Dear designer,

Thank you for your first year at Obra. In this year, we did a lot of work as a team.

As a founder, I’m happy we grew the team to seven people. Now we have a solid base of designers to grow the company once more.

We’re aiming to become a design reference worldwide, and it’s thanks to your work that we’re well on our way.

I want to thank you – your work has been more than stellar.

From working on massive application prototypes, to helping three startups get funding because of your rich prototypes, to mentoring a new designer in a team, you really helped Obra get further.

It was an awesome year. I loved our time at [undisclosed conference]. Remember that talk that inspired us to look at startups in a different way?

We found new workflows where we found better ways to validate product decisions. We experimented a lot with AI to use it in meaningful ways. But you never lost sight of the actual humans using your designs.

You already knew how to work with Figma like a pro when you joined the company, but you stepped it up by making a custom plug-in to help our internal workflow.

When there was a new feature, you immediately learned how it worked and applied it to your projects.

I’m also happy with the new design app [undisclosed]. It really upped the animation level in our projects and made it easy to ship animations to development.

What I like is your collab with our Mexican brand designer. You interpreted her brand work, upped your visual skills along the way and took the base of the branding in [undisclosed project] and applied it in a perfectly executed way to the application UI. You made excellent derivative work of the brand and upped your illustration skills.

For the biggest project, I loved that you took the lead in the strategy for the features and that you actually worked on the hundreds of screens for all the user stories alongside a new team member that you were mentoring at the same time as executing the project. This shows both the ability to execute and to grow as a leader.

Actually, I have to mention that your communication skills have been great. You are very good at ”Slack etiquette”.

In meetings you are making sure that meetings don’t go off-topic. When I mentioned that every meeting needs an agenda, you took it to heart and you executed on that comment.

That one time the team was discussing a new technique in one of our Friday sharing sessions, you actually improved upon it and came back with a logic that made sense and that we could as a templated way of working company-wide. You documented it on Notion and we used it successfully internally for three more projects until we discovered another better way.

You also stepped it up when you gave a scoping workshop for the client. Maybe there is a future product manager in you?

I would like to know how you want to grow as an employee and where you want to take your career.

With the right mix of skills, we can build an awesome theme and become that design reference that we all strive for.

I want Obra to be the place to do your best work. So let’s decide what your focus points are for next year and how you can grow as a designer.