One Man Army: Being the First Product Designer

A survival kit for the first designer of a startup

Are you joining a company as the first designer? Good.

Do you have a pioneer soul? Maybe you see yourself as an explorer. No?

Good, because you’re going directly at the forefront of the war. Welcome to the army, soldier.

Please don’t imagine yourself throwing post-its blocks into the tranches of our minimalistic offices; we’re on an ideologic war. A cultural war.

Working in a startup is a war by itself, but adding design culture internally is another one.

The objective isn’t to force everybody to think like a designer. But to pave the way for the future design team to evolve in a design-conscious environment.

Because of the rapid growth and uncertainty, startups don’t have a defined form. It looks like a regrouping of cool people trying to go together at the same pace at the same place.

At this point, culture is mostly defined on founders’ mindset, style of management, personality. If the CEO is a designer, you found a unicorn. If not, I will tell you how to survive.

Do everything

After joining the ranks, leave your resume and preconceived idea of what it is like to be a Product Designer behind.

You’re the design gal/guy now. And it won’t be your definition of design but everyone.

From powerpoint presentations to photoshopping the private facebook. From cool idea generator to “make-it-good-looking” machine, even product management. While shipping as fast and functional as possible, of course.

Put your ego and your job sheet aside and do everything.

Do you think you would do user research and conducting experiments all day long?

My two tips:

• Say “yes” to everything; you will learn along the way.
• Don’t install Photoshop on your computer; now you have an excuse to decline pain in the ass background cutouts.

Search for allies

Paying a 100k design tuition to hear “Everyone is a designer” should hurt, I get it.

Still, it’s true.

Even if you’re the only one to have the holy title of “designer,” you can find precious help from folks from other teams.

Maybe not for executing or producing the design — you should be the one in charge of this — but helping you during research or ideation sessions, for example.

One of the bests ideas I had to work on came from sales or developers.

Maybe try:

• Having design critiques with a wildcard seat, anyone can assist and be an active actor of the critique
• Setting up a feedback loop for your teammates. It can be a Slack bot that gathers user insights, product ideas, and bug reports from the product.

Set the stage

Having to work on a variety of things daily can pull you away from the underlying mission of being the first one: Preparing the field for a future team.

Startups have, in most cases, growth into their DNA. Scalability also applies to people. You should have an idea of how it should work, having 10x the amount of designers in-house.

Document everything. If you learn something, teach it right away to an imaginary freshly onboarded designer on Notion.

Take a step back and think about what works and don’t about your process, activities, tools.

Project yourself into a short term future where you won’t be designing every bit of UI, thinking about every feature. And ask yourself what you can do to get closer to this scenario, even on basic things like file management, or naming conventions.

This is how I’m working on it:

• Blocking time on your calendar every month to nourish your team documentation.
• Get help from others on management or hiring best practices. Avoid doing the same error two times by leveraging your coworker’s experience.
• Trying to don’t fall in love having all the light on yourself. You will hire smarter people soon.

Stay strong, my friend; it’s a war that is worth doing at the end of the day.

If you invest yourself enough, it’s a fantastic opportunity to have a profound impact on your company and the liberty of experimenting with a multitude of things without the fear of breaking things.

Without a manager or a mentor, loneliness is right at the corner, yes. But it will force you to develop the habit of learning by yourself. And that’s so valuable in today’s world.

When do you know the war is over? When do we see the design is adopted? I don’t know. Maybe never, maybe when a designer is sitting at the board.

I’m curious, what would be your answer? Let me know.