Randy Hunt: Notion and Etsy design leader on why the best design teams stay small

Randy Hunt (0:01)

Look, you're not going to come here and get some training in career path.

We don't talk about titles or levels internally in this team. You're here to be on the team and make stuff happen. We want to compensate you fairly for doing that. When we do great work, we're all going to win together. Like, let's go, this is about building stuff. I think you really sell that idea and that vision and then do it.

Aarron Walter (0:23)

In graduate school, Randy Hunt poured his heart and soul into a poster for Milton Glaser's class.

It was a picture built entirely from hand lettering that read as an image from across the room and as words up close. Glaser glanced at it and said, Well, that's not very good, and moved right on to the next student. It's brutal. Randy tells that story fondly. What stayed with him wasn't the sting, but the standard. Keep the floor high and the ceiling keeps rising. He carried that idea from Glaser's studio, where he apprenticed. Through a career leading design at Etsy, at Grab in Singapore, and until recently, at Notion.

Eli Woolery (1:01)

At Notion, that standard meant a design team smaller than anyone would expect, on purpose. Randy argues that limited bandwidth forces a company to prioritize, and that great people have little patience for what he calls the work around the work. The team doesn't talk about titles or levels. Designers ship code in the production app, something Randy built teams around at Etsy in 2010, long before Design Engineer came back into fashion.

We also get into what he calls whole design, which means treating a push notification with the same care as the main dashboard. He explains why hotels and restaurants inspire him as much as any software, and traces that back to growing up near Disney's carefully spaced trash cans in Orlando and to the bowl of fresh fruit that always sat in Milton Glaser's studio.

This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery.

Aarron Walter (1:51)

And I'm Aarron Walter.

We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

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Randy Hunt, welcome to Design Better.

Randy Hunt (4:15)

Thanks for having me.

Aarron Walter (4:16)

Randy, you're someone I've known for a little while now, and we last crossed paths in New York. I think we were at a Wharton Co. function and caught up and chatted.

You've got a lot of really interesting experience in your background. You've been at Etsy, you're currently at Notion and SVA, School of Visual Arts in New York, leading a department there. But let's start from the early days. You actually apprenticed with Milton Glaser before any of these big company chapters that I'm alluding to. What did you learn from that experience that you carry around?

Randy Hunt (4:53)

I think the parts of Milton Glaser that will endure most is almost him more as a philosopher and almost like communication philosopher. There's this how people feel about things, how they respond to things, and how things ought to be.