TLDR: Every product cycle without a designer looks like time saved. It isn’t. The work piles up until someone has to deal with it later, at a much higher cost.
Every founder I’ve worked with has, at some point, convinced themselves they can’t afford a designer yet. None of them actually saved time by waiting. The work didn’t disappear. It just piled up, unaddressed, until someone had to deal with it later at a much higher cost.
Without design, engineering becomes the sole producer, building reactively to feedback, shipping features one at a time in the name of testing and learning. That approach can surface real signal about product-market fit early on. But every cycle it runs, it adds exponentially to the work a designer will eventually have to do to make the product feel like one coherent thing. Teams accustomed to working this way often don’t see the impact it has on their ability to collaborate with non-engineers, or on the quality and scalability of what has shipped.
By the time a designer joins a startup that’s been operating this way for more than a few sprints, they’re not walking into a typical design role. They’re walking into a site with no standardized patterns, no global styling, and a dozen slightly different ways of doing the same thing—the basic foundation that was skipped in the name of speed. Additionally, they are joining a team that is used to working without them and that doesn’t want to slow down. The cards are stacked against them. That is, unless the leadership team understands this to be true, and is intentional about making room in their culture, processes and mindset to adopt design as a tool in their arsenal.
Designers are often hired specifically to refine and pump out new features quickly, but their bigger job is to play archaeologist and tour guide. As an archaeologist, they dig through layers of previous design decisions and existing patterns in order to correct the complexities in the user experience. They become a tour guide by carefully easing users into new ways of interacting with the product without irritating them by changing too many things at once.
As someone who has stepped into this scene multiple times, I’ve seen complications arise from totally avoidable challenges that result from delaying design input:
| Building without Design Input | Impact on User Experience |
|---|---|
| Treating the product as a collection of individual features or “screens” | Rather than designing pathways for users to accomplish tasks throughout the product, this approach leads to convoluted experiences that are easy to forget. It may also produce multiple ways to accomplish the same task, often with slight variance that confuses users. |
| Not investing in a streamlined user onboarding experience | The time it takes for users to get value from the product will impact product stickiness, growth and virality. |
| Blending together components from multiple design systems, and habitually using in-line styling rather than global styling | Slows development and multiplies efforts to make small updates. Mismatching pages and features are common, which can impact the credibility of the product. |
| Poorly written or frequently occurring error states | Errors are frustrating for users. Additionally, if the errors don’t include coherent descriptions of how to resolve them, this often leads to a barrage of customer support calls or user complaints. |
Design Debt
The longer a startup waits to hire designers, the more design debt they incur. Design debt isn’t just a backlog of features waiting to be developed. Design debt includes the more significant considerations of product architecture that has a sweeping impact on user experience: information hierarchy, user experience patterns, naming conventions, roles and permissions.
Finding the right designer who understands how to balance speed and scalability becomes more and more imperative for the business to succeed in using design as a competitive differentiator. Addressing design debt is key when landing enterprise customers in order to deliver a certain level of quality and customization for their needs.