When you are looking for a new job, something to keep in mind is the kind of culture you are joining. Besides the company mission, industry, and product, it's important to understand how the team works together.

For designers, you want to be able to look at 2 parts of the team's culture.

1. The overall culture and how designers fit into it.
2. The design culture and how the rest of the team fits into it.

There are often overlaps for both of these, but it's important to note the differences as much as the similarties.

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A quick description on Design culture

Design culture is made up of 3 key groups and how they operate together to effectivly implement design

• The organization as a whole
• Individuals (non-designer)
• Designers

Each group has a role to play. The design culture has to be bought-in at the org level to ensure that it'll be equally respected and understood by all members of the organization. The non-designers are needed to give feedback and support as well as participate in design processes. The designers themselves are required to set design philosphopy, tenants, and how design descision will be made. As well as facilitating the conversations and workshops to work with non-designers.

The effective design culture is able to:

• Support understanding and advocating for the users.
• Encourage collaborating across teams with design.
• Encourage and empower taking risks and experimentation.
• Set up design processes and standards across the company.

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The BIG question: Why have design culture?

There are 2 primary reasons why it's important to have good design culture. The first is, designers (people in genearl) want to work in places that care about design. The second is, organizations with good design culture generally tend to design better products.

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Question 1:

Ask to non-designers: What’s it like to collaborate with design team or designers?

It's important to understand how the rest of the team works with the designers. Whether they have a design team or an agency, or even just one of the founders that has a design background.

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Question 2:

Ask anyone: What was a recent project that was successful due to design?

Does the team recognize design as a factor in success? If so do they know how? Did they participate? How did they understand the way design was successful?

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Question 3:

Ask anyone: What was a recent failure that was due to design?

Conversly, what do they understand for design failures? How has this affect how they work with design team/designers?

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Question 4:

Ask to non-designers: What does the design team do?

Who is the designers/design team? What do they know about them? Do they keep to themselves in some design laboratory? This is as much a question for non-designer team members as it is about the design team and how they communicate with the rest of the team.

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Question 5:

Ask to designers: How do you get buy-in from other teams?

For the designers working here, what is this process like? Who are involved? What processes are gate keepers or gate openers? How available are these resources?

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Question 6:

Ask to designers: What’s your design process like? Who is involved?

Similiarly, how do the design mechanisms work? Who gets involved at what stage? How flexible is this process? Where does this process come from? Who dictates this process? Is it tied to another team's process?

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Question 7:

Ask to designers: How do you ask for help?

As a designer, what happens when you come across a challange you cannot surmount on your own? What mechanisms are there for support? Who are available to support you? What does this look like within the design org, and what does this look like outside the design org?

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Question 8:

Ask hiring manager as a candidate: Are you looking for generalists or specialists? What is the "make-up" of design in this organization?

What's the make-up of the design team? How do things work differently for teams with generalists? Where do specialities fit into the team? For example, some teams might define themselves as full on generalists that wear "many hats". If you have any interest to build deeper scope into a specialty, how does that fit in?

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