Square Staff Design
Introduce us to your team
We are a close-knit group of designers focused on building high-quality tools for business owners and teams.
We help the owners of small- and medium-sized businesses handle the logistics of running their operations and managing their team so they can focus on what they love. They can use our tools to create a schedule, manage access permissions, pay their team, and more.
Employees love our products because they can easily see their schedule, trade shifts, and get paid quickly – all from their phone.
What are your team rituals?
We start off every week with a team meeting, where we play music and share updates from the weekend, discuss our top priorities for the week, and check in to see if we can help each other with anything.
Holding this time for reflection and planning has helped our team feel close as we are all in various cities and timezones.
It's also really fun! We get to see what people have been up to in their personal lives and share movie and food recommendations!
Share an interesting side project from a team member
We love to be creative inside and outside of work! In our spare time, our team is coding, illustrating, cooking, knitting, gardening, and more.
What does your team's product development process look like?
We work closely with our product managers and engineering partners to deeply understand the experiences and problems of the owners, managers, and employees who use our products. We focus on these personas to make sure we are solving real problems for all our customers.
We use interviews, surveys, and analytics to help us scope and further understand the problem space. We design solutions, prototype flows, and gather feedback. We use all of these learnings to iterate and refine. We're always coming back to the needs of our customers to validate our solutions and once we feel ready, we work with engineering to ship new products and features.
We see shipping as the start of the process – we work with research, marketing, and data science to understand the impact of our changes, listen to feedback from customers, and improve over time.
Here's an example of some of the Early Wage Access programs we've built for employees to transfer their earned income before their regular pay day or end of the pay period.
Learn more in the 2022 Block Investor Day video!
How does your team conduct critique?
Our team strives to be inclusive – so we structure our critiques in a way that we think helps everyone provide thoughtful and constructive feedback.
Every week, a few people present a problem they are working through by sharing a quick explanation, the stage of the project, and what sort of feedback they are looking for.
Then, we put some music on and everyone has a few minutes to add comments in Figma. Once we're done, we talk through any patterns that emerged or topics that are easier to discuss in real time.
People can also add comments asynchronously, before or after the meeting, if they weren't able to attend.
We think that this format provides a way for everyone to have an equal voice, rather than the discussion being centered around the person who can talk the most. We're always iterating on this structure and improving it over time.
What does your workplace look like?
We are fully remote, but you can work from the office if that's easier for you! Our team is distributed across the United States, so we are aware of people working in different time zones and set up our meetings to work for everyone.
Where can we learn more about your team?
We'd love to chat! If you are interested in learning more about our team or design at Square, please reach out to our design director, Amy Winther, or Moira Losch on our recruiting team.
