What working with founders has taught me.
Over the past five years, working with startup founders has changed how I think about product design. I’ve come to enjoy the conversations around a product as much as the work of designing it.
When I started, I expected to spend most of my time in Figma. I cared about how a screen was organised, whether the typography felt right & how someone would move through a flow. I still care about those things. But more of my work gradually happened in workshops, user interviews & conversations with the team. Those discussions gave me a better understanding of what I was designing & why it needed to exist. There are usually plenty of ideas to work with. A founder can see where the product could go, customers have requests & the team has things it wants to improve. I find that energy exciting. It also means there’s often more we could build than we have time for. I’ve learned to spend more time with an idea before adding another one. Who would use this? What are they doing today? Where does that become difficult? The answers help me understand whether a feature deserves our attention now or can wait.
Some of those questions are uncomfortable to ask, especially when a team has already put time into a direction. I understand the attachment. Once I’ve worked through a design, I want it to be useful. It takes a little effort to step back & look at it again. What helps me is getting specific. If we’re discussing a new dashboard, I’d want to know what someone needs to find there & what they’ll do with that information. That gives us something to work through together. We can look at how they do the task today, try a version of the screen & see which questions are still open. It also gives us a reason to change the design beyond someone simply preferring a different version.
I’ve learned how much the design depends on the conversations around it.
A founder brings knowledge of the business & the people they’re trying to reach. An engineer can explain what a choice would involve & suggest possibilities I haven’t considered. I bring what I’ve noticed in the experience: a confusing step, a missing explanation, something we’re asking the user to work out alone. I enjoy seeing how the design changes as those perspectives come together. The pace of startup work makes this especially interesting. An idea can become a prototype within days, while the conversation is still fresh. I like being able to try something that quickly. I also want us to know what we’re trying to learn from it. Sometimes a short conversation with a customer gives us enough to adjust the next version. Sometimes we need to sit with the uncertainty a little longer.
I still get a lot of satisfaction from making an interface feel right. Working with founders has given me more to think about while I’m doing it. I want to understand why a particular step matters, what led us to include it & whether it helps someone do what they came for. Those conversations stay with me when I return to the design. They give me something to make decisions against, right down to what a button says or what a screen can leave out.
