Design at Feedly

Building a stellar design team in a very complex domain

Carrying on in the series of exploring design at companies, the attention turns to Feedly.

I feel Feedly is a very interesting company because (and for designers):

• They are fully bootstrapped and they have been for the last 17 years.

• They pivoted from B2C to a focused B2B offering 5 years ago, very successfully I may add.

• The product is solving a real need in threat intelligence and preventing cyber attacks, which seems to be on the rise for companies in every industry, so you’re solving a huge problem if you choose to work for Feedly.

• The CEO truly invests and believes in design.

• They are remote-first, with employees all around the world. When it seems most companies feel they need to go back into the office Feedly are doing the opposite.

• The interview process is very detailed and the attention to detail on hiring is one of the best I’ve seen in the industry. They are clear on what they want.

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In this article I am chatting to the brilliant Micka Touillaud who is currently a Staff Product Designer at Feedly where he helps millions of users and hundreds of companies stay ahead with AI-driven insights.

Micka is a Product & Design leader with experience driving innovation across visionary startups and scale-ups in France and San Francisco (most of which have been acquired). He’s also an Angel investor in early-stage startups and supports founders in building transformative products and design strategies.

To find out more about Micka check out micka.design and his Substack Framing Design.

1. What are Feedly up to in 2025?

5 years ago, we started co-creating our B2B offering with our power users. It helped created 2 vertical offerings. One for Market Intelligence Analyst and another one for Threat Intelligence analyst.

We’ve built an intelligence platform that can serve both use cases in depth for each of their workflows. Notable horizontal features include

• AI Feeds (based on 1000 AI models, automatically tracking the web for you),

• Ask AI (summarize, translate, extract data) across multiple articles and the creation of

• Automated Newsletters to share these insights every weeks internally (release AI insights in it a few months ago).

• For Threat Intelligence, we’ve worked on many integrations, reporting dashboards to spot trending vulnerabilities, dive into the depth of cyber attacks and understand the techniques used by attackers, leveraging AI for insights summarization.

• Market Intelligence has seen new dashboard emerge also for spotting the new Emerging Trends among each industries.

We now have a strong product market fit for both product with 400+ enterprise customers, 50% year-over-year growth and signed some of the best Fortune 100 companies. We’re also keeping our B2C roots for the quality of each of our experiences, and our customers are loving it!

We’re currently working on searching the web with natural language query

You can see the details of what we release every two weeks and more visuals in our feedly.com/changelog

Here is our vision deck to learn more about Feedly.

2. How are you thinking about design at Feedly?

We’re currently a small team of very senior and autonomous Product Designers. Currently 3 and hiring for 2 positions.

We’re all working within our squad. Eduardo, based in Lisbon is working for our Market Intelligence product, Alex, based between San Francisco and South-West of France is working on our Threat Intelligence product. On my end I work on the AI and Deliverables squad that benefit both products horizontally. The two designer roles we’re hiring for are to double our efforts on our top priority product: Threat Intelligence. One for our Growth squad (the core of our revenue engine with a product-lead-sales motion) and another one to join forces on Threat Intelligence and AI.

PMs and Designers work hands in hands with the squad domain experts, Product Marketing Manager, Frontend Engineer and Backend Engineer. We like to think of our squad not as a Duo but as a Quintet.

Everyone in the squad are working on the problem definition phase of the project, while PM are the owner of this phase. Designers leads the discovery phase. Engineers leads the delivery phase. Collaborative exploration and 2-weeks focused steps are key product principles we’re trying to apply. We also like to determine at every steps of the initiative the Problem clarity and Value clarity.

Design is valued from everyone in the organisation with the CEO Edwin very much understanding the importance of design.

3. How do you measure success of the design team?

The success of the designers in the team are deeply linked to the customer value they have delivered. This value can be delivered though different angles

• Primary through the squad angle: Key initiatives delivered, customer satisfactions, customer quotes, number of beta customers enrolled

• Secondary through the design system angle: Key project released to customers, successful component simplification and refactor, UI improvement, …

• Finally though the expression of our company values in the day to day. Our values are Growth Mindset, Customer Obsessed, Team First, Excellence and Ownership

Regarding Rituals, we have a few key meetings along the week that make our design team tight together across our squad and allow us to maximize knowledge sharing and fuel cross-squad innovation.

