10 things before you join a startup as a Product Designer

Starting in the field of product design at a startup can be both tricky and overwhelming. There are now god-knows-how-many designer titles floating around the world from Web Designer to App Designer to UX Designer to Product Designer +100s more. Good luck explaining how one differs from the other. Most young designers don’t even know what their specific role is going to be after they bag that fancy offer letter from a startup.

There were instances when one would want to learn design or join a design team because they thought it was glamorous. Some wanted to build things that millions would want to use. There were people who came from detailed design academia and wanted to research for months before implementing the first feature. And there were some who just wanted to design screens in an iPhone app.

Here I talk about a few things that you should understand before joining a startup as a product designer:

I have worked with a huge bunch of people from digital agencies who end up becoming a misfit in the culture of product companies as designers and so it’s very important for you to understand the difference between the two.

At a digital agency, your work is billed by the hour or by the project that has a pre-defined scope of execution and a set time of delivery. You’ll be working on a project for a certain number of days/ weeks before the client gets to see the cut and then proceed accordingly. Accordingly, when all feedback from the client is accounted for, the development cycle kicks in through final project delivery date. This is usually referred to as the waterfall model which is a sequential process going through the phases of conception, initiation, analysis, design, development, testing, production and maintenance. Your role as a designer will most likely be confined to working in and around design tools and production of designs. There’s typically going to be a project manager/ account manager who’s in constant touch with the client doing all the selling, convincing and so on.

At a startup, however, it’s going to be you who will be the owner of a feature/ project and working hand in hand with your buddy product manager who will be your initial bridge to business, sales etc. It is going to be you responsible for delivering and selling your solution to the client (read manager, VP, CEO, CTO etc.). It is going to be you who will be living one project day in day out for months, and years before you get it just right unlike a project that will last for 3 months and delivered!! At a startup, you will not have the luxury to focus only on the production of designs and leave the rest for an account manager to take care. You will need to do the fighting and pushing and hustling to ship the right thing. You will constantly be improving that one page or one flow that constitutes 10% of one of the 5–6 platforms the product is one. Day in, day out.

Many, after working for just a few weeks, realise it’s not their forte. That it blocks their creativity and simply move on. I am not criticising them. As a matter of fact, some of the best designers I know of have always been a part of a digital agency producing award-winning work.

Broadly, if you want to design for a breadth of industry domains, I’d recommend going for an agency. If you’re, however, into deep diving into every industry domain, join a startup, or a product company.

I can’t stress this enough. As designers, we strive to communicate to our users what our intentions are, what we want them to do, what is important to them, useful to them through our designs, through font hierarchy, through micro-interactions, through layouts, through flows, through storytelling.

If you’re going to be a good designer, you need to be good at communication. Period. There’s no exception to it. If you are not comfortable talking to people outside your team, a startup is not an ideal place for you. If you can’t explain why you did what you did in design, a startup is not the place for you.

You will need to communicate why you did what

You will need to sell your concept like your life depends on it

You will need to discuss and reach a solution by contributing to brainstormings and decision makings situations

You will need to spend time with sales to understand how they are looking at a product and how they take it to potential customers

You will need to talk to users, hundreds and thousands of them, to understand where their inhibitions lie, how they think about your product

You will need to approach strangers to test your feature prototype

You will need to keep project owners and engineering managers in the loop with the new design interaction you’re planning so they appreciate any risk in deadline commitments

You will need to constantly keep managers and peers in the loop of your work and get constant feedback

and, a hundred such things! You get the idea.

Having said that, you don’t need to be good at it on day 1. I wasn’t for one. It takes a while to understand the system you’re working in, the kind of teams that are supporting the product and also, how to craft and handle your language, scope of discussions etc. in different contexts. To efficiently be a part of a startup, be open to learning this invaluable skill of communication.

Contrary to the popular belief, product design is not equal to your Dribbble shots. What, in the front, looks like a simple fancy input field may have hours of brainstorming, debates backing up its story. What, in the front, looks like a cool chart animation may be failing completely to represent real-life data values. There will be instances when you will spend hours, sometimes days fighting to get just one line of text removed from a page — not to make it look pretty, but to communicate the right thing to your users.

I have often seen young designers get a feature requirement and jump directly into Sketch and start drawing rectangles and text on the screen. After a few days, we have a pretty set of screens that show various possible states and interactions but fail miserably to tell a good user story.

I’ll take a small example:

Once I gave an interview candidate a simple assignment: Create a (colour) theme for a quarterly sales dashboard for CXOs. I gave a generous 3 days timeline for the assignment. The candidate reverted next morning with a JPEG file with not one but 4 colour palettes. When asked about the reason for choosing the specific colours, she mentioned the colours were warm, cool etc. and look aesthetically good when put together in a dashboard. But, she missed the point.

The quarterly sales dashboard was meant to reflect the highlights of data. It also needed to be clearly legible on projector screens since CXOs will also look at the same dashboard with the broader team or board members in a board room. Her colour palette went completely indistinguishable when I plugged it to a medium range projector screen.

