2023 Year in Design

2023 was a dynamic year for Automattic Design, one that challenged us to embrace change and experiment with new ways of working, as well as narrow our focus and raise our standards of quality. These highlights are not just about celebrating what we’ve achieved; they provide the foundation for even more exciting, innovative work ahead.

We grew.

We welcomed eleven new designers to the org this year, across six teams. Contributing further to our broad footprint, our new designers join us from across the world – everywhere from the Philippines to Serbia, to Canada.

We also saw internal growth: almost 25% of designers rotated teams or took on a leadership role this year to pursue a new challenge. It’s a point of pride for us to be able to offer designers a wide range of flexible opportunities to learn and grow in the way that feels right for them.

We also formed a new team this year – Design Core. This team exists to look horizontally across the organization and help us provide more connected experiences. Design Core has already worked on projects with our Applied AI team to bring new innovations to our products and leveled up our presence at in-person events, with many more cool and exciting projects coming soon.

We gathered.

While we’re a distributed company, we recognize the potential that in-person time provides to help us advance our goals. In February of this year, we hosted our first Design Meetup since 2019 in Vienna, Austria. The event was a celebration of the incredible talent we have within the team and an opportunity to set the stage for the rest of the year.

We also had our first-ever Design Leadership meetup in New York City in September. During our time together, we were able to unite around common challenges, learn more about each other, and work on solutions to help us continue to level up our design quality and processes. We look forward to continuing to work together as a cohort to meet shared goals around quality and impact.

We raised the bar.

We began this year with the goal of elevating quality across Automattic through intentional actions, support, and new projects.

We leaned into a new organizational model this year. We looked at some of our largest design teams, like Woo and Dotcom, and divided them into sub-teams, or squads. The squad-based model ensures designers can work more effectively as a unit and receive more hands-on support from their leader.

We also took a fresh look at our expectations for designers, iterating on them to ensure that designers are held to consistent, impactful standards regardless of their role within the division. We also began work on writing design principles for the Automattic Design team. These design principles aim to more precisely define what we mean when we reference “quality” design work. We look forward to sharing more about those in the coming months.

We designed.

This year, we worked diligently to ensure that we were prioritizing the most impactful projects across the business. Looking back on everything we accomplished, it’s inspiring to see such a tremendous body of work and how much this team has helped to improve our products.

Check out some of the posts we’ve shared about our work this year, here and on our product blogs:

Keep an eye on our Projects page for fresh new work in 2024.

Looking Forward

Design is constant iteration, and our plans for 2024 reflect that. We’re iterating on our hiring processes, tooling, onboarding, leadership development, and how we collaborate together. We look forward to continuing a number of initiatives that we started this year in this spirit – including cross-team projects, and investments in the ways we present our team, our brands, and the company as a whole.

We also look forward to prioritizing some new and refreshed initiatives for design – fun, skill-building design challenges, experimenting with our design critiques, and diving into promising new technologies like AI.

One of the key themes we intend to lean into next year is maturity. Maturing our design org to meet new challenges will help us keep pace and ensure we grow and scale in a healthy way. We want designers to be able to operate as trusted business partners within the teams that they work in, aligning their work with the efforts most critical to our continued success. We’ll provide guidance and support around business acumen, data analysis, and leadership skills, and will look to reinforce the team through hiring in ways that best equip us for the future.

There’s no greater asset to the Automattic Design team than all of the designers that make up the org, and we want to continue to tap into their collective genius as best we can. We couldn’t be successful if we didn’t listen to and act on the amazing feedback and ideas that designers share with us both in person and through our feedback channels.

Finally, we also look forward to seeing each other in person this year and using Automattic’s meetup tradition to strategically collaborate across teams and advance interesting new ideas. It all kicks off at our All-Design Meetup in Italy this February.

…And, that’s a wrap. Happy New Year! ✨