Hello Scroll team! 👋
Mark Schafer here. I’m an experienced product designer, currently leading the design team for Palantir Foundry. I have a high bar for quality, am passionate about making great products that help people, and my favorite color is hot pink.
Candidly, I think I’m a great fit for your Product Designer role and would love the opportunity to talk to you!
—Mark
PS – My online presence is intentionally small (not to mention out of date), so I’ve put together this page to help you get to know me and my work.
Why this role interests me
Scroll’s mission aligns with my values. I care about online privacy. I seek out and pay for ad-free experiences. I want media that informs and doesn’t pander. In short: “How would a better internet work?” is a problem I’m interested in working on.
Scroll’s success depends on building a great user experience. This is where I provide the most value. It also gives me confidence that I’ll be working with people that care about building a great user experience as much as I do.
Scroll is a small team working on a consumer product with a unique business model. I’m looking to downsize to a smaller team and work on a consumer product again. The business model matters because I’m only interested in designing consumer products that respect people’s time (instead of exploiting their attention).
Why I’m a good fit
I have a strong generalist skill set. I’m a strong executor across the spectrum of product design facets: user research, information architecture, interaction design, visual design, and prototyping. Particular strengths include communication, typography, and facilitating design sprints. (I also have brand and print design chops, which occasionally come in handy in the tech world.)
I have over eight years of experience designing digital products. The best products are the result of deeply understanding both the technology and the users, in order to design an appropriate interface between the two. Designers too often only understand the users without an adequate understanding of the technology, leading to superficial and overly-simplified solutions; engineers too often only understand the technology without understanding the users, leading to confusing and unintuitive interfaces.
I excel at both strategy and details. I thrive when given the opportunity to both clarify a product’s vision and dive down into the weeds to implement that vision. Both are important and both are inherently collaborative. I’m equally at home leading a design sprint to collaborate on vision as I am working closely with engineers on a pull request.
My experience
For the past 12 years, I’ve designed across a diverse set of mediums, organizations, and roles – from a small agency to in-house to big tech. I have over 5 years of management experience, including coaching and leading design managers. View my resume.
My work
Contour
Product vision and design execution for top-down data analysis app
Foundry Issues
Zero to MVP and beyond for integrated data issues app and components
Platform security documentation
Cross-platform work to clarify and communicate complex concepts
Design leadership education
Materials for teaching leadership to a new class of design leads
HGTV Folio
Visual design for an interior decorating iPad app
My point of view
- Design is what ships.
- Design is how it works.
- Design is inherently collaborative.
- Great design is about getting it just right.
- Done is better than perfect.
If you think I might be a good fit based on the above, I’d love to have the opportunity to talk.