How To Be a Design-led Business and Build Products That Matter
The startups we work with at Founders Factory Africa need to be able to demonstrate product-market fit and the ability to scale. What that means is that startups can show us that they are building a product or service that customers want and are willing to use or pay for. We work very closely with founders and their teams to help them achieve their goals by the end of our six month programmes.
My role as a product designer shifts and changes depending on what the startup needs to accomplish. They may need help branding, validating and iterating their value proposition, running user research, improving their user experience design, or even designing an interface. But out of everything, the most value I can add to the startups is to help them take that first step towards becoming design-led. I help them establish a design presence within their businesses that enables them to work towards establishing product-market fit and being user-centred (Watch the workshop we run for founders: From Feature First to User First ).
Being design-led is fundamental to the success of your business. The fundamental role of design is to be the customer’s advocate (being human-centred), bringing that understanding to the business, and making a product that people love and want to use. A good starting point would be:
- Creating a culture that has your customers at the front and centre of your business.
- Developing a product or service that addresses a real user need, and having the evidence to support that.
- Not being restricted by design as a function. Design presence in your business should not start and end with a designer, it should rather start and end with everyone who is part of your business.
“In design-led organisations, design permeates every initiative and expression. It’s embedded in the culture.” — Debbie Millman
Just because you have a designer on your team doesn’t necessarily mean you are design-led. I’ve seen businesses that don’t empower their designers to have a voice when it comes to the product and the vision. Instead the designer just rolls out screen after screen, but the value of design should not be isolated to just visual or UI design. Design enables us to make the best possible decisions for our business, products and customers. We need to enable our teams to “get out of the building” and find the data we need to support our decisions.
But if you don’t have a full-time designer you can still become design-led. Here’s how:
Design presence and value
A designer is a luxury that doesn’t always exist in startups at a seed or pre-seed stage. That’s not to say that these companies aren’t doing some form of research or advocating for their customers. What often happens is that there’s no one owning design as an approach to solving problems and defining a product.
Businesses get wrapped up in rolling out features without thinking holistically about who is going to be using this feature or what problem it solves. Investing time in building a product without the evidence you need to support that decision means you’re building something for yourself, not your customers.
“You’ve got to start with the customer and work backwards to the technology.” — Steve Jobs
Some startups fall into the trap of focusing on solutions and not involving their customers beyond idea validation. We always need to speak to our users/customers in order to remain relevant in our customers’ lives in order to be successful as a business.
Startups can waste precious time and resources by building the wrong thing when there is no customer-centric design presence in the business.
How to adopt the right mindset to create a design presence in your business
Design should be embedded right at the beginning of our product discovery and development processes. Invest in this. Design is an approach to problem solving and can’t be an afterthought. This means that everyone in the business needs to cultivate a design mindset. Here’s how:
Empathise
IDEO’s Human-Centred Design Toolkit, defines empathy as a “deep understanding of the problems and realities of the people you are designing for.”
Empathy is an important skill in design because it helps you set aside your assumptions. This helps you open your mind to what people really mean when they speak, how they feel and why they do what they do. This is a powerful way of unlocking insights and inspiration. It’s also one of the easiest things to start doing — just listen and be observant when engaging with your customers (do not try to influence them or listen for what you want to hear). The more we understand, the more we know and the more we can adapt in order to be relevant to our customers.
Embrace uncertainty
Being uncertain feels wrong or uncomfortable. That’s why we tend to hold on to what we perceive is right. It’s ok to not have all the answers. When we remove our biases we discover what is true rather than proving what we believe to be true. Embracing uncertainty allows you to open yourself up to unexpected possibilities that can get you to places you wouldn’t have imagined.
Learning is an iterative process
Startups are built around insights that give them their competitive edge. Constantly learning and growing your understanding keeps your thinking relevant and can help you respond to new opportunities. Context changes, people change, their world changes, so your business and products need to change too. You should iteratively test all of your assumptions of your customers, industry and the communities you engage with to ensure that you are solving the right problems in the best way. Every new learning and iteration refines and improves what you had known and done before.
Learn from failure
Failure always offers a learning opportunity. There is knowledge to be gained. We shouldn’t see failure as a bad thing but rather as a step toward finding the right answers. By embracing failure, we can ensure that we are constantly pushing the boundaries and exploring the unknown without the fear of being wrong. Experiment, fail fast, reflect and fail forward. (Also: learn from others’ failures too!)
Be informed
“Our assumptions are risks unless those assumptions are well informed.” — Erika Hall.
A good way to become more informed is to validate (get data on) your product, service or idea with your users and actual target audience. This is something so easily forgotten or set aside but it should be embedded in your product development process. Using evidence to support your decisions is critical in justifying that you are always making the right thing for your customers.
With great power comes great responsibility
(Quotes from comics never get old. Or maybe it’s just me. I’m finally old)
Changing your mindset can be like learning a new superpower, opening entirely new opportunities. Just remember this:
- Be customer-first (or user-first) and develop a deep understanding of your audience so that you can build products they love using. (Hello product-market fit!).
- Always aim to stay relevant in the lives of your customers. This means engaging with them regularly in order to iterate your product meaningfully.
- Iterating means you are growing & learning about something that will improve your business, product or the experience you deliver to your customers. Even with incremental changes, always strive to improve and build products that matter.
- It’s ok to fail as long as you learn something valuable from it.
- There’s more value in unpacking the truth than developing a product based on assumptions.
- Backup your decisions with evidence. As a startup the most value you can add to your business is by reducing the amount of risk associated with your product and business. Be informed by data.
I’m not saying that you don’t need a designer if you can change your mindset. This is a great starting point if you don’t have a strong design presence or culture in your organisation. These mindsets will help you build a better business even if you do have a dedicated designer too. To be truly design-led we can learn from the “Airbnb’s” and “Uber’s” of the world which have designers that strategically lead products, services, customer experiences and the business towards success.
