Progressing in a User Experience career leads most designers working for companies or agencies (i.e., not freelancers) to a fork in the road. In order to get to the “next level” in your career you need to decide whether you are going to become a manager or master craftsman (sometimes referred to as a subject matter expert). The choice here is stark.

Choose master craftsman and you get to design all day, all the time. You work tirelessly at becoming the best designer you can be but, in most cases, you max out your earning potential and career advancement very quickly. Pretty soon you’re making lateral moves in your career focusing those career changes on the actual material you’re working on rather than a potential “career move.” Often, you end up designing at the whim of the design manager (CD, ECD, etc…) at your current company.

Choosing the managerial path often leads to less actual design work and more administrative work. Resource allocation, mentoring, hiring/firing, performance reviews, project prioritization — the mere mention of any of these phrases to many designers causes them to shut down and start convulsing in the fetal position on the floor. Yet the rewards are different – there is a far longer career ladder to climb regardless of whether you’re designing at an agency or inside a corporation. The effect you have on the design output of your organization grows as well. Your vision and aesthetic drive many decisions and you get to choose which designers to surround yourself with.

This choice is presented to designers relatively early in their career and many of us feel like it’s truly a binary decision. I believe there’s a third option – designing at a startup. Designing at a startup blends the best qualities of both of these career tracks by allowing you to do actual design work yet at the same time your vision and design philosophies get built into the company from a very early point. You determine the design direction and interaction experiences for a brand new product. You actually execute that design and, when the time is right, you get to help bring on other designers to work with you that you actually enjoy working with.

If you’re lucky you get some equity as well and as the startup grows and reaches a point where you’re once again faced with the “manage or SME” decision, you have the option to exit gracefully and move on to the next startup. This approach is not for everyone as the rigors, risk and general lawlessness of the startup environment can drive a designer crazy. But if you’d like to exert more control over a design vision and not be forced to worry about who will staff the upcoming conversion funnel overhaul, it can be a very viable and exciting choice.

[Jeff]

In a startup environment the mantra of “push early, push often” is often heralded as the right product development course. The theory is one driven by the Agile model – get value to customers in the form of working code as quickly as possible, get feedback, iterate and push more code. This also jives well with another popular mantra, “Fail early, fail often.” Similar? If we were to use (ok, not really) the transitive property (if a=b and b=c, you get the rest of it) you come up with the following formula:

Push (early, often) = Fail (early, often)

I’m not interested in getting into a debate about the merits of Agile. I’m actually quite bought in to the value it brings to a software shop and believe that UX design can be properly integrated into the process. What I think this equation speaks to is the image of your newly-birthed company in the market. This is also known as your brand.

Getting to minimal viable product and pushing code live may get you “to market” fast but the risks of doing so before you’ve reached minimum desirable product can outweigh the benefits. Prior to launch, your startup’s brand is a tabula rasa. It’s yours to own and shape and, as the old slogan goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Even early adopters are sensitive to the presentation of a new product. It doesn’t have to do 50 things. It only has to do 1 thing but it has to do it elegantly, efficiently and in a manner that speaks to its audience – sophistication, fun, exploration, etc. Early adopters (with the blogosphere counted among them) are often the loudest voices on the Web and can easily make or break your debut. At the very least they can put up enough of a stink to create a brand and PR hurdle to overcome before you’re even out of private Beta.

Consider the whole experience you’re pushing live before doing so. Yes, your product does what it’s supposed to do but how does it meet the minimum desirability standards of your target audience? The push early/often mantra gets your team focused on the details. But is anyone looking at the big picture? The whole experience?

It’s critical to involve design thinking in this process (as Dave McClure points out here) from a variety of angles. Ensure you’ve considered that first impression before actually going out in the market. Make a good enough one and the market (and blogosphere) will be far more forgiving to the updates you continue to push out. Make a poor first impression and each move will be attributed to you “fixing your product/brand/image” in the marketplace.

[Jeff]

I would venture a guess that in most designers’ experience they rarely get to create something from scratch. Typically, we’re called in to rework, redesign and ultimately clean up somebody else’s mess design. In the dot-com days this was not necessarily the case given the youth of the medium but the landscape is different today. The company is established. The business model and brand are in place. The design has been there for several years and has likely been redesigned several times. In addition, corporate politics have been taking root (if it’s a younger company) and organizational ownership claims have been laid and fought over.

As a designer coming in to this situation the challenge goes far beyond design. Coming into an established company’s redesign project means starting off with untangling the existing situation. In many ways it’s like taking out the Christmas lights from last year and starting the process of this year’s decoration.

You start here:

(yes, it’s a cute pic)

Taking out last year’s lights means taking out a giant tangled mess of strings, bulbs, glitter, staples and random tape fragments that make simply untangling the ball significantly harder to accomplish. Then, as you go through the strings, you start to figure out which lights work, which lights don’t, which strings have a staple through them, what’s hopelessly tangled and what can be salvaged.

Existing corporate redesign work is exactly like this. You have to peel back the strings (existing designs, decision history, information architecture, org structure) and then assess the state of each one. Next, you need to take all the random elements you come across along the way (political insight, conflicting corporate business directions) into consideration and finally assemble the lights into a new design that takes advantage of their existing condition while ensuring your final outcome is original and better (more effective, meets business/user goals) than last year’s display.

Startup design is different. You come in with a blank slate – no existing brand, very few players, minimal (if any) political currents and likely, a throw-away placeholder web presence that was hastily put up just to hold the URL. You also get to start with your own, clean, fresh box of lights.

This is your toolkit. Everything is new, untangled and nicely packaged. Best part – everything works! No one has ever laid these lights out before. There are no random artifacts and nothing to untangle. Your goal is to take a box of fresh ideas and make something no one has ever seen before. That doesn’t mean you necessarily have to reinvent the use of the lights but at least you have that option. Startups want to take on incumbents in their field. They want to take the tools that have been used for years and turn them on their head. This is a designer’s dream. Take the expected outcome:

and innovate:

Try something that’s never been tried before and see if it works. If it doesn’t, iterate and try again. The agility of the startup encoruages this. Not only is it in the interest of the startup to refine its approach until it best fits the marketplace but it helps establish the brand of the young company as a savvy innovator.

Now, this lack of “structure” may actually prove challenging for some designers who are used to being handed stacks of requirements and explicit style guides before beginning their work. But for those who thrive in this open canvas situation, this is the best of all design worlds.

[Jeff]

After some great conversations today it became even clearer to me that a startup founder who “gets” user experience and design will likely create a more successful product than one who does not. It’s not just because a great user experience makes a product more enjoyable and ultimately fun to use. It’s because this type of design thinking and understanding of the customer seeps into every other aspect of the product. Customer service, fluid interaction of back-end elements, copy tone and voice all benefit from a keen understanding of the user, their needs and pain points and the core benefits your solution brings.

The other upside of baking UX in early in a startup is the viral nature with which this focus will grow as the company grows. Each employee that is brought on will have to demonstrate an understanding and affinity for design and customer experience and will seek to drive that into their own area of specialization. Before long the startup is staffed with specialists who “get” customers and understand that whether they’re writing code, pushing pixels or selling the product, they have a direct effect on the customer’s experience.

[Jeff]