So, like most fields, in product design, you can choose your one core vertical to be UI design but you have to understand the experience it will sit on, the story it will fit in, the rationale it satisfies. After all, it’s the real users that you’re making the product for, not a 400 x 300 box.

Most people in product, mostly designers, tend to fall in love with their creations instantaneously.

I just found the right place in our app to introduce a tinder like interaction and it’s going to be the best thing ever! *after 3 hours* I love myself. I am awesome!

When you fall in love with your design, you go partially (or, fully) deaf to all the good discussions that can dramatically improve your designs, or simplify it. You will tend to focus a conversation more on defending the design than listening to understand various concerns and going back to the drawing board.

Practically speaking, your design is never going to be 100% perfect. You need to be mentally prepared to get your output go through grilling critique sessions from peers, stakeholders and most importantly, users and see if it survived the test.

Did users in your usability testing get the communication right? Did they understand what you were trying them to do? Is that interaction going to be smooth and functional in a low-end device? Are the flows simple? Is it intuitive? Can you sell it? Does it cover edge cases? Does it stand the test of your changing business model?

Very likely, you will not hit all of these checkboxes at once. Gradually, yes.

Fall in love with a problem, and not its manifestation in design. Keep hammering it till you get it right and when you do, keep improving it.

Friday beers, quarterly team outings, top-of-the-line Macbooks, T-shirts, Herman Miller chairs, gourmet lunch buffets, 50% work from home time, convertible standing desks… and the list goes on.

These. are. perks.

Perks are different from culture. It’s very important that you understand the difference.

Getting shit done

Make mistakes, own them, fix them, don’t repeat

Never fail to ask for help

Always be shipping

Customer service experience is paramount. Nothing, nothing, nothing should compromise it

Always be learning

These are some examples of company culture.

Perks are some means that organisations provide members to be optimal and efficient with their work and life. Culture, on the other hand, are principles that people in the organisation nurture and build the company on.They are values that keep people together, focused on the common goal(s). And in the long run, make you a better person as well.

Now, let me explain how I mean it from a young designer’s lens with an example:

You’re a designer who joined a budding startup. You have a comfortable seat, a desk, free lunch, shiny new Macbook Pro and maybe an iPhone as well. You’re all set to work.

Over the course of the next few months, you’ll run into a few issues like this:

Too many emails, I can’t keep up. They’re not even important most of the time. Why do I still get it? ‘This is a company that sends an email for every god-damn-thing’

People are not competent. It takes a guy soo much time to execute such a small thing. ‘This is a company that harvests mediocrity’

It’s been one year and I did not learn a thing. I’m doing the same work over and over again. There’s no one to teach. ‘This is a boring company’

There’s too much bureaucracy here. To get one change done, I have to run it through 10 levels of hierarchy. ‘Government company hai’

This is not good for the user but we’re okay with it because of business ($$)! ‘Selfish company doesn’t care about customers’

It wasn’t my mistake but no one stood up for it. I was thrown under the bus. I hate this place. ‘Too much politics in the company’

My manager is extremely hard to reach. Who do I go to with my issues? ‘Too much hierarchy’

“Let me look for a better company which has a better culture (read perks). This new startup has 5x the funding and they give free breakfast as well! Wow! This is one good place.”

Sounds familiar? All of the above are cancer to the growth of a company. How do we fix it? Culture. See how:

More emails? You’ll only get marked with emails if this concerns something you have worked on or are working on. For everything else, use Slack, Skype or whatever.

Have an issue over email, with someone who’s sitting 4 rows away? Walk up and talk it out. And, to keep everyone in the loop, reply to the email.

All members of the company should always be accessible via

Mediocre people? There will be a hiring committee with 5 people testing a candidate’s competence across culture, management, people, skill set etc.

Engineers taking more time to execute? Spend time understanding why one animation is taking more time? Evaluate if the effort is worth the result. Work together with the developer to explore alternatives and if nothing works, seek help from seniors.

Not learning anything? Have your manager allocate some budget for learning initiatives. Online courses, monthly meet-ups and so on. Spend 1 hour every 2 weeks with other operational teams in your organisation like Business, Sales, Customer Support and work with them, if required. You’ll gradually expand your ability to look at any problem holistically.

Too much bureaucracy? Skip the line and directly go to the executor of the job. Do that frequently, others will follow and will eventually curb the evil.

Politics seeping in? Speak up immediately when you sense something like this. Be vocal about any negativity nurturing around you. It gets resolved by doing just that almost all the time.

Initiatives like these, from individuals like you, form a culture. A startup is built by the amalgamation of principles brought in by the collective, not one. Taking initiatives and stands will ensure you contribute to the culture equally as the rest of your colleagues.

I’m pretty sure everyone reading this would already know by this point of time that life in a startup is not easy. It’s full of chaos. But how does chaos affect you as a product designer? Let me help you understand.

The following will inevitably happen when you’re a designer at a startup:

• You will produce designs that sales will push back and your dream design is down the drain

• You will disagree with business goals but business will win

• You will get frustrated with your oversight not approving your designs for the 10th time in a row

• You will get into long fights with the product manager and still not reach a solution

• You will get exhausted and give up sometimes and re-think your life

• You will get frustrated and pass on the negative energy to your peers over water cooler talks

• Your manager is going to yell at you in front of team about your work negligence (Fun fact: I was once politely asked to leave the company after I accidentally sent an email to 5+Mn customers. I didn’t. I corrected the issue and we had beers after!)

