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.
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.…
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.…
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…
Got a call from a designer friend last year. Voice sounded tired. “Remember that client I was excited about? The fintech thing?” “I’m two months into fixing what a design package agency did. It’s all garbage. And the client’s out of money.” “Yeah, what happened?” (This is how most design package stories end.) The Setup:…
Design RFPs have a reputation — and not a flattering one. Speaking as someone who’s spent years inside big design teams and consulting for large product organisations, I can say this bluntly: most RFPs are a mess. They reveal more about a company’s internal politics than their actual design goals.They’re often contradictory, stuffed with self-important…
I spent eight months working as Creative Director for a large, well-funded product team. Big budget, talented people, genuine ambitions. Watched them add features like collecting Pokémon cards. CRM. Then dashboards. Then analytics. Then automation. Then AI (of course). Each addition made perfect sense in isolation. Each one had a business case, user requests, competitive…
