5 tips for the [lone] startup designer

Startups are awesome! They are fast, focused, lean-mean machines, that personify a group of individuals rallying toward a common goal. There’s a tonne of opportunity to learn, grow, take responsibility and stretch yourself in your field of specialization, which is what makes working at a startup incredibly satisfying for most folks.

However with great power, comes the great silo, of being the lone designer! Designers are social animals and being the lone wolf can be daunting, especially when you constantly crave for eagle eyes, critical design feedback, past learnings and mentorship— all critical to thrive as a designer and master your craft.

Here are some tips to find your tribe, get these valuable learnings in, and not just grow as a designer, but enable your startup to build a design-centric culture at large.

1. [Design Culture] Build a customer journey map and share it with your team:

This is a great first design deliverable because it takes design out of the picture and focuses on the customer. This makes it easy to socialize this artifact across various orgs like leadership, engineering, sales and marketing.

It also gives a shared understanding of the customer behavior and various touch-points at which they interact with the business. Identifying touch-points can also showcase areas to focus on to remove friction and enhance customer experience.

Journey maps are also awesome tools to add focus while thinking about the longer term. It shows the road ahead, but also shows you how far away you are from reaching the goal.

2. [Design Culture] Run a design sprint

I know I know! When you see this tip you are thinking — How am I going to get my hyper-focused engineer, my ever busy CEO, my always overwhelmed CTO and buzzing sales folks to think this is a valuable use of anyone’s time! I understand… Let me make a case for it….

At startups it’s very easy to pretend you know the answer. Why? Because knowing “some answer” enables you to make “progress”. Chasing this notion of progress could be counter-productive as it might lead to short term thinking.

This is where the design sprint comes in handy. It enables the team to hit the much needed pause button, to think about things at a higher level, and say “I don’t know” — a lot.

They are also cross-functional in nature, which gives you a holistic view for making sustainable and meaningful product decisions.

Design sprints also diffuse tensions that are inherent in “execution” sprints, which opens up the floor for honest conversations. It’s not uncommon to see people speak about their deepest fears or issues they believe are essential to be solved. Such open dialog increases transparency and adds trust. The team is them equipped with the information they need to make a decision to address the “big wins” instead of focusing on “enhancements”.

However always focus on a deliverable at the end of your design sprint — Some examples include:

1. Design Principles
2. Business Principles
3. Journey Maps
4. Personas and more….

Grounding the idea of brainstorming but working toward a tangible outcome that will be used to inform future decisions is the definition of a successful design sprint. It’s actually quite easy to get there…..

3. [Design Execution] Form a design slack channel:

Slack channels are awesome to get work done or friendly workplace banter. Creating a dedicated slack channel for #design, enables you to create a space to share design inspiration, and keep creative juices flowing within the company.

A lot of what designers at early stage startups do is “Design Education” — communicating the value of design, spreading the word on the latest design languages and systems, and enabling the company to adopt or build it’s own unique design identity.

Design is a highly accessible discipline, but which easy to understand but hard to master. Use this to your leverage. Share the latest design news, talk about what Apple and Google are thinking of in their latest platform and design guideline updates, share font inspirations, share brand websites you follow, etc.

Encouraging this dialogue and giving your team access to this info, will make them more aware, and prep them to be on the know on what’s latest. This passive education will come in handy when you propose design changes/enhancements, as people within the company will understand where you come from, as they understand your context.

4. [Design Execution] Build a lightweight design toolkit

Repeat after me — Startups don’t NEED design languages. Startup don’t NEED design rules (as they are meant to break them anyway). Startups don’t NEED design systems (as the design itself is yet to stabilize).

Instead what startups need at “Toolkits”. Toolkits empower designers and the company to have the right set of tools to complete the task in hand efficiently.

Building a light-weight toolkit for your startup could be the best time you will spend as a designer, as it will help you in the following ways:

1. Provide you the much needed time to step back and internalize your design decision making process as it makes you think about your screens in re-usable components. This will also serve as a great artifact to talk through during design interviews if you decide to pursue other roles, especially in larger organizations
2. Build a notion of predictability to your design which will dramatically enhance usability
3. Build a shared language for others in the team to understand how design decisions are made, so that they can make quick design changes or fixes if you are out/have to leave the company

Minimal interface input toolkit by Joey Banks for Figma

Here’s how I did it during my time at startup-land:

1. Downloaded existing UI toolkits from the Figma Community
2. Edited components/palette builders with startup brand colors ( Optionally invest in building out color styles when the brand has evolved to stable place)
3. (Specific to Figma) Focus on building robust auto-layout components. This helps with repurposing, and re-use. Better yet, building components correctly will also help you make lesser disparate design changes. This video talks about one perspective to build single-source-of-truth design components. This is a great example of investing time upfront to move fast. With single-source-of-truth components, it’s easy to propagate style and layout changes effectively throughout your designs saving you valuable time and effort during crunch time.
4. Build a quick Loom Video Walkthrough of the toolkit and how to use it. Again share this with engineering — getting as many front-end engineers to understand Figma as possible, and have them jump into your file directly to grab critical design elements can significantly reduce the overhead of a lengthy hand-off or documentation process. However, given the timeliness of your designs, it’s essential to build trust and communicate freely with your counterparts, so that they are aware of which designs are locked down and which ones are WIP. One way I overcome this is by adding add very obvious red badges to WIP designs to avoid any source of confusion or wasted effort.

5. [Design Community] Build your own design community

Being the social creatures that we as designers are, it’s hard to be the only person that cares about the stuff we care about at startups. Since startups don’t come with huge design teams, it’s on you to build your tribe. Here are some tips on how to go about this:

1. The best way to build your design community is to leverage your startup’s network. Most startups are a part of an accelerator program or have raised capital from a VC.
2. Bigger these programs and VC’s the easier it is to build thriving communities, but it doesn’t always have to be that case. Even 2 is a party :) Reach out to designers at companies that have these common links and start off with design happy hours, maybe once a month.
3. Plan fun activities, talk about the latest in design world, or just commiserate about how much you missed talking shop.
4. As the group evolves, and as you start to become familiar with other designers, you could think about leveraging this time to talk about design challenges, or even request office-hours for crits. Designers will gladly oblige to help you level up your company’s design, but be sure to return the favor.

Finally…..

I know that this post has been about your lone life as a startup designer but I want to end with saying — this is one of the most rewarding roles you could take up in your career.

Being the early designer at a budding startup is going to help you stretch in new ways and learn new skills you could just imagine about learning at bigger companies. Fair warning, that the scope, autonomy and creativity might even spoil large design orgs for you :)

The goal of this article is to provide tools to succeed as a designer at a startup. The goals of the business and individuals usually align, but designers have different needs outside the business context. Proactively investing in growing as a designer, rather than just being thrust into the limelight of responsibility due to the rapid growth of your business is crucial to be truly happy about quick successes (which are usually hard earned).

My hope is that these quick tips can get you there!

Hey there! I’m Sindhu — A senior product designer at Roku. Previously I built my own startup and worked at a startup studio called PSL. Oh also, I worked at Amazon building Amazon Key :) I love building new products and ideas.

Want to discuss startups and design? I’m all ears! Email me at sindu.ux@gmail.com. I can’t wait to hear all your stories :)