The Startup Designer

There's nothing glamorous about being a designer at a startup. It's a role that frequently values speed and pragmatism over going deep in the craft. It's not all big launches, viral tweets, building for happy paths, and clear-cut product requirements.

However, it can be incredibly rewarding. The fun comes from being able to excel at learning new skills and wearing many different hats while being solely responsible for large efforts.

The "Fog of War" in StarCraft hides areas that have yet to be explored.

The startup designer's greatest strength is their speed and versatility. It's the light aiding in the search for product-market fit as resourcefully as possible.
The startup designer is part artist, part scientist. The scientist views product design as something to be tamed with rules, systems, and principles; a thorough optimizer. The artist is aware of some of those rules but often chooses their own path. The artist runs by feel, and is known to always detach components. One crafts a system that helps with consistency, accessibility and scaling; the other continually challenges it and provides the friction needed to improve it.
The startup designer can survive—and thrive—without relying on a design system. They can go from a blank canvas for a new homepage or landing page design and bring it to life in a way that embraces the brand and marketing strategy.
The startup designer is relentlessly resourceful, and embraces any task, even the mundane, unfamiliar, or gargantuan. Helping with company swag, brand design, icon design, packaging print design, use case landing pages, et cetera. There are a few exceptions where outsourcing makes sense, but most of the time there's not enough time to find a contractor, onboard them, ramp them up on project context, and guide them through iterations.
The startup designer knows where to compromise on quality, when to push for it hard, and how to advocate for it beyond intuition, armed with customer feedback, insights, and company goals.
The startup designer perpetually exhibits strong ownership and knows what to work on. Their priorities come up naturally from working closely with the team and seeing what users are running into. They know the right fidelity, speed, and urgency for each task.
The startup designer embraces ambiguity and is naturally optimistic. The cards are already stacked against every early stage startup. The team needs to be crazy enough to see through it all and envision the future they're building and convincing others of. When there are inevitable moments of uncertainty—with a feature, with the entire product, with a company pivot—the startup designer takes action to find clarity, gather data, and explore alternate solutions. The pessimist criticizes, the optimist creates.
The startup designer balances their desire for craft and extremely high-quality shipped products with the pre-PMF startup's need to prioritize shots on goal. The faster you're able to ship (and nurture what is shipped), the more shots you can take, and the more likely you'll reach product-market fit. There are times when spending an extra week or two ironing things out and polishing matters, but most of the time it's hard to make that ROI math work. This compromise is one of the harder parts of the job.
The startup designer doesn't try to predict designs needed for future versions of a feature that hasn't been built yet. They do enough design due diligence to make sure it works reasonably well for the near-term, then move on. Chances are that feature won't live long or work out anyways. And if it does well, it'll probably be redesigned and rebuilt based on new information.
The startup designer fully separates themselves from the work. There is no time for ego. There will be hard feedback at every turn: from the team, from the customers. Everything worked on is the result of countless iterations. There's no point getting worked over a design that probably won't matter in the long run, or even next week when they're focused on something else.
The startup designer is pragmatic. They know they can't refine everything to perfection before it gets shipped, and that not everything will ship. But they know when it's worth advocating for a bit more quality and rigor.
The startup designer has a natural urge to thoroughly explore designs for any task. Even with a minor visual design task, the startup designer knows the power of continuining to explore iterations and alternate designs. Sometimes the best design is Frame 1, sometimes it's Frame 37.
The startup designer knows that even unshipped designs provide value. These designs can show the team what's possible for the future vision. They can prove a certain direction isn't worth investing in. They can show why another design is a better choice. Some of the startup designer's best design work will go unshipped and they know that's okay.
The startup designer is vocal. About product direction and requirements. About technical issues affecting users. About marketing and storytelling. About branding. About prioritizing issues. Not only about their own thoughts, but also about the customers' thoughts.
The startup designer asks a lot of the same questions to drive toward simplicity. Is X even needed? How can we remove this step? Is this actually a problem? Why can't X and Y be the same thing? There's a myriad of basic foundational questions like this for any set of designs that can help frame the challenges in a new light.
The startup designer never simply hands off designs. They care too much to treat them like finished objects to be lobbed over a fence. They document the basics but know there is no substitute for working closely with the team to build it together. New information, such as technical constraints, edge cases, and forgotten error states, always bubbles up while building, and the startup designer is there to help, often jumping into the code.
The startup designer is technical. Not just to prototype ideas, help build features or add polish, but also to intimately understand technical constraints of the product which helps them with design exploration.
The startup designer knows that new ideas need to be protected and nurtured to be able to have a chance at growing. They will set context with stakeholders, share exploratory visuals or docs, and continually find ways to evangelize.
The startup designer talks to customers directly, shares concepts and synthesizes feedback. They tell everyone about The Mom Test.
The startup designer knows what altitude to operate at. One feature might require a few optimizations via incremental design, while another may deserve taking a step back and rethinking the entire foundation or direction.

The startup designer may not know to do all these things on Day 1, but learns over time.

I'm a startup designer working on Limitless and we're hiring. We're building personalized AI powered by what you've seen, said, and heard, along with the Pendant,