Buying Design & Working With Designers
How to choose, brief and collaborate with designers and design partners as a business decision, not a vanity spend.
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Good for: founders, PMs, CTOs and heads of product deciding who to hire, what to outsource and how to structure UX work.
Someone at an event, after I mentioned the book. “You wrote about AI and design. Did you use AI to write it?” No. “Really? Not even for editing?” No. They looked confused. Not skeptical – just visibly puzzled, in the way people get when they encounter a choice they wouldn’t have made and can’t immediately…
Six months into her first junior role, she kept doing something her manager couldn’t figure out. Every time a PM overruled a design decision, she just… did it. No pushback. No “here’s why that creates a problem.” She’d nod, open Figma, and make the change. Her manager asked her about it once. “Why don’t you…
A prospect emailed last month. Polite. Clearly done their homework. “I noticed you’re not on Clutch’s top UI UX design agency list for New York. We usually only consider agencies with a strong Clutch presence. Is there a reason you’re not listed?” There is a reason. It costs $8,400 a month. The “Top UI UX…
December 2025. Video call. Client (B2B workflow automation SaaS, 8-person team, Series A): “We just spent $210,000 with a design agency in New York. Six months. Nothing works. Can you look?” Share staging link. Load product. Immediately clear: this UI/UX design agency in New York had never designed a real SaaS product before. Dashboard looked…
The UX strategist’s final deliverable was a 31-page PDF titled “Strategic UX Framework for Multi-Audience Dashboard Optimization.” Page 8 had a Venn diagram with three circles: “User Needs,” “Business Goals,” “Technical Constraints.” The recommendation in the executive summary: “Further research required to validate strategic direction.” Seven weeks. Fourteen thousand dollars. Three weeks into that engagement,…
“Mark” (not a real name, but the story is) asked me to write this. Said I’d know the model – I’m from Ukraine. Here’s what happens: Agency sells you “a full-stack designer with 8 years experience in UI/UX design and development services.” You get a junior designer in Portland who’s never written code + an…
Last year, a SaaS company paid me to fix their onboarding. Churn was 23% monthly. Brutal. First call, the CS lead opened their dashboard. Gorgeous interface. Real-time health scores. Customer journey maps. Risk alerts. Engagement tracking across seven touchpoints. “We have complete visibility.” I asked if they knew why customers were leaving. She pulled up…
When $50/hour ends up costing more than $150/hour — the math nobody wants you to see. Last quarter, a SaaS company contacted me about their UI design outsourcing disaster. They’d been outsourcing design for 18 months to “save costs.” They wanted to know why their design quality had tanked, development cycles had doubled, and their…
After designing mobile apps that made everyone miserable, I figured out which clients are worth the headache. Some 10 years ago, I’d take any UX/UI design project that walked through the door. Mobile apps, SaaS dashboards crammed into phone screens, e-commerce apps with seventeen-step checkout flows, productivity tools that required a PhD to understand. I…
Good UX is deciding what matters, in what order, for whom, under constraints you don’t control. That’s the job. AI in UX can help. But it doesn’t do the deciding. Think of it as a tireless junior: fast, keen, occasionally delusional. Useful when supervised. Dangerous when left unsupervised. I’m not anti-AI. I’m anti-theatre. I use…