Tuesday: Design System sync with Eng (discussing ongoing projects and new threads)

Wednesday: Design critique between designers (maximum 2 subjects per session, here it’s to unblock challenges, generate more ideas, elevate quality, encourage consistency, or simply recent projects)

Thursday: Design pairing between two designers

Friday: Async weekly pulse (Wins, challenges, other things to share)

4. What are the reporting lines for the design team?

We report directly to the CEO. Feedly has a culture of being as horizontal as possible and trying to reduce the number of management layers. For each domains (Machine learning, Frontend, Customer success, Design …) we have Leads that are the referee to each communication and are responsible for their team success. But Lead roles at Feedly are seen as partners rather than hierarchical managers.

This direct line to Edwin our CEO is very healthy as Edwin has a deep understanding of our product, customers and design.

5. What to expect in the interview process

In the interview process we’re looking for senior people that thrive within squads and know what great design is. We’re looking for people with growth mindset, humility, passion for their work and that can demonstrate great craftsmanship.

We have a pretty short and effective process. A 20min screening interview, then the regular 60min Portfolio presentation. We then do 1:1 conversations with PM, Eng, and CEO. After these steps we should have cleared all of our unknowns and be in position to offer the candidate a 2-day paid work trial.

We’ll define a small scope project and work on a real problem we’re having at Feedly. You can think of it as if you were freelancing for us for 2 days. It’s great to let the candidate know how it is to work at Feedly and see if the setup is a perfect match for both the candidate and ourselves.

Here is the process in more detail:

• Screening interview

  • In the first interview, it’s 20min, at this point I’m mostly looking for passion, conciseness, clarity of thought, business and product sense as well as the overall energy that the candidate shares.

  • One of the questions I like to ask is if the candidate can talk to me briefly about his favorite project he worked on recently. It’s usually a great indicator of the above.

• Portfolio presentation

  • The 60min Portfolio presentation is very standard. We’re a minimum 2 designers here and we’ll have the PM of the squad joining too. We’re asking to the candidate to showcase 2 case studies (20 min each). Which gives us 10 min of questions (very short) and 10 min of question for the candidate.

  • One of the questions that I like to ask here at the end is “You could have decided to show us anything today, you decided to show us … , what were you trying to convey?” This gives candidates a chance to re-iterate on their core value and explain this in another format.

• 1:1 conversations

  • Here we have a short series of 3x 45min 1:1 conversation (PM Interview, Culture fit, CEO chat)

  • They’re meant to assess the general fit of the candidates for the role through additional angles

• 2 day work trial

  • Here, we’re evaluating candidates as if they were Freelancing for us for a few days.

  • We’re paying candidates $800 to $1200 per day depending on geography

  • We work on a real problem we’re having at Feedly

  • Problem are well scope and defined ahead of the work trial

  • We’re looking for collaborative mindset, iteration skills that can level up quality quickly

  • Ability to ask questions, ease of collaboration while being remote

6. If you receive 300+ applicants to a role, what makes 1-2 designers stand out above the rest? What do you really look for?

A polished portfolio with case studies that have a great storytelling and can go in depth to the challenges, hypotheses, iteration and final outcome metrics.

The biggest mistakes I find when people are applying is a generic application that doesn’t feel personalized. A simple suggestion from the onboarding or landing page always feels like a great catch-point that demonstrates interest, curiosity and point of view.

7. Feedly has been around for 17 years in a very competitive industry, fully bootstrapped. What would you say is unique or central to your approach to product that leads to such a successful product?

Customer-obsession. It has been central since the early years of Feedly and still is. There’s no development time that is passed on to things that haven’t been validated, triangulated, or stamped by customer research or customer feedback.

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Feedly is currently hiring for 2 design roles:

(with details on how to apply on the JD)

1. Senior Product Designer - Remote

2. Growth Product Designer - Remote