I have been working at Maize since February 2018, spending two years in H-Farm‘s unbelievable headquarters plus three (and counting) in Milan.
What I’ve been doing
My main occupation is being a senior product designer. I design digital products from the early research stages to the architecture and UX Design, all the way to the UI Design. I am particularly skilled and meticulous when it comes to Design Systems.
However, for two years I was the product owner of MAIZE.plus too (our B2B e-learning web app), which let me experience a different type of work, made of product strategy, roadmaps, dashboards, value propositions and business sustainability. And a whole lot of Excel.
The organisation and my role
Maize is, as we like to define ourselves, a flat, yogurt-like organisation. Wait what?
Flat means we do not have a hierarchy of roles. Sure, we do have seniority levels, but you are not assigned a boss or a number of people reporting to you. You can choose a mentor and the mentor thus accepts the responsibility to help you grow professionally, and to review your performance. Also, every project is assigned to a person that becomes its project manager. If you are the project manager, feel free to involve people with a higher seniority: within that project, you will be their boss as you are responsible for the final outcome.
Yogurt-like means no role is immutable or permanent. You can change your mentor every time you want; the committee evaluating the performance reviews submitted by mentors gets re-elected every year; every community (the group of people doing the same job – in my case, Visual and Interaction designers) chooses two people to drive the community, and the drivers get re-elected every year too. And so on.
As I type, I currently am the mentor of one colleague and one of the two drivers of my community. Yay!
Other interesting stuff
The name Maize comes from our own magazine, which is very insightful and well crafted. Every issue tackles a topic from different perspectives thanks to the contribution of philosophists, engineers, entrepreneurs, designers, journalists… I could go on forever.
Also, it is so well designed that issue #13 (Identity) was selected in the 2023 ADI Design Index. Not bad innit?
In 2021 my team joined forces with Celi, an organisation based in Turin focusing on Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing. This is why we have been working on smart chatbots and AIs for longer than the most recent Generative AI hype.
Working at Maize has also exposed me to international projects: in 2018 I went several times to Nuremberg at Adidas’ headquarters; in 2019 I lived in Barcelona for two months for an insurance project. Getting to travel again after Covid took a little time, but we are now back at work with clients from all over the world. In 2023 I went as far as Copenhagen, but some colleagues even went to Shanghai and Seoul!