Why we hope your designer is pushing you to fail.
Sunk cost fallacy — when people don’t want to abandon a losing strategy after investing heavily in it — is super common in the startup world. I personally got into this trap several times. I saw many people not only lose their money and time over bad strategy but also their motivation and willingness to innovate. We’ve all been told to “fail often and early”to avoid needing to make major pivots later in product development. From my experience and those of previous clients, this can be easy to say and hard to implement.
How to save yourself from painful late pivots? What does it mean in practice? My answer is: if you want “fail early”, include your UX/Product designer during ALL stages of your product development. Trust me, we designers know how to make you fail :). Jokes aside, UX and Product designers are trained to not only crash-test assumptions, ideas, and prototypes, but also to guide you through the product development process, conduct unbiased and rigorous research, and facilitate sound decision-making.
Inexperienced startups often make a common mistake: they hire designers only for prototyping. Yes, shiny mockups are the most obvious artifacts designers create because they are visual. Good UX and Product designers however can bring much more value to your product than drawing prototypes.
A simplified product development process roughly includes the following stages: problem statement, research, ideation, prototyping, development, and testing. The sure sign of an inexperienced founder is if they hire designers only for the prototyping stage. By doing this, they shoot themselves in the foot twice: first, when they don’t fully use the designer’s skills, and second, when they don’t give the designer an opportunity to delve into the context enough to deliver the best possible solution.
You can see in the picture above the value designers can provide if they are involved earlier and stay with the project longer. Yes, of course, not every designer is a generalist with skills in all these areas, but, most of us are good in a decent chunk of them.
I genuinely hope that the next time you are looking for a designer for your project, you will at least ask them what else they can do besides prototyping! In my entire career, I have never met a designer that wanted to be limited to prototyping.
Now I’m expecting you to say something like: “It’s not like I don’t want to include a designer in other processes, but I have a limited budget and cannot spend a ton on a designer”. This is fair, but the goal of budget planning is to maximize the outcome at a minimal cost. You can see below a simple model of pivoting cost against production stage.
In this model, to make it more realistic, I even added an impact reduction coefficient — pivot at each next stage brings 20% less change. Although these numbers are an approximation and based purely on my personal experience working with dozens, if not hundreds of startups, they illustrate a point: the cost of pivoting grows dramatically with time and only tappers off because ultimately necessary changes will decline after a huge pivot investment and the team gets back on track.
So, we are now back to where we started — pivot early before the pivot price gets to its peak. Designers are the ones that can help you to do more with less and are an invaluable investment that yields long-term savings and returns. Don’t be like everyone else and find yourself investing into a sunk cost fallacy.
If you are not ready to change your process just yet and look for a versatile designer but want to try the power of design early in the process, Reach has two design sprint packages: classic Design Sprint and Web3 Sprint. Both of them are 5 days of collaborative work guided by our frameworks that were designed to maximize the value of the time spent.
