Building a Company.
Designing an early-stage start up from zero the same way I design a product: in the small moments that compound.
- Challenge
- Design a company from zero, as the only designer in the room. Build the product, the system, the brand, the culture, and the operating process at the same time, and make them all cohesive.
- My Role
- Head of Product and Founding Designer. Third hire after the CEO and CTO, leading design across every surface the company touches and building the internal culture and ways of working.
- Team Structure
- Joined as the third hire but now within a team of six. CEO, CTO, Head of Product (me), Senior Data Scientist, Senior Data Engineer, and Senior Full-Stack AI Engineer.
- Impact
- An onboarding every new teammate has walked through. A design system powering every client deliverable. Four shared principles that gave the team its first vocabulary for who we are. A design-led process that moves the firm from ambiguous brief to aligned direction. And a working theory, pressure-tested in real time, about what culture actually requires to stay alive.
Overview
I joined Element14 as the third hire, Head of Product, and the only designer to shape the company itself alongside the products it ships. The website I’d designed before being hired was the only external-facing artifact we had, and the rest was open ground. In the first six months I designed the onboarding every new hire now receives, built the design system and the operating process behind every client deliverable, ran the workshops that set the team’s working rhythm, and shaped how product, data, and engineering decided to collaborate.
The frame I brought in is that a company is a product. It has a voice, a system, an experience, and a set of rituals. The deeper belief underneath the frame is that both culture and design work the same way: the first few moments matter disproportionately, and getting them right early does most of the downstream work. Small decisions, made with intention, compound.
Building the front door
Before
After
Designing the onboarding
Every new hire at Element14 opens the same door with a warm welcome moment built around the company’s own name: silicon, element 14 on the periodic table, the foundation of modern technology.
Each person on the team gets their own element tile with a symbol, a short bio, and AMA. The periodic motif gives the team a shared visual language that builds retention and belonging instantly.
Setting the culture
Most people treat culture the way they treat design: as a long, heavy process that takes forever and never quite finishes. To me though, culture, like design, is almost entirely about getting the first few moments right. Get the onboarding right. Get the weekly rhythms right. Get the shared vocabulary right. The rest tends to grow on its own with surprisingly little maintenance.
In my first weeks, I ran a series of workshops to shape the team dynamic and ways of working on purpose. The premise was if we name how we want to work together while the team is small, we get to carry that rhythm forward as we grow.
From there I shaped the big and small rituals that give the team its rhythm. How we show up, how we make space for new voices in meetings, how we balance priorities, and how we communicate were all intentionally crafted rather than simply written down as policy. They’re designed into the environment, so the team gets to live them without thinking about them.
These “Elementals” show up in our capabilities statement, how we talk to clients, and how we make hiring decisions. They’re the frame we use to decide what work we take, who we bring on, and how we keep showing up for each other.
Crafting the
design discipline
The operating process moves the team from an ambiguous brief to a clear direction everyone can build toward. Alongside team documentation, I built four artifacts that now anchor how every project works: a requirements-gathering method that keeps clients and the team speaking the same language, an interview synthesis process that turns scattered conversations into shared insight, a product vision narrative that gives the whole team one picture of where we’re going and why, and a living prototype that keeps engineering moving at full speed.
The product vision and journey — built to align the team and show how it will fit within the current workflow and ecosystem.
Scaling the
product portfolio
Each federal client we serve brings something different: different data, different users, different procurement needs, different brand expectations. Rather than rebuild for every one, I designed the system to flex. Underneath every deliverable sits one design system skeleton, with components, tokens, patterns, and documentation that stay constant across projects with the ability to still tailor to each client.
The engineering team doesn’t have to re-learn structure for every project, and the clients get something that feels built for their world from the start.
Coming soon
What I’m still working on: shaping the brand
Right now we have two different tones since I built the website before the company even formed:
The external brand is dark, sleek, tech-forward, a confident counter to the sterile consulting look that fills federal procurement.
The internal brand is warm, playful, and deeply human. Two expressions, each pitched perfectly for its own audience.
The two tones make sense for their audiences but they feel disconnected. I want to rethink the website with really simple touches that let our periodic element shine through and round out our full brand and design system. The internal brand already uses two-letter element tiles for every teammate. The external brand can inherit the same grammar for services, methods, and principles. What I’m working on now is the thread that ties them together and how far to extend the motif externally while keeping the credibility the current site has.
A company is a product that never stops needing design. The onboarding, the system, the brand, the culture, the way the team moves together, all of it keeps growing as the firm grows, and that’s the part I find most generative. Where we are now: seven people, four Elementals, one design system, one operating process, six client variants, and two brand expressions learning to recognize each other. One company I’m continuing to design.