Key takeaways: Geoff Teehan on navigating change as a designer

Geoff Teehan has done a lot of what I’d like to do. He co-founded Teehan+Lax, led design at Facebook and made the viral game Dialed.

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Copying is inevitable, and a bit of a compliment. Mapmakers used to hide deliberate mistakes, called trap streets, so they’d know if someone copied their work.

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Our tendency here is to share it really early and to share it really often.

His team skips one-to-ones and meets most mornings to go through the work. When someone’s stuck, they call a lightning round, and the whole team spends an hour on the problem. It’s solved almost every time.

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Each hire that I’ve brought on, they bring something unique. They have a baseline of greatness, and then they’ve got a superpower.

Four designers is enough. Anything the team can’t cover, like heavy backend work, gets outsourced.

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That sucks for retention, but it is awesome for like when something goes viral.

No app to download and no sign-up makes a game easy to share and hard to keep people coming back to.

Listen to the episode on Dive Club⁠.