I work with a lot of startups to help them as a design director, and often apply for freelance roles on sites like AngelList, Behance, etc. Sometimes I’ll look at full-time roles as well and am noticing a trend. Tell me if I’m wrong here, or not... 1) Seems like companies want to cheap out on design and actually prefer someone with less experience at half the rate of someone with 3x the experience. Why not go with the person who has 3x the experience? Why are companies so afraid of spending more for an experienced designer? 2) Seems like a lot of postings mention 2-4 years experience for product design. I don’t know about you, but someone with 2-4 years of experience usually doesn’t have depth or breadth, yet companies are willing to trust their products to designers with such little experience. Would you expect a designer with 2-4 years to be able to give you an edge in your business? Why are these companies aiming so low?
Can't really speak for everyone, but here is my experience after working at such startup: CEO is not a technical person, more of a sales guy, budget is usually limited in early stages, so he really thinks in terms of profit with given resources. Say you have a goal of achieve, so our CEO would consider hiring two people with less experience than one experienced, because in his opinion it's only time that you win with the experienced one, and once those two ramp up - you suddenly start to benefit more from them. The short term problem was solved with two less experienced ones, then why bother to pay more. Explaining that the problem might look/be solved, but design is flaky - was a hard concept for us to explain.
Startups risk failure. They need to quickly market test their ideas, learn from mistakes and pivot. They would rather build a piece of junk quickly that gets the job done, and not worry about long term issues like 2 year plans, and technical debt, because many ideas will fail and go to the garbage. Once they product takes off they hire bigger guns.
Because products with poor design but meet a need will still work. Better designs can come later. Just look at amazon 1.0, Uber 1.0, craigslist etc. if your product is solving a problem people really need solving, they will ignore your bad designs. If you need good designs for your product to work, your product usually won’t work out in the long run.
I call BS. Maybe for that 1:1M idea like google search, uber, etc but most startups are not solving that huge $100B problem no one knew existed. In most instances, startups have some competitors and having a useable design is a competitive advantage. The reason design is neglected is because of the cult of the engineer in SV, everyone thinks the only thing that matters is the backend tech. So what we get is tons of shitty UIs designed by engineers who think they know better.
There’s tons of examples of products with shitty ui but works that works out great. Yes you need a nice looking design to scale to the masses. But early adopters usually do not care much about how nice your design look. Startups target early adopters.
Struggling for work? To be candid, you sound like a crotchety old guy who thinks experience trumps everything else. Yes, you may have a stronger intuition based on experience alone but that doesn’t guarantee you will give the startup an edge. And I think we probably should put the blame on overly generalized tittles and not necessarily the startups. Because maybe the startup feels they only need a visual designer to help with branding, or UI because they have a great product / design thinker at the leadership level and really just needs someone to execute — but with these ever shifting design titles they feel product design is the expected title for that role.
I may indeed be crotchety.. but not old. Wait, we are taking about startups and tech, I guess “old” is relative, lol. The work is always there, I’m struggling with why people seem so cheap with the overall design process and why they trust jr. designers (2-4 YOE) with their business. Call me crotchety I guess! Intuition is just one factor, there are quite a few more factors that can go into helping businesses succeed with the design process. Why not spend just a little bit more with someone who has more relevant expertise? Hard to believe that business leaders don’t want the expertise( except in the case you mentioned where they already have design leadership)
Here’s another thought... Those startups only understand the surface level of design. And even though design has been maturing in places like Google, FB, Apple, Intuit, etc there are still a lot of people who haven’t experienced real end-to-end product design and don’t understand what they need, what good is besides what they can see visually or what real value design can provide. But they know they need design because the big players are celebrating it — hence thinking someone with a visually compelling portfolio will give them the edge that experienced designers at google, et al provide.
Don't startups have full-time engineers/founders to aid in design?? Why do they need a freelancer??
😂
Wouldn’t hiring someone with a lot of experience at a higher rate (taking contract, not employment) help improve the odds of the startup succeeding? Or do companies simply not put that kind of faith in designers, and thus are just looking for pixel production and/or wire frames?
Not all expensive or more experienced contractors are good. Startups have been burned enough number of times by the so called design experts, they start to skimp on costs.