A lot has changed since I first walked into a small empty room in Tallinn for a job interview with just 3 people sitting around one big table — a place GrabCAD then called it’s office. Now I’m getting closer on my 5 year anniversary. In that time GrabCAD has grown to almost 50 people, opened offices in 3 different countries, grown the user-base to more than 1,8 million mechanical engineer all over the world, and lastly joined the family of Stratasys — the worlds biggest 3D printer manufacturer.
5 years ago I worked as a freelance designer in my own one man design company and the problems I struggled with daily were more about what I can do with Photoshop to make the design cooler or how to customize that free Wordpress theme. Today the problems I’m solving have a totally new scale affecting a lot more people. I started off doing branding, marketing materials and visual designs for web pages. Now the responsibilities have grown to the entire user experience across our cloud-based software, desktop client and mobile applications.
How I got here has been an amazing learning process, but I’m not going to talk about the details of that experience today. I want to share 5 main learnings that I have come to working in a growing startup.
1. Get shit done
Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, will move faster than you think is possible. There’s going to be a lot of problems that need solving and probably not many people with experience to do that (the magic of a startup), but things still need to get done, so get on it. The only way to learn is to get things out there. The more you do the more you learn, so turn on your execution mode.
Often there is no time to think things through or plan ahead. You need to prioritize and go with the minimum viable product. The perfectionist in me dies a bit when I say this, but there are more important issues to solve than the small pixel aligning that scratches your eye. Get it done and try it out—there’s time to finalize later.
2. Make you own rules
The charm of a startup is that everything needs to be built up from an empty slate. There are no rules. It is easy to let things slide and do them the quick and dirty way when you are small. The problem here is that you don’t even notice when you grow and things get out of hand to a point where there’s no turning back.
As a designer it is important to communicate your design decisions to keep the work consistent. Until you are working alone it doesn’t seem to be important since you know all there is, but that situation will change quickly—you should be ready.
Every new hire understands things differently and has different habits, they bring their own system. How can they know how things worked before them? Make sure your team speaks the same language, uses the same process and follows the same guidelines.
Writing down guidelines and rules will also help yourself. Building a product that is growing fast can be a messy thing. You never know how long you will be working on the same project and eventually you will start to forget tiny details behind different corners. Keeping the same style across the entire product is not easy. When time passes you get better ideas or your own style might change.
So start writing down rules. Don’t plan it big, take small steps. Make these rules accessible for everyone, otherwise no one knows what you were thinking — even yourself.
3. Find compromise between quality and quantity
In a small company you are most likely one of the few design thinkers. Others might lean to the sales and business side caring less about the visuals and interactions. You have to understand the company’s needs and priorities. Moving fast and delivering all the necessary new functionality or user requests is important, but you also have to be the balancing act between quantity and quality.
Earlier, I said there are more important issues to solve than pixel-perfect design and details can wait for later. Well, it’s still true, except the “details can wait for later” part. Here comes the other side of the story. There’s never a later nor is there more time at a young fast-paced startup. Things you don’t get right the first time might stay like this for a long long time since there is always something more urgent happening. You are responsible for setting the standards for both quality and user experience. You have to make sure that you do your best on aligning every pixel and finishing every tiny interaction detail.
On one hand, the company has its business goals and the product needs to give value to the users, but if the user experience isn’t good enough, interactions don’t make sense or the visual language isn’t clear and usable, then none of that matters. You have to be the one to find the perfect compromise.
4. Don’t forget to ask WHY?
Whatever task you are working on, you need to get to the core of it to understand the real problem. Things can seem much more basic than they actually are. Asking “why” even when you think you already figured it out might reveal some new insights and even save your hours of work, including a better outcome.
Thinking that you are right will not get you very far in a startup. People can get easily carried away when trying to prove a point — but ideas change. Approaches change. One small detail can turn everything upside down. Be open for whatever others have to say and analyze everything.
5. Always look at the bigger picture
It’s easy to get lost in details and not see the bigger picture. Building a company is about building value for the customers. No matter what the process, all the different parts of the product have to come together and work as one.
Never work on just one screen or single graphic. There is always more to consider. Work with the entire flow the user has to go through, print and lay out views so you can see and compare them. When you are already working on the flows, don’t forget higher level company goals.
You are never just a designer at a startup. To get your vision out to the real world as you planned, you need to know how to write microcopy, you need to understand how the code is built, and you need to know how to work together with people — you need to understand the bigger picture.
Bonus: Learn everything
To put it all together in one main key takeaway, I would strongly encourage you to learn about everything from everyone. There are all these amazing people around you with different skillsets. Use that knowledge and learn everything while the company is growing. Being a designer isn’t about pushing and pulling pixels. To make the world a better place with design, you need to know how the world works.
Mikk Olli is the Head of Design at GrabCAD. He is passionate about building better user experiences and designing simple elegant interfaces. You can also find him drawing silly illustrations and taking photos on the streets.
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Follow Mikk on twitter @mikkolli.
