my journey as head of design

1/16/25

tldr: sleepless nights, chaotic tech, and hard-earned clarity. building trust, mentoring a new designer, reaching targets, and shaping a culture where creativity thrived. a journey of connection, growth, and work that mattered.

9 min read

/a role i chose

when i first joined harpie as a ux engineer, i was excited to be part of a small but ambitious team working to make crypto safer. in those early days of 2021, my focus was on creating clean, functional interfaces and bridging the gap between design and development. as i honed my skills, i transitioned into a full-fledged product designer after about a year and a half, taking on deeper responsibilities like user research, wireframing, and leading design sprints.

after another year, it was early 2024 and i started asking myself what was next. i reached out to dan, one of our co-founders, and shared my thoughts on how we could elevate design at harpie. i wanted to improve our operations, establish clearer processes, and build a stronger design presence within the team. the more that time passed and these major initiatives i created got completed, the more it became clear: the responsibilities i was taking on aligned with the position of head of design. so, without much fanfare, the title followed naturally.

this wasn’t about claiming a title for its own sake. it was about owning the work i was doing—leading design efforts, planning projects, building design systems, hiring and mentoring junior designers, conducting user research, setting and tracking key indicators, reaching out to artists and handling clients, representing harpie at global events in north america and asia, and cultivating a culture where creativity and collaboration could thrive. and so, i embraced it and got to work.

/elevating design

as time went on, i knew that in order to elevate our design capabilities, we needed more than just better systems and processes—we needed people. we already had a team of 9, including 3 full-time engineers. we needed another designer to keep up with our product development goals. specifically, someone who could bring fresh energy, new ideas, and a willingness to learn. so, i pitched the idea of hiring a product design intern to dan and noah, our co-founders. it was an ambitious idea, but one that we believed could transform our team.

we opened the position and were overwhelmed by over 600 applications. phd candidates, undergrads, grads—the diversity and talent were staggering. to cut through the noise, i developed a structured selection process: clear criteria focused on adaptability, creativity, and potential. i designed a project-based interview that would test their design thinking and problem-solving skills. after hours of reviewing portfolios and conducting interviews, we narrowed it down to twenty, then four, and finally, grace yu.

there was something about grace. she was sharp, curious, kind, and had a natural instinct for design. she was even canadian, and i had just returned from a really nice trip to vancouver (lol). more importantly, she had the drive to grow, which was exactly what harpie needed. bringing her on board wasn’t just a step forward for us—it was a leap!

/building mentorship

mentoring grace was a journey that challenged me as much as it helped her grow. i wanted her to feel both supported and pushed, to see design not just as a job but as a craft worth perfecting.

we spent countless hours on discord calls, brainstorming and ideating. i encouraged her to keep a design journal, to reflect on her work and document her ideas. we watched design documentaries together on netflix, and i even assigned her reading and analysis homework to deepen her understanding and love of design and art theory. we even played minecraft one time, though looking back i’m honestly not sure how that related to work haha. was fun regardless.

over the months i helped sharpen her technical skills in figma and soft skills in collaborative work. low, medium, and high fidelity designs started to look and feel better. prototyping too. i care about the craft so design standards really did matter for me. we worked together on adhering to the design system i’d built, refining it as we went. over time, she became an integral part of the team. there were moments when she stepped up in ways that amazed me—leading projects when i was out of the proverbial office or taking initiative on other critical tasks. she grew into an independent, confident designer who could stand on her own.

of course, i didn’t navigate this mentorship journey alone. i reached out to my own mentor, won you (an amazing design mentor you should hire!), for guidance. he helped me understand how to balance creativity with discipline, how to foster a culture where exploration and accountability could coexist. his advice shaped how i approached not just mentoring grace but how i approached cross-team collaboration as a whole.

/creating the foundation

when i first stepped into my role as product designer and subsequently head of design, one thing was clear: design at harpie needed structure. we had ideas, ambition, and a vision, but the lack of workflows, repositories, and standards was holding us back.

in preparation for another designer coming on board (who eventually became grace), i started by building a huge design repository in notion. it became a central hub for everything—tasks, resources, feedback, random links to cool things i found online, brand guidelines, planning, metrics, and more. it wasn’t just about organization; it was about creating a second brain that could grow and learn along with us. it ended up being fun to build such a thing anyways.

then came the design system. we had a rudimentary one that worked okay for the time but i had never gotten around to actually formalizing it. i knew if someone was going to join my design efforts i needed something for them to get started with. so, i started building a design system with the basics—colors, typography, branded icons, a few components (buttons and modals). i didn’t stop there. i knew we would eventually need detailed documentation that outlined how every component worked and how it fit into the bigger picture, so i started building docs and assigned it as a recurring initiative between grace and i. it was really for the engineers and anyone who needed to understand how and why our design work came together. i got feedback straight away: our engineers told me the system and new operating procedures i started helped make their work way easier, that it reduced friction and sped up development timelines.

