The Design Founder's Juggling Act
The Design Founder's Juggling Act
Q&A: How I'm balancing business and design in a tech startup
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“As a design founder, how do you manage the design part (UX research, designing features, user-testing, etc) and the management part (all other stuff)?”
- Question from community member, Pir Ahmed
Here’s the hard truth: “all other stuff” is most of the business.
In my day-to-day as a founder, I have to be extremely deliberate about carving out focused "maker time" to dive deep into designing anything. The business responsibilities are never-ending, so time-boxing and proactively blocking off chunks of time on my calendar is essential. In my scenario, having dedicated design time is more of a delightful outlier than it is the norm. It's a constant juggling act.
As a design founder, managing the balance between the design work and all the other critical business functions is also an emotional challenge. The fact of the matter is that while design is significant for a software business, it’s just one input into the larger equation of delivering value to customers and keeping the business running. Setting aside ample time for design is a luxury that we don’t have yet. We’re doing our best to deliver a quality product, but the near-term focus is more on staying alive than it is on incremental design enhancements.
In The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman, the author outlines the five interdependent processes that make up a business: value creation, marketing, sales, value delivery, and finance. As you might notice, design is not explicitly one of those five (neither are engineering or product management, by the way). However, I believe that by establishing design thinking at a foundational, cultural level, it can amplify the entire system.
While design may not be considered a core business process in itself, it is well positioned to elevate the processes on that list.
Good design can:
Amplify the value you create for customers
Attract the right kind of attention in your marketing
Make your sales process more seamless
Simplify how you deliver value
Help you make more and spend less money.
Although I’m rarely "doing design" these days, I try to take a design-driven approach to every aspect of the business. It's not about surface-level decoration, but instilling design as a cultural value and lever to make everything we do better. The more the rest of the business internalizes design principles to augment its work, the more leverage and impact design can have.
Done right, design isn't just a department or phase, but a powerful multiplier on the core work of the business. While more design time may not pay our short-term bills, I’m mindful that strong design foundations will amplify our results across the board in the long term.
Balancing the design hat with all my other hats as a founder is going to be an ongoing challenge, but I’ll keep fighting the good fight.
Until next time,
Patrick
PS. Please send me your questions! I’d love to answer them. 🙏
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“It's not about surface-level decoration, but instilling design as a cultural value and lever to make everything we do better. The more the rest of the business internalizes design principles to augment its work, the more leverage and impact design can have.”
This is great! Nice, Pat