(gentle music)
- What is it like for a designer when you work at a company
that gets acquired by a much larger company?
This is something that I've never personally experienced
in my career in tech so far.
But recently I spoke with Berenice Mendez,
who is the associate creative director of HelloSign,
about her experience with being acquired by Dropbox.
honestly, as someone who has never been through one,
acquisitions scare me a bit, you've chosen to work
at one company.
Then all of a sudden that company is part
of a much bigger company and processes change,
team structure changes, it seems like a lot.
And we always hear stories about how easily
things can go pretty poorly
for people on the team of the acquired company.
But in my interview with Berenice,
I learned that Dropbox took a super slow
and steady approach to the acquisition of HelloSign.
And the two companies kind of operated separately
for about a year I think it was,
to let everything settle before fully merging the teams,
which it seems like a really great approach.
In the interview, Berenice also shared
some really great advice for designers
working at a company that's getting acquired.
So if you are in that situation or maybe just like me,
you just wanna know what it's like,
here's what she had to say.
- Oh man, change is so exciting.
I mean, honestly being very candid here,
like if we're going to be acquired by a company,
I think Dropbox would've been like the one
that I would have wished for,
I think be open to learning.
One of the first things that I realized
is that there's a lot of great things
about having a small team
because you do get a lot of ownership on the projects,
but the projects really,
you can only get so much feedback
from your peers in a small team
and from like your marketing partners.
And there's like the experience
and the way of running things from teams
that have experienced maybe the challenges
of the smaller and medium company,
those are really priceless,
and you don't really get to learn that
until you hit those.
So just really be open to like suggestions
and maybe like really question
about how process was arrived at, you know.
Maybe it's a time for you to implement that.
Something that I did a lot was when we got access
to pretty much a lot of the documents
in the design team, I read through a lot of older projects
and I found a lot of the challenges
that we were running into at the time.
So I was like, this gives me almost like 50% of the answer.
And this gives me the language to express
maybe like the thing that I hadn't figured out
how to express that something was bothering me
about this problem or I couldn't really narrow it down,
here was the answer for those things.
And that was really helpful.
I mean, it really felt like going back to school,
you really felt like you were reading, yeah,
from a textbook a little bit, and not everything applies
necessarily to you, but definitely perspective.
And like from a brand like Dropbox
that really pays a lot of attention
to design and like brand expression,
the insights really felt like kind of finding
a bit of a gold mine, you know?
- So just basically embrace the change, you know,
and see where you can learn from it
and take it as an opportunity, I love it.
- I think something that the designers
really also got really excited about
was that sometimes at bigger companies,
processes are a little bit lengthier
because like there's more people involved.
There's more eyes on their work,
I guess also kind of like the wearing a lot of hats.
It was really exciting to see people that were like,
oh my God, you did this, but you also did this,
you also did that.
It kind of makes them kind of like also excited
for them to try other areas, right.
Maybe they've been specializing on something
for a little while and just kind of meeting someone
who's gonna be doing a little bit of everything
because of really like, that's how.
Exactly, gets them excited to be like, maybe yeah,
maybe I can do that too, I can explore that as well.
- I love the approach Berenice took to this,
and how she and the HelloSign team really embraced
the resources and scale that Dropbox has to help them grow.
There's lots more insights into their team processes
and structure and how things have changed
post acquisition in the latest episode
of Inside Marketing Design.
So you should go check it out
on the Inside Marketing Design channel right here,
and I will see you over there.