Welcome to Design Staff

My job is to help startups design better products. So I’m often doing hands-on work — helping teams get through one iteration of a user-centered design process. Together we’ll talk with users, sketch ideas, design interfaces, and build prototypes. It’s a blast.

It didn’t take long before I realized that many teams have similar questions about how to design products. Teams ask about everything from tips on interviewing a designer to picking actionable user metrics. Some questions I can answer right away, but often I reach out to other talented people to find answers. I love being able to help entrepreneurs like this, but I kept feeling like I was missing an opportunity to share what we’re learning with the whole startup ecosystem.

It’s no surprise that startups have questions about design, but I’ve also found that designers have just as many questions about startups. They’re curious how startups are different than in-house and agency work. They wonder how to pick the right team to join. And designers at startups often struggle to find good ways to work with fast-moving engineering teams.

So with all these questions flying around, I decided to start Design Staff as a community for entrepreneurs and designers to help one another build better products. I’m incredibly excited to have such talented contributors join us. They have helped to build some of my favorite products, and I have found that I always learn something new from them. Stay tuned for their articles.

My hope is that we can bring together some of the best designers, researchers, product managers, and founders to talk about the lessons they’ve learned while designing products at startups.

This is an experiment for sure. We’ll learn as we go. My promise is that we’ll listen to you about how to make this community better. So let’s start right now. What topics should we cover over the next few months? Who would you love to see as an author? Go ahead and jump into the discussion below.