Dear (none)Designer,

Welcome back to the forty-first Design at Scale™ Newsletter – focusing on innovation and how design drives change in a large organisation or an agency.

Everybody these days is an entrepreneur, everybody is trying to reinvent themselves and build a new, well-defined online digital service or platform, so they can protect themselves and survive in the era of constant change.

Despite all the challenges and technical advancements of digital businesses, we have engaged with over the 27th startups to explore and implement a design operation model that helps them to scale.

What could be better than just designing things, building, releasing, and monetising them?

I know it sounds simple, but at the core of every business is simplicity. The majority of the startups either waste their funding on something that is not desirable or build a desirable product and forget to market it properly. Others have a very good marketing strategy and spend all the money on marketing to gain traction for the product or service that is barely surviving or solving the core value proposition for the customer.

So, where do we find the balance, and how well can we design a product or service that can help startups to get ahead of the game?

The first condition is that you actually have a startup. You have an established entity, and you do have money to survive at least for a year while you are building your dream company. This way, all your worries are going in one single direction, and it is to make your business successful.

Bringing a designer on board to your business is as crucial as choosing the technical partner, financial advisor, or accountant. There have been plenty of documented studies reflecting on the top five traits that make a startup successful.

Today, our focus lies on the design and how design can elevate your business. As everything these days is digital, it will be the design that operates in a digital space, so we will not be talking about retail, but we will be addressing everything that's happening in the digital world, healthcare, transportation, education, finance, and so on.

43% of the time is wasted on "where is my file!" This way, even startups of 5 to 10 people spent a significant amount of time on finding their source of truth.

The second most important thing is to have a clear definition of roles and responsibilities on who is making decisions. Of course, time to time we all have a great idea, but we need to ship, and the shipping should be the most important, if not the only, objective of every week's delivery. Most successful startups and even those that have significant challenges with refinancing their entire business succeeded by shipping one thing in a week. Whether we talk about a brand update, social campaign, feature or another button, by the end of Friday, this thing has to be live. Meaning it has to be defined, designed, coded, deployed, tested and released to the public.

Only this way does it mean delivered and has an impact on a business. Having a great delivery cadence for design is a fundamental step one for engaging the designers with a business, enabling the business to be more design-oriented. Fundamentally, this brings us to a design thinking, service design and integrating these two disciplines into the core of your business model.

What are you building?

The healthcare app?

Finance app or transportation service?

You will always find that dealing with customers is better with empathy and understanding their real situation in real life in a real scenario.

This way, you will not build the screens for the computers. You will build the screens for the real humans and answer some real, challenging scenarios and objectives.

Eventually, this brings us to the second part, which is production. Daily, we hear about new plug-ins, new functions, new features, and new things that make our lives easier. The opposite is the truth: having the three tools for delivering the entirety of your proposition is the key. It makes your life 10x easier; you don't have to switch from tool to tool every minute. You don't have to maintain 100 passwords to actually go around the world and log into your email – right MS Office? Above all, if you ask someone where you work, they always find you in the one place, which eventually brings your entire team together with minimal integration. This is a formula for speed: by integrating the three tools, it's probably going to take you a day or two to set it up; by integrating 150 tools and plug-ins, you get the point.

The world that we operate in our scenario sets on Office package, Atlassian and Figma. Office, whether you (are forced to) use Microsoft or Google, defines your communication channel with the rest of the world to help you organise tasks across the entire project. The biggest decision is where the truth lives, in other words, where you document your design decisions, and where is a repository of your code. Finally, Figma will operate in a space of your design thinking service, thinking, design, definition, branding, marketing and delivery.

This way linking these tools allows everybody to be in sync, not leaving them in the known, and to outperform their duties with a short period of time.

The final summary: "would this work for my startup?"

I wouldn't know. But it works for 16 out of 27 startups we have had a chance to collaborate with over the last 5 years. Now, they are using the same method, surviving the pandemic and still building their business in a digital space. This way, we can say that 60% of our partners and designers who have been advised by the Design at Scale™ have benefited from the method. From the remaining eleven, seven of them lost their funding, and four were completely unable to adopt even one thing. Therefore, this was the end of the startup regardless of the method or our ambition to help them.

For more information, please visit Designa at Scale™ – GRID Magazine, where you can find additional relevant articles that explore high-performing teams, self-organising teams of 001, teams of 010, and teams of 100 that deliver the value proposition within a product-led environment.