Startup and Design

The Coffee Run

To a startup, what role does design plays?

Hey there aspiring founders. Let me walk you through an imaginary journey. You have detected a problem that you want to solve. You have found the perfect solution. You have managed to convince your friends, family and some other unfortunate (or perhaps fortunate) fools to invest into you and your idea. You even have managed to turn your idea into an actual product. Congratulations, you actually achieved what many people like you failed to do. Feeling good about yourselves, you push your product forward, expecting the market would welcome you with open arms, your product would sell like hot cakes and you would be swimming in money like Scrooge McDuck.

And you push…

And you push…

And you push…

And people start asking:

“What are you doing?”

“How does your product help me?”

“What does this button do?” (uh…oh…)

You start to panic. You start blaming your team, then crying yourself to sleep, while asking God why your customers are so dumb. These plebeians should spend more time to learn, right? After all you are solving their problems. LIFE IS SO NOT FAIR!!! RIGHT GUYS???

The catharsis entailed all the drama will bring you back to the balance state of mind but it will not bring you any closer to have a successful product. What happened to you is one of the two things (assuming all of the premises at the beginning of this piece is true, if not, you have more issues to worry about than reading this piece): either your feedback loop does not work or your design sucks.

Right now I am working with a design team so, out of my self interest sprinkled with some selfless hope that product designs will suck slightly less, I will discuss about the importance of product design.

What is product design anyway?

“Hold on, stranger on the internet,” you may ask, “that’s like everything other than the actual building of the product right?” Precisely, that is why design is so important since it covers all the steps from conception right up to before materializing a product. That applies to not just digital products but also physical products and services.

Some of you might have read about the dead of the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and the rise of the MAP (Minimum Awesome Product) with your google-fu. I will leave the debate about the exact definition of these two terms to other startup specialists, philosophers and linguists for it can get as long as the debate of what is reality. What I want to point out is that the current customer expectation is at the highest point ever and “being good enough” is evolving into a new height. It demands more investment in the product design and more interactive feedback loops because the internet is more accessible now than ever.

How do I product design bruh?

I honestly have no right answer for you. For that purpose, Google is your best friend. What I can do is point to some other articles that I found relevant at the end of this piece so that you can have a good starting point. Another thing I can do is to see if the startup is taking product design seriously or not.

A startup is taking product design seriously when:

A startup is not taking product design seriously when:

So, as a startup, why are all of this product design stuffs important to me?

Because a decently-funded startup can still fail when their product sucks but a well-designed product can open up many opportunities to the startup in terms of funding (Bootstrapped business like Basecamp and Github come to mind) .

How do I show that I take my product design seriously?

If you are the business person or the engineer of the startup trio, you can pick the best designer you can and give him/her the fair share who obviously needs to be vetted. Work with your designers closely, watch if important questions about the users and their use case are raised. Any designers worth their salt will ask you these kinds of questions. If you cannot find that kind of designer, find a design studio or agency that follows Design Thinking principle and practice Design Sprint process (like us 😘)

What are Design Thinking and Design Sprint?

Some further readings:

About the series: The Coffee Run is a series of miscellaneous rants and very opinionated pieces about my own observation that will circle around the main topics that I am interested in: Startup, Design, and other Business related thought.

Disclaimer: I am not a professional designer by trade. I worked in and with corporation, digital agencies, started businesses, failed flat on the face, and currently work in a startup. I am not here to teach anyone, I am here to tell stories. My journey is my own, and your mileage will vary.

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