First Weeks at Daydream

I joined Daydream a few weeks ago as the Head of Design. It's a fashion AI company with a small team and a lot of ambition. Here's what I've been doing.

The first thing I noticed is that design work was happening but it wasn't visible. Good thinking was happening, but it needed a dedicated surface to be visible across the team. So I fixed that first. I forked an open-source tool called Draftboard, customized it for our team, and deployed it as an internal design feed. Within a week, leadership was using it to make faster decisions because the context was already there.

The second thing I did was research. I spent time talking to the team, reading everything I could about our customers, and building a framework for who we're designing for. Not personas in the traditional sense. More like a shared understanding of our customer that the whole company could align around. That work ended up being adopted across teams as the foundation for how we talk about our user.

The third thing was getting in the product. I started shipping design work alongside the existing team. Not to prove anything. Because I think the fastest way to understand a product is to design for it, and the fastest way to build trust is to make something useful.

I'm also hiring. Building a design team from scratch is one of the hardest and most rewarding parts of this job. The model I'm building toward is small, senior, and high-autonomy. I want people who can own a surface end-to-end and don't need me to tell them what to do. My job is to set the bar, clear the path, and make sure the work is seen.

It's early. There's a lot I'm still learning about the company, the market, and the team. But the pace feels right. When you can move fast and the people around you trust you to move fast, the compounding starts early.