Tips for Entrepreneurial Designers
Context
I am currently a 4th year student at the University of Waterloo in Liberal arts. In addition to having started a venture, Node App, I also landed an internship at Google as a UX Designer. Throughout my time at university, I did multiple internships in roles ranging from design research, product design, and business strategy. These internships helped me acquire skills and gain experience that allowed me to significantly contribute to this early-stage startup. At Node App, I lead design, product, and business strategy. In this article, my goal is to provide tips to help fellow designers generate more value in the startup they are working for and/or help them start their own venture.
Here’s an article about how I was able to land my first design internship
Disclaimer: These tips are based on my own experience. This will for sure vary depending on the stage of the startup and the industry you are operating in.
Advice
1. Understand your organization before understanding your users
As startup founders, we can get easily distracted and carried away by new ideas and untapped opportunities. There are going to be lots of people coming to you with advice and recommendations. Understanding your organization is one of the ways to stay focus and avoid scope creep. To elaborate, you should be aware of the skill sets of your colleagues, what they are able to achieve, their limitations and constraints, and the internal culture. The key is to acknowledge and embrace your constraints and problems and use that as an opportunity to prove your creativity as a designer.
Once you are self-aware of your internal capabilities, understanding your users and customers should be one of the next top priorities. During user research, you will most likely be able to identify multiple user problems and needs to fulfill. Understanding your organization will help you pick which problems are worth solving as well as identifying ways your organization can be changed to be able to tackle more impactful problems.
2. Use collaboration as a tool to set stakeholder’s expectations and be more transparent
Collaboration is a topic close to my heart as it is one of my biggest learnings. In my early beginnings as a freelance designer, I was designing alone and presenting my work to clients hoping that they would like it. Now that I have more experience, I can confidently say that my approach was wrong. It was very easy to get attached emotionally to my end work. As a result, I was really defensive and tended to take less feedback, and the work produced didn’t necessarily align with what the client’s wanted and needed. It led to a lot of back and forth, waste of time, and frustrations for all parties involved.
By collaborating with other stakeholders by organizing workshops and design sprints, for instance, it is easier to get buy-in projects and propose new ideas. It creates a situation where everyone has agreed to key elements of what should be achieved, everyone has similar expectations and having all the stakeholder’s perspective in mind helps in making design decisions that are based on validated assumptions. If making times for other stakeholders is hard, I would recommend to enable them to still have a say in the work that is being executed and provide them with different alternatives based on different assumptions that were made when designing. Doing that will help in creating a healthy internal culture, get buy-in faster, get other stakeholders involved, and execute the work faster.
My mentor has a great article on cross-team collaboration! https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/designers-here-6-tips-make-your-projects-run-smoother-warren-lebovics/
3. Stop thinking about artifacts, and start thinking about experiences
As designers, we have the capacity to solve complex problems and generate human-centered solutions. One of the best forms of business value design can bring is not through visual or tangible artifacts but in intangible experiences. The creation of offline experiences is an element that not only helps in designing great products and services but also in developing a great internal culture.
Instead of over-optimizing for elements that don’t bring business value, you should use the design process to solve problems that “keep your team awake at night”. That could involve the design process to help with marketing, sales, legal, human resources, and finance. Tackling these types of problems will allow you to grow and will increase your value in the organization.
4. Bring business value by solving the startup’s biggest problem
As designers, we often think about branding, visual identity, logo, polished visual design, pixel perfect wireframes … These are definitely important, but more often than not, it’s hard to show that these things have brought actual value to your business. For instance, let’s assume that you are leading an early-stage startup and your biggest problem at the moment is recruiting engineers to build out your product. However, despite the obvious priority, you might be spending your time redesigning the company’s logo. Unless you have clear proof that the new logo will generate business value, your attention should shift back to applying the design process to improve recruitment and/or find ways to build the product.
Summary
1. Understand your organization before understanding your users
This will help you develop solutions that aligns your projects with the organizational goals.
2. Use collaboration as a tool to set stakeholder’s expectations and be more transparent
Working with other stakeholders will help in getting buy-in and make better design decisions. Involve key stakeholders early and often!
3. Stop thinking about artifacts, and start thinking about experiences
Artifacts are definitely important, but thinking about experiences will help you in going deeper in terms of what you are trying to achieve.
4. Bring business value by solving the startup’s biggest problem
The stakeholders are going to be more mindful of the work and design will be more valued within the organization.
5 (Bonus). Always be learning!
Here are interesting videos:
The Designer’s Cartography of Complexity: https://vimeo.com/190602711
Strategic Foresight Foundation: https://vimeo.com/128496888
Strategic Planning for Dummies: https://vimeo.com/43978469
