Allan Grinshtein

Product Designer at Netflix

Issue #149 April 24, 2022

About

Allan Grinshtein is a Product Designer at Netflix. He was previously a Product Designer at Facebook and was the Founder and CEO of LayerVault.

He also recently started a community for designers called Good News that is a great place for collaboration, news, inspiration and discussion.

Photos

5 images

Gear

8 items

Computer 16-inch Macbook Pro Buy

Computer 13-inch Macbook Pro

Lamp Pablo Circa desk lamp Buy

Chair Herman Miller Cosm — Red Buy

Monitor LG Ultrafine 5K display Buy

Miscellaneous Tom Dixon Offcut Bench

Storage Muuto Compile Shelving — Filled with books and knick-knacks Buy

Miscellaneous A rotation of posters, riso prints, weird layout sketches, and my son’s drawings

The census

Only 6% of the desks we’ve published have Allan’s LG UltraFine 5K.

Ranked across all 515 setups that list their gear.

MacBook Pro 63%

LG UltraFine 5K 6%

See top 50 gear items ›

Software

7 apps

Things

IA Writer

Notion

Figma

Slack

Nova

Terminal

Interview

3 questions

› What is your favorite item in your workspace?

A blue mug that my son made as a birthday gift.

› How do you spark creativity?

Lots of output. Whenever they’re kind enough to pop into my head, I capture ideas in a doc or Figma or on paper. Sometimes I'll return later to massage ideas into a complete thought, but I’ve built up a pretty large graveyard of loose ends.

And espresso, of course.

› How do you manage work-life balance?

Having a wife and kid means that you can't always be at your desk. But I don’t have what you might call “work-life balance”. I don’t even like the idea of it. If I'm not with my family, I'm usually working.