they have a certain job in mind. It’s our job to understand what this intent is so that we can show them the path of least resistance to that objective.

But let’s take that one step further… What if instead of any resistance, we gave them a boat and allowed the swift currents to take them to their destination? It’s the creation of that type of experience that brings delight and empowerment to our customers. It’s that type of experience that we ultimately aim to build.

What has surprised you most about your time at Segment?

The documentation culture! I’ve now been at two big companies and have never seen documentation to this extent. If there is a thought, data point, brainstorm, reflection, or anything in between — you can bet your bottom dollar (is that still hip to say?) that it has been documented. I typically find it difficult to get ramped up on new teams or projects because of a lack of context, but here you can trace a deliverable back to the original seed of an idea. I think this is also a reflection of the fact that everyone is truly empowered to improve the experiences that they see could be better. Sometimes all it takes is an artifact that shows the future of what could be and why that’s of value to tackle!

What’s one really good piece of advice that you’ve received recently?

I went camping with a friend recently and she talked in-depth about how

“We constantly intentionally or unintentionally create complications due to a lack of understanding.”

We have a tendency to think that we know how something works or how someone operates even if we’ve never encountered that person or thing before. Then we base our actions off of that belief system which only ends up one of two ways — for the better or worse.

I believe the same tendencies can spill over into the experiences we create. We sometimes create a narrative of what we think the customer wants or needs instead of actually taking the time to explicitly learn about who they are or why they have chosen our product to fulfill their ambitions. It’s our job to make the additional effort to understand where customers are coming from, meet them where they are, and THEN create the best path forward rather than introducing experiences we think they need which may just complicate things further, for both them and yourself (product debt = UGH).

What’s a guilty pleasure right now?

Currently making my way through all of Netflix’s reality dating shows and I’m not proud of it… but Sima from Mumbai has a tough job!

Follow Kwasi for more content: Kwasi Twum-Acheampong

Shoutout to Tess Hannel for the beautiful illustrations! 🎨