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.
A client – B2B SaaS, 34 employees, Series A, scaling fast – needed a contractor for a 3-month engagement. Dashboard redesign, onboarding flow, design system foundations. Senior-level work. $8,500/month. They asked me to help evaluate candidates. I look at portfolios, sit in on one call, give a recommendation. Not a formal arrangement – just something…
It was a referral. Good sign, usually. The brief was four pages. Also usually a good sign – someone had put in effort, thought things through, written it all down. Then I got to page two. “Required UX design skills for this engagement:” What followed was fourteen bullet points. User research. Information architecture. Interaction design.…
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…
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 – B2B SaaS, 41 employees, Series A – hired an agency for a dashboard redesign. Three months, $35,000, “a senior full-stack designer with eight years of UI/UX design and development experience.” Seamless handoff. No communication gaps. One person who thinks in both languages. Week ten of an eight-week project, Mark asked the designer to…
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…