/fika times and connection

while processes and systems were essential, i also wanted to focus on something less tangible but just as important: connection. during my time in sweden at malmö university, i learned about fika. it’s more than a coffee break—it’s a moment to pause, connect, and share. they had taught us about fika in our study abroad onboarding week. we even were encouraged to find a random student and just ask to “go fika” sometime. it was cute as hell. man, i miss sweden.

i introduced fika times at harpie. once a week, me and another employee would step away from work to just talk. no agendas, no deadlines—just connecting. sometimes we’d share stories or laugh at whatever randomness we came up with. other times, we’d open up about challenges we were facing. these moments strengthened our team, building trust and camaraderie that translated into better collaboration and creativity. i encouraged grace to do the same and she set up fika times with many of our teammates and they loved it.

/chaos and thai milk tea

crypto is often a bit messy, from a ux standpoint. flows can get convoluted and pain points are abound, oftentimes users can get lost navigating web3 platforms. and not coming from a super crypto-native background myself, i knew one of our main deisng pillars at harpie was going to be aiming for our product to be as friendly as possible to as many people as possible, especially those not fluent in this tech. our product really had appeal to any crypto user at all anyway, especially the ones less familiar with the security vulnerabilities that enabled scammers to hack into their digital valuables. it is really the wild west out here.

one of my first big challenges now that another designer was onboard was redesigning our onboarding and product adoption flows to address these concerns and others. a lot of users were dropping off right after signing up, unsure of what to do next. we had almost nothing to direct or guide them once they made it to the dashboard. this needed design thinking.

i worked with grace and dana yao, a senior product designer at visa, to completely rethink how users experienced our platform. dana led the design solutions based on her industry practice and i led the thoughtful integration of her solutions into our product experience. grace helped bridge talks between us and engineering. we added welcome modals, guided tours, and gamification elements to guide users toward essential actions. we stripped away the noise, creating a journey that was intuitive and clear.

fastforward a couple months and harpie was headed to asia. onboarding 100+ users in person at devcon7 in bangkok was a really fun and transformative experience. spending time face-to-face with people who relied on our platform and had never heard of our platform brought a new depth to my understanding of user needs and wants. we also collaborated closely with shefi, a women-led blockchain initiative, sponsoring their event and creating meaningful connections with attendees. these moments were really about listening, learning, and building trust through genuine interaction. seeing users grasp our features and feel empowered to navigate the platform reminded me why this work mattered—it wasn’t just about cool tech, it was about people.

however, we even ran into some serious wallet connection issues during those live onboardings, which was stressful since we have 4 teammates to handle people coming up to our booth and begging for our merch (we had the best merch). it was time to go back to the drawing board with this onboarding flow. we hadn’t encountered this sort of issue en masse before. noah and i met over coffee and thai milk tea near the phra khanong station of the bts metro and ideated ways to improve and streamline our onboarding flow even more, to cut down on user friction and technical points of failure.

i noticed we didn’t really need users to connect their wallets during setup to get them the security analysis they were looking for, just for more advanced features later on. so i figured we could replace that clunky and prone-to-failure step with the option to just input an ens domain (a unique username on the ethereum blockchain) or even their full wallet address into a simple text field instead. we were already doing that for a different product’s onboarding flow, our poap badge passport (which btw, shoutout to the great designers over at the poap org). this would seriously cut down on potential pain points when signing up. not to mention our wallet connection provider was absolutely not meeting our technical needs at the time, so some kind of change was needed.

/work worth doing

this role wasn’t just about big initiatives. it was about the hours i poured into the small details—the late nights refining workflows, the weekends spent taking courses on ux strategy and analytics, the extra effort to ensure every pixel was perfect.

i sought mentorship when i needed guidance, reaching out to get help refining my approach to leadership. i collaborated with people across the team, building allies in marketing, engineering, and beyond to advocate for me and for design. together, i even led roundtable discussions on emerging technologies like ai, brainstorming how they could one day be integrated into our app. no one else had thought of doing something that.

there were moments of doubt, when the weight of everything felt overwhelming. but there were also moments of pure joy—when a feature launched seamlessly, when a user told us we’d made their life easier (even when they told us off... useful feedback nonetheless), and when grace posted on linkedin about how much she’d grown during her time with us and loved the role that i gave her.

grace and i video called one last time and reminisced on our time together. man how fast the months passed! but it was moments like these made it all worth it.

/what mattered most

at the end of the day, what i’m proudest of isn’t the systems we built or the features we launched. it’s the culture we created. a culture where people felt valued, where ideas flowed freely, where work felt meaningful.

from visiting bangkok’s vibrant streets to jet skiing as a team in cancún, from playlists that sparked creativity to fika times that built trust, this journey was about more than just design. it was about connection, growth, and doing work that mattered.

Jorge Aquino