Axis

‍Axis is building the knowledge base for Corporate Affairs teams, covering over 50 sectors in 25+ countries. Axis graduated from the Y Combinator Winter 2022 batch.

“One of the challenges we had in finding a designer was that there are not a lot of designers who have experience building enterprise-focused desktop apps,” Mishaal Al Gergawi, CEO of Axis, said.

Not only did the Axis team need desktop design expertise, but they needed to work with someone who could meet their very high standards. “I’ve got very specific ideas about what I want and what I don’t want,” Mishaal says.

Axis approached NUMI in need of product design. “Harrison [NUMI’s cofounder], was like my general practitioner. He routed me to the exact NUMI designer we needed, who met all of our requirements.”

NUMI connected Axis with Nasrif, a member of NUMI’s design guild.

“We thought we’d need to keep Harrison involved in the process to oversee Nasrif’s work, but we didn’t. Nasrif was able to take on a lot of design responsibility and collaborate with us directly.

“We really liked that he was a native English speaker, we’ve worked with remote teammates in the past and found that high quality English is super important for collaboration,” Mishaal says.

“Plus, I have to give Nasrif a lot of credit. He’s stepped up and risen to the moment. In the face of our feedback and change requests, he’s defended his designs and explained the rationale behind them.

“For example, I used to give feedback that he reduce padding between interface elements. But then he’d explained why padding was important, and that it wasn’t wasted space. He stood his ground, and he had a view. And a lot of that debate was possible because he felt comfortable in his communication.”

Through NUMI, Axis was able to move fast on shipping new products. “We’re launching a mobile app that will be ready in a week. The design was really easy because our NUMI designer had already built our design system.

“So when we said, ‘We need a mobile app’, it came together really fast because we already had all the components and interfaces. We just needed to shrink them down to fit the mobile form factor.”

“We’re super invested in our design work with our NUMI designer. We now have an aesthetic, we’ve got a working style, we joke around, we debate what’s possible. It’s been great”

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