Employee Spotlight: Milena Vlad

Our company culture revolves around respect and collaboration, friendship and professionalism, passion for excellence and a love of keeping our employees happy. With that in mind, we decided to shine a spotlight on our colleagues, just to give you a glimpse of what 123FormBuilder is about. Today, our Employee Spotlight series starts with our Product Designer, Milena Vlad.

What is your job at 123FormBuilder and what does that involve?

Being a Product Designer at 123FormBuilder means solving problems for diverse users while trying to balance business goals and technical constraints. It implies discovering ways to help our users gather and process data efficiently, by continuously improving our form builder user experience and interface. 

More concretely, it’s far more than being concerned with current trends and how our product looks or feels like. My job is to understand user needs and business opportunities, and propose solutions that will address those while keeping in mind complexity and cost of development. Depending on the situation this might mean a small tweak to an existing functionality, an entire feature redesign, or launching a completely new feature. It’s dynamic, it implies a lot of collaboration at various steps of the development life-cycle and it’s never boring.

Before 123FormBuilder what did you do?

After deciding to switch careers, I had the opportunity to work as a User Research Assistant — and later on as a UX/UI Designer — for a Romanian-American outsourcing company which was heavily focused on design sprints and human-centered design. This is where I discovered my passion for design thinking, hands-on workshops and facilitation, as well as understanding the value of cross-functional collaboration, prototyping and testing assumptions early on and often.

Is there a project that you have worked on and are particularly proud of?

Working as part of multiple teams comes with the advantage of working on lots of interesting projects, from the challenging Salesforce integration, to the complex User Management system, or the fun Whitelabel customization section. However, the projects that I’m particularly excited about are the Product Design Principles — that serve as a clear point of reference for our design decisions and help us streamline our critiques & feedback sessions — and the Product Design System which we are currently building together with our engineering department & which will allow us to work more efficiently, design more consistent interfaces and deliver better quality to our users.

What is your favorite perk at 123FormBuilder?

Out of the many enjoyable perks we have — like work from home, hackathons, team buildings and daily breakfast bar — what really makes a difference for me is the company culture! It’s really exciting to work in a friendly, collaborative environment, with passionate people willing to share their knowledge and feedback.

What did you dream of becoming when you were growing up?

Solving puzzles, fixing problems & helping people always attracted me, but it took me a while and some trial & error to discover that these can be achieved in various ways and that we can be creative about our career path 😉 What I still dream of is being good at what I do & appreciated for it, so this is what drives me.

What does your workspace look like?

Depending on the time of day, it might be somewhere between neatly cleaned or covered in notes, to-do lists, messy sketches & sticky notes. What is constant is the mandatory cup of coffee & my favorite music played loudly in my headphones.

Any advice for people looking to pursue a career at 123FormBuilder?

Forms & form builders might sound simple or even boring from an outside perspective, but in reality, they are more complex than they seem. Just think about all the use cases & industries where forms could be useful — whether we’re talking about event registration forms to sell tickets, time tracking forms integrated with payroll systems or forms to gather sensitive medical information, chances are we are supporting these & more.