The case for co-designing beyond mockups
When Hareem Mannan, Senior Manager of Product Design at Segment, explains her job to people outside the tech industry, the conversation usually ends with the conclusion that she designs "mocks." It’s technically accurate, she admits, but it undersells the discipline. Design can also shape delight, culture, process, and community—and doing that well requires co-designing not just with other designers, but with researchers, product managers, engineers, and customer-facing teams across the company.
Mannan shared a few real examples of how Segment puts that broader definition into practice.
Mapping the customer journey with UX research
To understand how different customer tiers experience the product, a Segment designer paired up with a UX researcher to build a customer journey map in Figma. The map tracked the full arc of the experience—from initial discovery and sign-up all the way through scaled implementation—and each stage was supplemented with analytics.
The team turned the map into an interactive prototype with clickable customer stories. That file has since become the source of truth for anyone at Segment who needs to reference the customer experience, and it doubles as an onboarding tool for new team members.
Diagramming the data architecture
Segment operates as a customer data platform, which means a lot of data flows through its product. A cross-functional group—designers, researchers, customer success managers, and infrastructure engineers—collaborated on a diagram that traces that data pipeline and highlights where it is transformed, enriched, and cleaned.
The resulting diagram acts as a foundational reference for future product development. It makes clear where the platform is strong and where the team should focus improvement efforts, serving as another shared source of truth for planning discussions.
Running a retrospective on the design system
Segment’s open-source design system, Evergreen, is used by teams far beyond the design org, so gathering feedback from engineering partners is essential. Recently, a design lead ran a retrospective on Evergreen entirely inside a Figma file, swapping in-person sticky notes for virtual ones.
Designers and engineers wrote out pain points and mapped areas of opportunity for the design system. Beyond capturing useful feedback, the exercise produced a framework for next quarter’s OKRs and shifted how the team thinks about Evergreen—effectively co-designing a roadmap for the system’s future.
Co-designing community rituals
Co-design doesn’t have to be product work. For International Women’s Day this past March, Segment’s Chief Product Development Officer wanted to send appreciation cards to female-identifying teammates in the Engineering, Product, and Design org. In a remote work environment, the team turned to Figma to collaboratively write meaningful notes to colleagues and express what they hoped to learn from them. The same virtual card approach now covers birthdays and other occasions that would previously have been celebrated in person.
These examples stretch the conventional definition of co-design, but Mannan hopes they inspire teams to look beyond mockups. The question, she says, is simple: what will you co-design, who will you co-design for, and what impact could the exercise have?
