What’s It Like To Start UX From A Start-up?
There are two different school of thoughts on how one can kickstart their UX career.
- Starting from a small company because it gives you more opportunities to tackle a wide variety of UX problems, leading up to be a generalist, or
- Starting from a medium-large company because it gives your proper structure and resources to conduct a full design cycle, potentially becoming a specialist.
Let me speak from the perspective of the former.
Starting my UX journey at a Social Enterprise
bantu is a SAAS company that focuses on providing a management system to support Volunteerism in Singapore. To start with, I never knew the functions of a business-to-business (b2b) company, much less have the exposure of what management systems are.
I ought to thank the lucky stars as I was handed a great mentor on a silver platter. This mentor took me in and reviewed my learning progress with me every week. She shared multiple productivity hacks and even sends random UIUX Instagram content as well. This person is nevertheless, the Chief Product Officer (CPO) of bantu, Janelle Lee.
So, why do I recommend aspiring Product Designers to start from a Startup despite all the struggle?
1. It moulds you to have a practical mindset
Naturally, because of the nature of a start-up, we have to think about how we can maximise our resources to propose quick-win solutions. This includes proposing design solutions that is within the means of the engineers, so as to bring the quickest revenue for the company. The practice of try now, fail later, and try (iterate) again is often done, and seeing your product come to live fast with the intended effectiveness, is always rewarding. It trains you to work within your means, and eventually the sense of business acumen as a Product Designer.
2. You have more design liberty
This is of course debatable, because bigger companies will, for sure, have more spendings available to support any “whacky” design proposals. But my counterpoint here, would be that big companies often require a significant reason for you to do so.
In a start-up, however, playing it safe doesn’t necessarily resonate well especially when you’re not tied down by any investor’s KPI — because after all, new breakthroughs come when common practices are disrupted. The entrepreneurial scene stands from exploring new methods and risks, so the receptiveness to new design proposals are always welcomed.
Furthermore, such teams are often comfortable with the practice of “Fast Failing”, in which iterating designs through short sprints are frequent. This makes learning from mistakes even faster and meaningful.
3. You have full visibility of the entire process
In my time in bantu, I took up multiple roles — QA tester, Customer Support, a little bit of Product Managing, and of course, the main bulk would be as a UIUX Designer. It can be a lot, but without experiencing any of them, I would not have gotten the full picture of what our end users are truly thinking.
In bigger companies, these feedbacks are likely to get watered down or placed in a design backlog. Or worse, misinterpreting and/or downplaying the severity of the problem.
A small team meant constant communication is necessary:
- Having visibility on the progress from the engineers allows you to have a better estimate on the effort required to build your next design concept.
- Given the chance to test the product after it is pushed to production, allows you to identify all the possible edge cases that you might’ve missed while designing.
- Doing customer support, allows you to empathise and quickly ask questions to identify if it is a mistake or a slip.
It all contributes back to the basis of design thinking, where we empathise, define, design, test, and iterate.
4. and precisely because you’re starting from Ground Zero
I think the best part about being in a startup is that people tend to forgive you for not knowing the industry’s best practices. The community is more than happy to share with you any resources that they have, in order for you to succeed. These industry experts do not have any expectations of you, nor do they have any judgement towards you if you have any particular stance.
You have a free pass to ask any questions that might seem dumb at that point, because they do not see you as a threat, but rather, they see themselves in you — that passionate designer who is ever so enthusiastic about proposing a ground-breaking user experience. Thus wanting to make sure you succeed as well.
Conclusion
As always, I want to give my audience a useful quote that has helped me with my growth as a Product Designer:
“Whatever makes you uncomfortable, is your biggest opportunity for growth”
Humans will always gravitate towards stability, and we don’t favour change all that much. But if we just tweak this, and realise that change will always be constant, why not just be comfortable with it?
This retrospective is just my experience from beginning my career in a small enterprise. I’ve moved on from working at bantu for about a year now, but I still chose to work at an enterprise in my second job, simply because of the reasons above. Eventually, I’d love to share my experience of the latter perspective, and give a more holistic comparison. But till then, I’m still learning something new everyday. :-)
Share with me your thoughts especially for those who started their Product Design journey at a medium-large company! I’d love to connect with you and gain more insights (here’s my linkedin profile).
