Design
I’ve lost count of the founders who’ve come to me after buying a “starter” or “small business” website design package. Same story every time: a tidy PDF proposal, a fixed number of pages, a timeline that fits neatly into a calendar, and a site that looks vaguely competent but somehow does nothing. Pretty. Punctual. Pointless.…
Most UX audits are long, expensive, and full of beautifully formatted reports you’ll never read twice. This isn’t that. This is the UX sanity check — the quick-and-dirty, seven-question sweep I use when I want to know if a product is healthy enough to survive the week. It’s not a replacement for a proper deep-dive…
Every product accumulates UX/UI debt. Cluttered flows. Unloved screens. Ghost features no one uses but everyone’s too scared to remove. The digital equivalent of that junk drawer in your kitchen — you know it’s a mess, you just don’t know where to start. Here’s the catch: fixing everything at once isn’t just unrealistic. It’s usually…
Founders love hiring. It feels like progress. A full-time designer on payroll? That must mean you’re a real startup now. Except most of the time, that hire ends up babysitting a Figma file for three months while the product spec changes fifteen times and your runway quietly dies. Here’s what actually works: a senior UI/UX…
If you’ve ever opened a Figma file and wondered whether the designer actually met a developer in their life, this post is for you. The $28K Handoff That Took 6 Weeks to Untangle B2B SaaS company. 35 employees. Growing fast. Hired an agency for their product redesign. Agency delivered 50 screens. Beautiful work. Clean layouts.…
Series A fintech startup. $12M raised. Hired “top-tier” agency for complete product redesign. Six weeks, $85K, beautiful deck. Launched Tuesday morning. Thursday: support tickets flooding in. Users couldn’t find basic features. Onboarding completion dropped from 68% to 34%. Developers filing bugs about flows that made no technical sense. Friday: emergency call. What I found: Every…
Got an email at 3:47 AM last Tuesday. “Can you change ‘enterprise-grade security’ to ‘bank-level security’ on our homepage? Investor call at 9 AM tomorrow and they kept asking about banking compliance.” Founder. Series A. Raised $8M. Could not change seven words on his own website. Worse: His developer was on vacation for two weeks.…
Got an email Tuesday morning. “Hey, can you do a quick design audit? We think our dashboard needs a refresh. Shouldn’t take long — just want to check if anything looks off. Can you turn it around by Friday?” Friday was four days away. “Quick design audit” is the second-most optimistic phrase in product development.…
This post isn’t a polite reminder. It’s a cautionary tale. A reflection, really — on every well-funded, well-intentioned product team that decided to hire a UI/UX designer… and then slowly suffocated them in a pile of Slack threads, Notion checklists, and “just a quick thought” Figma comments. Let’s call it what it is: pixel micromanagement…
Got brought in to help a well-funded American startup with their “revolutionary” product. They’d already spent $250K on branding. Had a complete brand book. Army of marketing consultants. Pre-approved UI kit. Moodboards for days. Looked impressive in investor presentations. Then I asked to see the actual product flows. “We’re still finalizing those,” they said. “But…
