Before you build, design.

After more than two decades in product design, including a decade inside some of Silicon Valley’s most design-forward companies, one lesson has stayed with me: good design is leverage not just in terms of aesthetics or usability, but in shaping the very foundation of a product, how teams make decisions, and ultimately how businesses grow. It’s not a finishing layer. It’s a multiplier of clarity, speed, and confidence when applied early and with intent.

And yet, at early-stage startups, design is often sidelined until something goes wrong.

Part of me understands the instinct. Early-stage startups are often bootstrapped and under pressure to prove traction. The focus is usually on shipping the tech, acquiring users, and finding product-market fit. Design, in that context, can feel like a luxury, something you get to later, once the fundamentals are working.

But having worked with both early-stage founders and mature product teams, the contrast has become harder to ignore. I’ve seen startups race to fix problems reactively, redesigning broken flows, reworking onboarding, or cycling through designers, while more experienced teams use design upstream, as a way to think through problems before they surface.

In both cases, the problems are real. But the posture is different. One treats design as triage. The other treats it as direction. Large companies aren’t immune to chaos either, far from it, but their chaos takes a different form. It comes from scale, layers of decision-making, legacy systems, and internal politics. The difference is that mature teams often have mechanisms to channel that chaos productively: critique, embedded design reviews, deep analysis, shared principles. In these environments, design acts as a stabilising force, less about catching up, more about guiding.

The irony is that the stakes are arguably higher at the beginning, when foundational product choices are still malleable. And yet that’s when design is most often overlooked.

As I spend more time in the startup world, I keep coming back to the same question:

What kind of design actually moves the needle when you’re small, scrappy, and trying to build something meaningful from next to nothing? How do you provide enough direction and vision but also be nimble, flexible, and reactive?

The Paradox of the early stage

Startups pride themselves on speed. The ability to ship quickly, experiment freely, and stay lean is considered a competitive advantage, and rightly so. But speed without direction can be deceptive. It can feel like progress when, in reality, it’s just motion.

Early-stage teams are often making foundational decisions: who their product is for, how it works, what it feels like, what tradeoffs are acceptable, all under enormous pressure and uncertainty. These are product-shaping, trajectory-setting choices. And yet design is frequently reduced to execution: flows, mockups, polish.

In those critical early months, it’s not uncommon to hear things like:

• “We just need to ship something, anything.”
• “Design can clean it up later.”
• “Let’s reuse that flow. It worked for another product.”

These aren’t inherently bad instincts. They reflect urgency, resource constraints, and a desire to stay lean. But they also point to a limited view of what design can do, not just make something look better, but help ensure you’re building the right thing in the first place.

Here’s the paradox: the demand for speed doesn’t disappear as companies grow , it intensifies. Even in large, well-resourced product orgs, the expectation is to ship fast while still hitting an exceptionally high quality bar. Velocity and excellence are held in constant tension. In those environments, design is expected to both guide and keep up, to bring clarity in the midst of complexity, while also delivering at pace.

This makes the case for early-stage design involvement even stronger. When startups treat design only as a finishing layer, they forfeit one of the few tools that can help them navigate ambiguity and move fast without breaking the foundation. In some ways early-stage startups that leverage design have a huge advantage over those that dont, especially when it comes to shaping the product’s vision and experience before it hardens.

I spent years at places like Airbnb, Instagram, and Messenger. What stood out in all those environments wasn’t just the quality of the output, it was the culture of decision-making.

Design had a voice early in the process. There was space to prototype, to question assumptions, to align on intent before execution. Teams used design as a way to think, not just to decorate. But that voice often had to compete with the constant urgency to keep engineering teams fed, to stay ahead of roadmaps, and to keep the momentum going. Even in environments that valued design, the pressure to produce sometimes outpaced the space to reflect. As a result, designers had to be nimble, flexible, and fast, finding creative ways to carve out space for deeper thinking and meaningful exploration within fast-moving teams. The most effective ones learned how to operate in dual modes: delivering quickly when needed, while also creating leverage through clarity and considered choices. That duality, of speed and depth, is at the heart of what makes design so powerful in a startup context. It’s not about choosing between fast or thoughtful. It’s about using design to make fast work smarter, and thoughtful work faster.

When I reflect on what made that possible, it wasn’t just headcount or budgets (that helped). It was belief at the leadership level that design could help navigate ambiguity. That a well-crafted prototype could clarify more than a 40-page doc. That the way something feels often tells you as much as what it does.

And yes, these companies operated at scale. But what many don’t realise is that this level of design maturity didn’t come after success. It was present from the start. Airbnb’s earliest versions were opinionated, crafted, experiential. Instagram launched with visual restraint and a clear thesis. And for every feature that shipped on Messenger, 30 others were left on the cutting room floor due to not meeting the bar. It was a high-pressure environment where prioritisation was constant, and design played a critical role in holding the line on quality. These weren’t accidents. They were design-led decisions made under constraints.

