As I meet different people in the growing StartUp race, certain things are hard to neglect, specially as a Designer. It is pretty evident that a lot of times Startups sometimes hire wrong people for the job at hand, or worse, they don’t invest time to define the scope for the person coming in. Here I speak for the startups as to what they need to keep in mind with respect to designers, starting with a little homework beforehand.
Self Analysis: Start from the Problems that you are Solving, or you are facing
Designers are a bunch that love solving problems. Jot down all the problems you are facing from technical to operations, legal to logistics, basically everything a to z.
Segregate the same in a grid, use this one preferably. It’s a simple urgent vs important grid to help you make a better decision and give the other person a more realistic view of what they would be working on mostly. (source: TuZZit)
Know about different approaches of different Designers, and Design itself.
Every designer is not the same. Some enjoy making beautiful animations while others care too much about a user’s flow, and there are still others who look at a whole system as a challenge and want to solve it using the same grid above. System here, for a lot of startups would mean their whole business. (You will gradually know how business goals do get solved by interventions from a designer.)
Once you have decided the tasks at hand, both long term and short term, you need to start learning a bit about what each designer type does and what are the main differences in UX vs Interface Design vs Product Design vs many more jargons, or if there’s none. UX mostly comprises of a whole system to be addressed and so does Product, so lay the scope very clearly as to what and how you expect that person to help you. Also keep your ears open to listen to his/her take on design which will tell you what they would be most happy to do. You might also get more insights into the possibilities design can bring to the table.
Product Design has never existed without UX. Every product designer always takes care of the experience around their product / service. What we are calling UX in 2016 can rightly be termed as Digital Product Design.
Read a little on how design can benefit business / service-
Here are few links I am sharing because it will be redundant to just talk about it. Go ahead and spend some time reading them. See you in a bit.
What Is Good Design and Why It Matters for Your Business
What do Slideshare, Pinterest, Airbnb, Behance, Posterous, Flickr, Etsy, Instagram, and Tumblr have in common? Well…
www.designforfounders.com
The Role of Design in Business
The frequent question asked of the design community is of its value to business. The query itself makes little sense…
www.bloomberg.com
From Google Ventures: How To Hire The Best Designer For Your Team
Finding the perfect designer to join your team is tough-there's no way around it. I've struggled for months searching…
www.fastcodesign.com
So after going through a few of these that I shared, I assume you are now enlightened to talk more on the same bit and can feel more ready to take a call on making a better job description.
Most Importantly, You yourself are a Designer!
You are designing a business / service / product with your colleagues. You are of course a designer yourself. Although you might not have taken the design process route while you were building the product because you were busy making the idea a reality and come up with a MVP. That’s great too.
But it’s time to look forward and anyone with a formal design education will have a very different approach on building something. It can truly add a lot of value to the product. In the startup environment, there are many iterations on different levels and defining goals other than figures gets hard for the team. Well, a designer would easily do that and take care of it. So basically the missing threads can now be kept as goals for the company while you chase your numbers. That’s actually amazing!
Be ready for a Change, and rather Initiate it yourself
Why a change? Well, because design does not work individually. It is inclusive, iterative and has to create impact across different channels to finally make a difference. Design Sprints, Product Design Brainstorming, Crazy Ideas Board, PinItUp Walls, etc. lets everyone be part of the process of creating something new collectively. Without doing so, the design process could easily fail and you will gain just a fraction of the possibilities.
Design should be able to lay foundations for the future growth so be open to changes in infrastructure as well, or at least have a road map as per the future requirements. It’s better to do it when you are small rather than revamping everything later. Scaling up will be much smoother!
Designing the product is not the solution most of the times, it is also about designing how the team works to reach there. ‘ If you are going to the same thing, don’t expect a different result ‘.
Going back to the first topic of this article, jot down your problems and listen to how a potential designer for you would approach to solve them and what all they think should be done to solve them. Listen to them and you should find your guy in those answers.
Goodluck!