The Coffee Run

Startup and Design

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?

It is a process from defining the real problem that real people are facing all the way to creating the product to solve that problem and the experience of the users of the product itself.

“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:

• The product illustration can tell you who their target users are (not the people who pay, we have a term for that, they are called “payers”, but the people who will use the products). It can easily tell the users what the use case is through visual cues or short text description.
• The products can solve practical problems, not “what is love” kind of problems.
• Other than the target users and use case, it is difficult to find a different type of users who can use the product in different scenarios.
• The company market their products with the respected users, payers and use case in mind. It was such common sense that when I see some companies do what is akin to marketing sanitary pads to preschool boys, I am thoroughly bewildered.
• If the product is put into the hand of the intended users, they can intuitively learn how to use it.

A startup is not taking product design seriously when:

• The opposite of all the above (duh!)
• Their products look uber cool with all the flair and new trendy designs with no clear visual cue/instruction to who will use it, and what benefits it gives them. The good news is that they have a very creative designer. The bad news is that the designer and/or the CEO is clueless about where they are heading to.
• People get the products, but it takes them 100 years to properly use it. It happened to products designed to solve complicated problems. It is the designer’s job to either create several extremely intuitive products working well together or write up an extremely intuitive and engaging instruction with information people actually want to read, not the kind of fine-print manual that you will toss to the trash in a typical “unboxing experience.”

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) .

If a startup is a tiny tree, the products are the roots and the funding is the water. A healthy set of roots with just enough water ensure the growth of the tree while weak roots and abundance of water lead to a dead tree.

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?

Maybe I can talk about it in one of the next piece of the series or you can see how these principles and process in action here.

Some further readings:

What is product design? Answered by 8 real product designers. The credit goes to Renee Fleck of Dribbble

Dieter Rams: Ten Principles for Good Design : Yea, it’s a book, I know, ain’t nobody got time for that nowadays. Seriously though, if you don’t have the time to read it, Google the title, it should show you the principles and tons of writing about those principles. By the time you go through them, you may as well read the book.

Some Shameless Marketing: I am a sales guy in a design team. This is what I do, so please bear with me.

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.