Most early-stage teams don’t have the luxury or budget for a full-stack design team, or even a dedicated designer at all. Product decisions happen in compressed cycles. Founders are juggling funding, hires, market pressure, MVPs, and everything breaking simultaneously. It’s understandable that design, when it enters the picture, is expected to just “make it look good” or “finish it off.”

But this is also where things start to unravel.

When design is disconnected from product thinking, you get screens that work but don’t resonate. Interfaces that function but don’t flow. Brands that feel generic. Teams that move fast but second-guess themselves constantly.

In my design circles, its easy to agree that design is not just about how something looks. It’s about how something works, how it feels, and what it means to the person using it. Good design reveals clarity in the mess. It exposes tradeoffs and invites better decisions. It’s a way of structuring ambiguity.

And yet, when founders haven’t seen this kind of design thinking up close, it’s easy to assume it’s optional, or worse, ornamental. In my work, sitting side by side with founders, not just reviewing designs, but shaping the very foundations of their product, I’ve seen how transformative early design involvement can be. It builds alignment, uncovers blind spots, and often clarifies the real problem worth solving. When design is part of the conversation from the beginning, it doesn’t just support the vision, it helps form it.

Depth beats scale (especially early)

There’s a misconception that “depth” means slowness or complexity, that thinking too hard at the start is indulgent or inefficient. But in my experience, depth is what unlocks speed later.

Early-stage depth isn’t about over-designing. It’s about taking the time to get the hard questions right before building scaffolding around the wrong thing.

Questions like:

• What is the fundamental value exchange at the heart of the product?
• Where does friction or uncertainty create hesitation for users?
• When do people feel something — whether it’s clarity, joy, or frustration — and why?
• What assumptions are we making that should be challenged or removed?

These aren’t abstract. They’re deeply pragmatic, especially when you’re short on time, money, and people. The difference between two months of exploratory prototyping and six months of course correction can be existential for a startup.

Depth helps you say no with confidence. It creates a sense of intentionality that anchors decision-making, especially when the pressure to move quickly is high. It’s the difference between launching fast and scaling prematurely — between chasing growth and knowing what kind of growth actually matters. The ability to slow down just enough to question, refine, and align can save teams from costly pivots later. In that space, design becomes a compass, not just a coat of paint.

Design direction, branding, and design systems are often underestimated at the early stage, but they play a foundational role in how products take shape and communicate value. Establishing a clear design direction early helps teams make consistent, aligned decisions without reinventing the wheel at every turn. A strong, opinionated brand builds trust and memorability in a noisy market. And even a lightweight design system — one that defines basic patterns, behaviors, and principles — can reduce cognitive overhead, speed up decision-making, and create a cohesive user experience as the product evolves. These aren’t just artifacts. They’re force-multipliers that help startups scale design maturity without scaling chaos.

I partner with a lot of early-stage teams who see the value in design but for one reason or another aren’t hiring full-time designers. They just don’t need that yet. What they need is someone who can think alongside them, challenge assumptions, and help shape the product before it calcifies. Working closely with founders allows for a shared mental model to emerge — one where product, brand, and user experience are no longer siloed conversations. These collaborations often uncover tensions between vision and feasibility early, creating opportunities to resolve them with intentional design rather than reactive fixes. Sitting in the same room (physically or virtually), shaping decisions together, design becomes an active participant in business strategy, not a downstream service. This kind of proximity builds trust, accelerates iteration, and ensures that product quality isn’t just preserved, but amplified as the company grows.

Sometimes that means prototyping ideas before a single line of code. Other times, it’s crafting a compelling vision deck to help founders communicate their ambition to investors and partners. These decks go beyond pitch templates — they distill product, brand, and experience into a narrative that feels grounded yet aspirational. Design becomes the connective tissue between an idea and the belief in that idea. When done well, the vision can unlock funding, shape internal alignment, and set a visual and strategic tone that carries through the next 12–18 months of building. Other times, it’s auditing an experience that’s already live and identifying where the friction is coming from. In some cases, it’s extending the same strategic narrative from a vision deck into a product roadmap, ensuring that the story investors bought into is actually reflected in the product itself. Increasingly, it means helping teams build systems — visual, interactional, narrative — that can grow with them, so they’re not reinventing the experience at every new stage of growth, but scaling from a solid, well-articulated foundation.

It’s hands-on. It’s manual. It’s strategic. And it’s often less about what we add, and more about what we remove. This principle of subtraction is central to good design. It’s about refining, not decorating; clarifying, not complicating. Whether it’s stripping back an interface to its essential interactions or reducing a pitch narrative to its sharpest articulation, the goal is always to amplify what matters most. In that sense, the process mirrors the very foundations of thoughtful design: purposeful constraints, clear hierarchy, and meaningful choices that honor both the product and the person using it.

This isn’t the kind of design that scales easily across 10 clients or fits neatly into a sprint template. But that’s the point. It’s not designed for volume. It’s designed for depth, for startups who care about getting the important things right, not just getting to the next milestone. This approach echoes the principles of good design itself: focus, restraint, intentionality. Just as great design strips away the unnecessary to highlight what matters.