How to be a successful designer in an early-stage startup
If you’ve ever worked in an early-stage startup, you’d agree it’s very different from being a designer in an agency or a large established company. In companies with big design teams, you have a chance to take less responsibilities, spend a lot of time on crafting mocks, and most importantly, work in a UX design direction you like the most, whether it’s Interaction, Visual Design or Motion, etc. In an early-stage startup you have to take all responsibility, do all kind of work, even such as graphic design and many times move with extra speed. Although such comparison might show an absolute advantage of being a large company employee, working in early-stage startups is a great skill booster, every Product designer should experience in her/his career.
Let’s talk about the most common mistakes many designers(including myself) do working in early-stage startups, how to avoid them and how to help your team succeed.
1. To everything turn, turn, turn, there is a season turn, turn, turn…
Before we start just google your favorite actress/actor childhood photos, are you wondering if these kids ever knew who they would become? What startups do is proving ventures and clients that they are 10 years old Brad Pitts “and although I have a little bit silly beatle haircut now” they say “I’ll become one of the most handsome guys on the planet, so don’t miss your chance to help me now and become my childhood friend.” As a stylist of that kid don’t put adult clothes on him/her.
Enough of allegories, the first thing you should keep in mind is that things like outstanding brand identity or very unique interface, are not top priorities of an early-stage startup. Setting that kind of goals can even potentially ruin the product, as the main goal on an early stage should be a clear vision of how a startup can begin monetizing the cool idea it has. You should also be ready that the product may even change its main direction you’ve all been working on, at some point.
One more thing is that NO product becomes successful only because of its great design, BUT there are a lot of startups which fail because of UX problems they haven’t handled correctly.
So, focus on solving interaction and usability problems first. The interface should be clean and accurate, while brand identity shows the direction and the meaning of the product. Once you succeed and become a unicorn you can hire some legendary teams like Collins and work with them on a very high-quality brand identity just like Dropbox and Spotify did.
(There may be some cases when startups need a very strong and well-crafted design from the very beginning, but it’s not standard practice)
For a better understanding, check out the first versions of
Evernote, Twitter, Instagram
2. Don’t only care about design
Design has always been a powerful tool to promote any product and increase companies’ revenue. To achieve that, the design should be done considering not only user needs, but also marketing and growth. A startup is the best place to do so: a team is usually small, everything is transparent and you can work directly with growth hackers and marketers, having a chance to learn from them as much as possible. Such working style will affect the company’s success and you will take with you some valuable business tips that will make you stronger as a designer.
3. Work with a team as transparently as possible
Forget the times when you were freelancing and doing your best to prove the customer that you as a designer know better.
An early-stage startup is a small team of people in the same boat. Teams with “always right” people tend to fail, as a great idea(including design idea) may come from anyone, even from a person of different field. So always be open for objective criticism and accept good design ideas suggested by anyone else.
Some teams fail, as a result of treating a project as something they just have to do, because that’s their job. To motivate workers many companies share stocks, but it doesn’t always work. Seth Godin says:
Everyone holds back because they know the boss is gonna ask for more. The people who don’t hold back are the artists, cause when we do art we ask how can I do more? And we do work we ask how can I do less? That’s the difference…
Don’t think of “art” as of fine art only. Art is anything done with the intent to do more and as creative and good as possible. Try to make your team think that way, BUT don’t wait for any inspiration to act! Well-shaped design thinking and the joy from the process of creation will make you one step closer to success.
You can now feel that your role is not only being a pixel crafting designer but a facilitator of all design-related processes. Guide everyone to generate as many useful ideas as possible, so you can turn them into some robust solutions then. Design Sprints will help you make this happen. We’ll talk about it in the next paragraph.
Always show your work in process and get feedback at the very beginning, ask developers to do the same when developing front-end.
4. Use Design Sprints
You may already know what Design Sprint is. If you don’t I recommend buying your own copy of the ‘Sprint’ book to gain a full understanding of it.
Let’s see how useful the sprint is for startups.
There’s an opinion that Design Sprint works only for bigger teams when there’s a chance for picking 7 employees who can participate in the sprint during a week, ignoring their usual everyday work.
First of all, Design Sprint should only be used for solving only some real big problems! For instance, creating a completely new feature which may make you outstand in the market and get a lot of clients and investors.
Second, there’s an updated Sprint 2.0 version which only requires for the whole team to participate in the Sprint process on Monday and Tuesday. During the rest of the days, there can be just you and someone to help you with prototype and testing. Sacrificing just 2 days to create a feature you know gonna work is really worth it!
To show clients or ventures the new feature as soon as possible, lots of startups are hurrying too much to publish it. Of course, according to the Lean Startup methodology, the MVP version goes first, but there a lot of cases when startups don’t even have time for the MVP, so what they do usually is decreasing the quality to meet the deadline! They end up publishing not fully tested feature with the potential to ruin the whole product! Or, in some cases, for the feature to get published teams are forced to do a lot of extra work.
The Design Sprint will help you create a high fidelity prototype and test it within 4–5 days! That means you can show clients and ventures what the new feature gonna look like, what are the results of user test, the iteration sprint. Then spend the time you need to publish a great working feature with confidence that it’s gonna work. So sprint helps you move fast without losing the quality!
5. Update design system time to time
Previously, I was saying that you don’t need to lose too much time on outstanding and trendy visual design, BUT it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep your design clean and accurate.
To do so, you should put efforts to build a great Design System. The most common mistake people make is never updating it! As I’ve mentioned, lots of startups are even changing their main direction during their journey, even if a company keeps moving in the same direction, new features are bringing a lot of new components and styles. Again: you shouldn’t care much to make super trendy masterpiece yet, but you should always keep the design elements consistent!
Work with development team closely and always keep your design system clean and relevant.
Conclusion
In 2006 a girl joined an early-stage startup as an intern. At the age of 25, she started managing their design team. Along with the team, she worked hard to make the startup successful and finally, it became one of the biggest products in the world and she’s a world-wide known designer now. I’m talking about Julie Zhuo and the startup she joined is Facebook. She is a great example of how the whole team wins when the product succeeds, so if you want to be “the world’s best designer” do your best to be part of “the world’s best product” creation, and the early-stage startup may be the right place to do it!
