Many founders hire UX help expecting a final "graphic design polish" on an already-defined product. The real value comes from a design partner who ideates alongside the core team from the beginning, ensuring the product's structure is coherent before it's built.
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Presented with the "LinkedIn for AI" problem, the designer's first step isn't visual design. It's product strategy: clarifying the core objective (e.g., matchmaking, certification), identifying the target user groups (job seekers, employers), and defining what "a good match" even means in this new context.
Cursor's initial failed attempt at a 3D CAD tool highlights the "blind man and the elephant" problem. Despite interviewing engineers, the founders lacked an intuitive, first-hand feel for the user's daily workflow. This failure underscores that deep, personal domain experience is critical for founder-market fit, and cannot be replaced by secondhand research.
A common misconception is that user research involves asking customers to design the product. This is wrong. The process is a clear division of labor: customers articulate their problems and pain points. Your team's role is to then use its expertise and resources to devise the best solution.
Don't design solely for the user. The best product opportunities lie at the nexus of what users truly need (not what they say they want), the company's established product principles, and its core business objectives.
Not all parts of an application require the same level of design polish. Founders must develop an "editorial eye" to invest heavily in the core user experience (a 9/10) while accepting "good enough" for less critical areas like settings pages (a 5/10).
The true power of UX research is aligning the entire product team with a common understanding of the user. This shared language prevents working at cross-purposes and building a disjointed product that users can feel.
End-to-end UX is not a single function but a combination of three distinct pillars. Research keeps the team informed with data, Information Architecture (UX) defines the core structural flows, and Graphic Design (UI) provides the final visual execution. Understanding these helps clients hire correctly.
Activities like discovery interviews and seeking design partners often feel productive and validating. However, they are frequently designed to make founders feel comfortable and avoid the difficulty of real selling and deep immersion. True progress comes from uncomfortable, direct actions, not feel-good processes.
The "design partner" label switches a customer's brain from "solving my critical problem" to "having fun with a startup." This leads to feedback not grounded in real purchase criteria, steering the product in the wrong direction for the broader market that needs to actually buy a solution.
The number one reason design-led product visions fail is the exclusion of product management. Since design doesn't typically own the roadmap, involving product partners from the very beginning is critical for buy-in and ensuring the vision doesn't become a useless artifact.
