I joined Saleswhale in January 2019 as their second product designer. Joining a Series A stage company has been quite an exhilarating journey for me. Here are some takeaways and observations that I’ve gained from working in a startup. I hope these learnings can be helpful for those who are thinking about joining an early-stage startup.
As you already know, working at an early stage startup are like running experiments. A group of people come together, they build some concepts and test it out with their friends or customers. On top of that, small startups have limited resources and money, they need to be very focused and ship only high impact product/features.
As a designer in a small startup, I have to get used to shipping minimum designed features (mini-shipping). Initially, I struggled with such approach and I thought I always shipped half-baked designs to the customers.
So I voiced my concern to one of the co-founders, he gave me an interesting perspective. He said, ask yourself, ‘What are you optimising for?’ Are you here to produced pixel perfect UI designs that the customers might not even want to use it, OR, are you here to help the company to validate assumptions for business growth?
The key here is to have self-awareness, and try to identify the company needs and goals. For example, if the startup is still in the midst of finding its product market fit, then by all means, focus on churning out usable prototypes to get validation/feedback quickly. Forget about pixel perfect UIs & animating gifs.
Be intentional when prioritising your to-dos, learn to say ‘No’ to things that are not important.
I’ve learned that it’s better to lay some standard processes for you and your team during the Forming stage. Be it design process, hiring process, engineering handover process or even cross-functional communication process.
Why? Because having processes will lead to better cross-functional communications and productivity, especially in a fast-paced work environment where you may be called upon to wear several different hats.
It does not have to be a full blown playbook pdf, a simple one pager is good enough. Write it and share it with the team. The goal here is not to write a book, but to set the standards for team strategic alignments, and operations.
Processes need to be evolved as you go through different stages of growth in a startup. Apply it, get feedback and iterate as when needed.
This one is related more to B2B/enterprise space.
Designing for B2B is all about solving business problems. From my personal experience, B2B products/services are mostly related to workflows, platforms and tools. Most of the end goals and ROIs have been defined by their bosses/team leaders.
To become a competent designer (especially B2B), it is very important for you to understand customers’ workflows thoroughly. A high-growth marketing teams have workflows for their demand generation, lead nurturing, and reporting workflow. The best way to grasp these knowledge is to talk to the customers.
For example, ask them to walk you through how they usually perform their internal monthly campaign reports. From my experience, most customers love to share their stories (both positive and negative) with you, because they see this as win-win scenario. Improved products, better work productivity.
In short, the goal of designing for b2b is to empower the customers to get their jobs done, and ultimately increase their business ROI. Everything else is secondary.
I hope these learnings are helpful for designers who are thinking about joining an early-startup. Thank you for reading.