What Working With Startup Founders Taught Me

Introduction

Five years ago, I thought my job as a product designer was to create great interfaces. Looking back, I don’t think that’s ever been the hardest part. The products I’m most proud of weren’t successful because of beautiful screens. They became better because the teams behind them made better decisions. Working with founders has changed how I think about product design. I expected to spend most of my time in Figma. Instead, I found myself spending more and more hours in workshops, user interviews, product discussions and whiteboard sessions. Some of the most valuable work happened long before a single screen was designed.

Founders rarely need more ideas

One of the first things I noticed is that founders almost never struggle to come up with ideas. If anything, the opposite is true. There are always more ideas than time, budget or engineering capacity. The difficult part isn’t generating another feature. It’s deciding which ideas are actually worth building. Every feature comes with a cost. Every decision means saying no to something else. The best founders I’ve worked with weren’t trying to build everything. They were constantly asking themselves what mattered most right now. Over time, I realised that a big part of my job wasn’t contributing more ideas. It was helping create enough clarity that the right decisions became obvious.

The best conversations were rarely comfortable

Some of the most valuable meetings I’ve been part of started with someone asking a difficult question. “Do users actually need this?” or “What problem are we really trying to solve?” Those conversations weren’t always easy. Sometimes they challenged weeks of planning or an idea the whole team had become attached to. Looking back, they also saved months of unnecessary work. I’ve learned that the best founders aren’t attached to features. They’re attached to solving a problem. That’s a very different mindset.

Speed only matters when the direction is clear

Startups move fast, and that’s one of the things I enjoy most about working with them. Ideas become prototypes within days and decisions happen quickly. At the same time, I’ve seen how easy it is to mistake speed for progress. Shipping features quickly doesn’t help if the team is still unsure who they’re building for or which problem they’re solving. In those moments, slowing down for a few hours to talk to users or challenge assumptions is often the fastest decision a team can make.

Great products are built through conversations

One thing I’ve come to appreciate is that the best product ideas rarely belong to one person. A founder understands the market. An engineer sees technical possibilities and constraints. A designer notices where users struggle. Everyone brings a different perspective and the best solutions usually emerge somewhere in the middle. Some of the strongest product decisions I’ve been part of weren’t the result of one brilliant idea. They came from many small conversations where people challenged each other’s assumptions until the right direction became clear.

Looking back

If there’s one thing these last five years have taught me, it’s that great products begin with clarity. Beautiful interfaces matter. Thoughtful UX matters. Fast execution matters. But all of those things become much more effective once a team is aligned on the problem they’re actually trying to solve. That’s why my favourite part of product design isn’t creating interfaces anymore. It’s helping founders understand their users, make difficult product decisions and build products that solve problems worth solving.