• You will sometimes not be listened to and just be micro-managed to do what’s required. Till. The. Last. Pixel.

• You will ship things with confidence which will break conversion and give the company revenue setback

• You will be at a bar, with your friends, thinking about an alternate signup flow

• You will traumatised the night before your monthly performance meeting with your manager

and many more.

But, it’s okay. You’ll be honed to become a better designer, better problem solver, better communicator and you’ll keep getting better through these inevitably occurring things. So, if this sounds scary but you’re still willing to take the leap, a startup is for you.

At a startup, everyone is already busy. You’ll be really lucky to get a dedicated mentor during your first months. During college campus placements, we all had the notion of company trainings for 3–6 months before you’re put into a project; at a startup, no. You’ll mostly need to shadow people, understand how they’re working and learn on the go while breaking things (hopefully, fixing as well) on the way.

Let’s look at how YOU, as a designer can make the most out of this situation.

Do the homework. Got the offer letter and now you’re just waiting for the joining date. While you’re doing that, I recommend you stay in touch with your HR, to-be manager and ask how you come a bit more prepared for your job. If there are some resources, small reads, videos and so on that will make you atleast 20% more efficient on your first day/ week/ month.
Example: Read all you can about the company — how they’re making money, what are customers saying about their product. You can follow their blogs to get candid insights on culture. You can ask upfront about the tools that you will be using at work and keep practicing it in your free time.

This will help you break the ice with a good conversation about their product, some specific reviews, some recent product release and so on. If you really do your homework well, there might be a juicy project for you on day 1 as well.

Practice will make you close-to-perfect. There’s absolutely no alternative to this. You need to keep practicing your work to get better. If you don’t, sooner or later, you’ll become useless for the team. You have to design hundreds of pages, hundreds of different form fields, make hundreds of calls, ship hundreds of small/ big features to truly start understanding a domain. Your job cannot be clerical in nature.

Learning while you’re shipping. This is something that will never change as long as you’re on the job. You will design a set of screens and you will learn development complications, on the fly iterations, trimming of features and scopes. You’ll understand numerous edge cases that are missed by the best of the guys and will have to accommodate in the existing designs and more. You’ll truly keep making changes till the time the design actually hits production and even after.

At a startup, you will see how things often don’t fit the ideal processes. But, by learning and working more, you’ll keep refining the processes and grow more than you’d expected.

Couple of years ago, I was at my boss’s place where some of our close friends, colleagues, significant others were just having beers over loud EDM. In small groups, some were talking about the premium grass one had scored from Himachal, some sharing their wedding event plans and some were just high and chilling.

My boss and I were stuck with a design problem for over a week now and we were on the terrace discussing about it using the concrete wall as our whiteboard with our fingers as imaginary markers. We continued to do so for about an hour or so. *we were pretty high too* We didn’t solve it but parked at some progress to continue on Monday. We quickly put some bullet points in our shared Evernote and got back to the party. After that night, hardly anyone was willing to join us for a party.

When you’re starting off, to become good at your job, you will need to forget all pre-conceived notions about a fixed time job and how you manage your time. You’ll basically be working all the time and try to fit in your life in parts, in between. I’m not recommending or suggesting in any way that this is good or healthy. But, for a certain period of time, multiple times, this will be required of you and will be expected from you.

One of the things that will absolutely destroy your ability for personal and professional growth is your ego. Product design is tribal in nature and there’s no room for your ego in a tribe of designers, managers, engineers.

Some examples of common scenarios when designer ego kicks in:

• Take my word for it, this is the only possible design. Take it or leave.

• ‘I’ designed it. It cannot be wrong.

• You have no idea about design, you have no right to comment on my work.

• I have been doing this for the past 1 year, I know more about this than you.

• Don’t show me wireframes and other product inspiration on how to do this. It’s very disrespectful. I will do it my way.

While:

• There’s never an only design. You can improve. Always. Ask the other person to help you if he/ she has something in mind.

• If you’re very convinced, try to bring the other person on the same page. Spend time in setting the context and story right instead of putting your foot down.

• If you have worked on a domain for a year or more, it’s a great practice to share some past experience, numbers, success/ failure stats with use cases. You can build a strong case for your design instead of putting your ego as a wall.

• As a designer, you should encourage others to speak and communicate with your language. It leaves less room for error. You’d want to have a clear picture of what your manager, peers have in their mind.

The job of a product designer is quite a beautiful one. It’s like a beautiful double edged sword that you’re holding, as one of my managers from years ago taught me.

When your work is visible to hundreds and thousands of customers, you can take all the pride in your heart if they found it useful but, you’ll also have to be the one to take all the hits if they did not find it useful!

You can show off your pride in the form of blog posts, status updates, social bragging, dribbble shots and so on talking about the good work you just shipped. You’ll also have to be the person taking in all the heat from business, founders, engineers and fix if your last work was an inefficient solution.