Co-founding a leading web performance platform

Summary

Calibre is a bootstrapped, profitable B2B SaaS business offering web performance monitoring, which I co-founded with Ben Schwarz. As a founder and Principal Designer, I led design strategy, end-to-end product releases, and created processes that helped us scale the business.

Using design as a commercial advantage

I owned the design strategy for all aspects and surfaces of Calibre. Facing a crowded market, with competitors often operating with many more resources, I decided we would differentiate on one of the common pitfalls of developer-oriented platforms: lack of good design.

Easy to use, resilient design influences buying decisions. Starting with our marketing presence, I paired persona-driven content strategy with high-quality product imagery. While it was tempting to turn marketing pages into feature listicles (which we had many of!), instead, I focused on telling a story of how to use the end-to-end platform successfully.

Designing systems to multiply a small team

With no designer on staff during the first few years, both marketing and the product were built without the tools to guarantee a cohesive, scalable design language. I created two Design Systems (product and marketing) that let the team of four release with confidence. The presence of tokens, Figma resources, Storybook counterparts, usage documentation, and high-level design principles enabled our team to focus more on what customer issues we should be solving and how, rather than what it’d potentially cost in cycles.

Thanks to both robust design systems, we were able to rapidly release 20+ new features and refresh existing ones to elevate brand cohesion and address disjointed user experience. Because all Calibre employees were design-savvy, it empowered them to make positive changes for our customers without following a more lengthy, end-to-end design process where it wasn’t warranted.

Creating company operating processes

• Four Day Work Week: How and Why We Work Less
  Aug 8, 2021
• Why We Run a People First Company
  Jun 3, 2021
• How We Deliver Great Customer Experience Without a Support Team
  Mar 9, 2021
• How to Write a Job Ad
  Feb 2, 2021

At no point did Calibre have a dedicated operations function, yet we needed those processes to effectively operate. Leaving those to chance (or single person’s memory) doesn’t scale, nor does it introduce transparency, or confidence in how the company is run.

To enable our growth, I authored our hiring strategy with three people successfully employed against it and zero voluntary attritions. I also implemented a 4-day workweek cadence that had a positive effect on productivity, and landed us a feature in the Time magazine. Calibre was widely recognised as a member of People-First Companies network.

On the design practice side, I introduced Calibre’s unique Voice & Tone and brand guidelines. I procured tools and set up how we use them effectively. I defined how we approach design critiques and developer handover, too.

Finally, I established Calibre’s customer support and communication strategies, which resulted in 97-100% Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) that’s held up to this day, long after my departure.

Making an expert domain accessible

Web performance has been historically gatekept from non-developer audiences. It required expert knowledge only a few possessed, meaning domain literacy and awareness was low, directly translating to a much smaller potential customer base to tap into. The goal I’ve set for Calibre was to make a complex domain understandable and actionable, without a degree in data science or statistics.

While many competitors focused solely on developers, Calibre reached further for agencies, entire product teams, and SEOs. This strategy allowed me to substantially expand our customer base, and diversify persona archetypes. We worked with designers, quality assurance specialists, project managers, and C-level executives. Removing the assumption of web performance expertise, and focusing educational approach, made the product easier to use across the board.

Providing real user data without tracking scripts

• Track real user Core Web Vitals data with CrUX Dashboard
  Feb 9, 2024

Often, a roadblock to adopting real user monitoring is the additional subscription cost and the need for external tracking script installation. Financials, security, and privacy concerns are non-trivial internal hoops to jump through, even for teams who don’t need convincing to use our software. Additionally, at the time, all eyes were on Core Web Vitals—a set of core performance metrics for UX. Suddenly, speed influenced how you ranked in Google Search, resulting in many asking: “how do I find out how Google sees me?” (the answers were not easily forthcoming).

To address both, we leveraged Google’s Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) to create a dashboard where teams could quickly do a health check without any obstacles:

This is an excellent update! Love the instant switch between p75 and the overall histogram. Thanks for your recent focus on bringing RUM into the dashboards, it’s been very helpful.

Simplifying making sense of performance

• Easily investigate page performance with Snapshot Overview
  Nov 16, 2023

Not only web performance is famously complex, people also have different modes of digesting information. I often noticed that customers struggled to fully grasp the impact of the metrics when presented with raw numbers, which might mean very little to them.

I redesigned the existing Snapshot Report to guide readers in quickly spotting the most critical performance issues. I combined the breadth of collected metrics with data visualisation to clearly show the impact of sub-par measurements on what their customers experience (the LCP is high, therefore our clients see a mostly empty screen for 4 seconds!).

This is great, Karolina! I love seeing the LCP time in the render timeline.

Helping prevent UX regressions

• Set and Meet Speed Budgets
  Jun 19, 2020

One of the most difficult challenges of web performance is not only achieving good metrics, but keeping them that way. Without meaningful and timely notifications about trends, teams can be stuck in a loop of reactionary, last-minute fixes taking time from other work. Not mentioning remembering what a “good” threshold means for dozens of metrics.

To prevent this, I introduced Budgets allowing teams to set goals, track them over time, and receive proactive notifications when measurements are at risk. The earlier they could spot unwelcome changes, the less negative impact on teams’ work cadence, and their customers.

The above is a short selection of features I’ve worked on, for more, check Calibre’s Product Announcements and Changelog.

Outside dedicated product work, I’ve curated and ran Performance Newsletter to raise knowledge of web performance, build audience and Calibre’s authority in the field. For five years, I’ve sent a fortnightly email to 7,000+ subscribers, creating a steady funnel of leads. During its time, Performance Newsletter was the best domain-specific publication, accordingly to its readers: