Why do early stage startups never want to hire a designer?

Designers make making mistakes cheaper.

Founders in early stage startups almost never want to hire a product designer.

Usually, I’ll chalk it down to one of the following reasons:

1. They don’t know what a product designer does, so don’t think to hire one

2. They don’t have much funding and they prioritise getting the product built. They decide they need to spend almost all their money on engineers because engineers do the building.

None of these are bad reasons to not hire a designer. They only become bad if they start over-indexing on engineers, when they would benefit from injecting another skillset into their product development process.

Adding the right product designer should amplify the productivity of your engineering team. Not necessarily in the quantity of code produced, but in terms of a more important output – customer satisfaction.

Generally, you can break the product development process into 5 stages: Problem → Hypothesis → Prototype → Testing in market → Evaluate results.

1. Problem:
   The founder sees a problem among a group of people they want to fix.

2. Idea/Hypothesis:
   They have a light bulb moment - when they think - “This will be the solution!” They start visualizing said solution in their mind.

3. Prototype / MVP
   They bring this idea to life through the creation of a prototype or minimal viable product.

4. Testing with the market
   Founders try to get their target market to use the prototype, subscribe or buy

5. Evaluate results of test
   Depending on how positive the results are, the founder may choose to continue working on their solution and refine their initial MVP ­- or go back to the problem or idea stages if it looked like a real dud.

The cycle continues with the product getting ever more refined, or until the startup founder gives up due to lack of resources or motivation.

Although product designers can add value at every stage of the product development life cycle, where they add the most obvious and immediate value is between the idea/hypothesis → prototype / MVP stages.

UX designers are to software what architects are to houses. Of course it is possible to build a house without an architect, however it will probably be very square, not be optimised for the clients needs or lifestyle, and may not provide good natural light, circulation and/or views. Most likely there will be multiple things you don’t like about it upon completion, and you may need to go through the expensive process of knocking down walls and renovating to fix it.

When it comes to software ­- building your product without a product designer, can be similar to laying the bricks - without doing the drawings. And tearing apart and starting again on a drawing - is a lot easier than tearing apart a wall.

The work that product designers do makes it faster to visualise concepts and test them on customers. The fact is you don’t need a coded piece of software to get feedback from your target market. Often a set of clickable wireframes or a wizard of Oz style prototype is enough.

If you find yourself having the following thoughts - it might be worth getting a product designer:

1. The engineers are not getting my vision or building what I asked for

   • Nobody is a mind reader and your product designer will probably deliver a design that is completely off at some point. Luckily it takes about 20-1000x less time to design something than to build it. This means the business can afford for them to get it wrong more often. Also presenting wireframes and sketches to engineers will probably yield better results than only having a bullet point list of requirements.

2. My product / website looks like a scam or people don’t know how to use it.

   • Most software developers I know become software developers because they like problem solving, have a bit of a math brain and appreciate intellectual challenges. Good visual sense, empathy for the user and understanding basic design and usability principles are not core tenets of the job. If your customers are questioning your product’s trustworthiness based on appearances - I would give up on trying to get the developer to make things look better and just hire a good designer. Ironically many people decide whether they can trust a product or not based on the front-end rather than the backend because that’s all they can see.

3. I am getting a lot of leads but they are not converting

   • The stats say your website has 2000 new leads but only two of them are pressing the buy button. Is it because: the buy button is hard to find; your marketing slogans don’t make sense; you’ve pitched your product at the wrong audience; or your product is simply not useful? You won’t know until you talk to some of your customers. A product designer well versed in user research will help you do this in the most objective way possible and synthesise the takeaways for you.

Of course not every company has the resources to hire a product designer. Especially if your company only has 1-2 developers, having a full-time designer can be overkill. In these scenarios, looking to get a designer in on a fractional, part-time basis could be the way to go. In your traditional software business a ratio of 1:6 or 1:8 designers to engineers is a good rule of thumb. Products that carry more technical difficulty and uncertainty need a higher ratio of engineers. Products with more market or user uncertainty benefit from more designers.

A designer pays for themselves when the amount of engineering time a company has diverted from bad ideas is higher than the designer’s salary.

Sure if you only have enough money to hire one person - maybe that person has to be a developer. But if you want to make the most of the development hours, get a designer to work alongside them.

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Disagree with me? Think my opinions are outdated in the age of AI? Leave a comment below. I would be interested in second opinions.

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*Sidenote - this post is directed predominantly at startups building software.*