How to keep design strategic when you’re suddenly in a startup environment
When your company shrinks back to startup size, how can you adapt?
“What am I supposed to do if my company pivots like 4 times a year?” a Lead Designer asked me recently. It’s a question that captures the current reality of design work.
While the job market remains challenging, employed designers face a different pressure: businesses are demanding faster output from smaller teams.
Many designers signed up for large teams. but now find themselves in startup environments.
A combination of AI tools and layoffs has reduced mid-size companies to skeleton crews that must operate at startup speed.
You’re being asked to work faster and more efficiently…but leadership’s vision keeps shifting.
You’re revisiting old design ideas from 2023 one quarter, then chasing completely new features the next. Different stakeholders demand different priorities, and you’re uncertain how to manage the constant pivoting.
Traditional UX processes struggle in these conditions. By the time you’ve created comprehensive user personas, detailed customer journeys, or elaborate design systems, they’re already outdated.
Even when you do create them, there’s another problem: your team actually needs to understand and use your work. Trying to do so when your company’s constantly pivoting? It’s wasted effort.
The solution? Focus on use cases.
Use Cases: Your Lightweight Strategic Tool
Use cases (also known as value propositions) are lightweight design artifacts that keep your work user-centered, even in fast-paced environments. They’re the fundamental “why” behind your product, captured in a simple, actionable format.
Jamie Levy, author of UX Strategy, illustrates this with the example of “Airbnb for weddings.”
The core use case: Would people want to book wedding venues the same way they book vacation rentals on Airbnb, rather than through traditional methods?
This simple question contains everything essential:
Who: People booking wedding venues
What problem: Traditional booking methods are complex, opaque pricing, time-consuming coordination, and no way to visualize spaces
Why it matters: Users need to evaluate multiple venues quickly, with transparent information
Proposed solution: An online platform with browsing, transparent pricing, virtual tours, and booking — just like Airbnb
The use case isn’t just a scenario description or a marketing pitch. It’s a comprehensive strategic statement that connects user problems to your solution approach. It answers both “what does the user need?” and “why would our approach work?”
It’s also naturally transitions in design artifacts, like personas or customer journey maps.
For example, you might develop a persona:
Who: Sarah, planning her wedding 8 months out, living in Boston but getting married in Vermont
What problem: She has a $5,000 budget and needs to evaluate 5–6 options this weekend with her fiancé
Why it matters: Traditional booking requires calling venues, waiting for callbacks, driving hours without knowing prices or if the venue matches their vision
Proposed solution: An online platform where she can browse venues, see transparent pricing, view photos/virtual tours, and book. Here’s her user journey through the site.
But if you don’t have that time, the simple use case keeps your team aligned on core user needs even as the product evolves.
How to Create Effective Use Cases
Here’s a practical process for creating use cases, especially in startup environments
1. Identify Your Target Audience
Start by focusing on a single, specific audience segment. While UX should ultimately serve multiple audiences, startups should prioritize their most valuable users first.
As one Principal PM told me:
“I would want UX to prioritize usability for targeted audiences. The biggest issues I’ve had with UX is them wanting to do things ‘by the book’ and try to serve everyone rather than the most valuable users.”
You need a core audience that will pay before expanding your user base.
2. Conduct Quick User Discovery
Identify 3–5 users in your target audience and conduct interviews with them about real-world scenarios. Keep questions direct and open-ended:
Tell me about your experiences trying to [accomplish this goal]
Did you run into any problems?
How did you make it work?
What have you tried?
What would your ideal solution be?
For the wedding venue concept, you’d interview people who recently booked venues (or in the process of booking).
You might learn about certain problems, such as opaque pricing, or specific contexts (planning 6–12 months), along with whether they’d pay to solve these issues.
This discovery can happen in a day or two, not weeks, especially you do guerilla user testing (like hanging outside of a shop that sells wedding dresses).
3. Articulate Your Use Case
Based on your findings, create a concise statement that captures the main problems you believe your product can solve.
This requires collaboration with your team: it’s not just about what users want, but what your business can actually deliver.
Use this simple format:
For [User Group], we’re [Doing X] because users are [Doing Y] for [Z reasons]
For example: “For couples that are unsure of what they want, we want to give virtual tours and previews because they’re currently wasting weeks calling venues and driving to know if places fit their budget.”
This single sentence becomes what your team rallies behind.
4. Refine as You Learn
As your product evolves, your use cases will shift or expand. You may discover that couples also struggle with vendor coordination. Does that fit your current use case, or is it a new one? Update your statement and move forward.
The advantage is speed and clarity. Initial discovery takes days, not weeks. Updates take hours. And you create shared language that everyone, designers, PMs, engineers, and executives, can understand and reference.
Why Use Cases Work in Fast-Moving Environments
Startups and startup-like environments struggle to maintain a consistent product vision. Leaders forget decisions. Teams chase trends. Someone suggests building a feature you already killed three months ago.
Use cases provide the North Star you need for strategic decision-making.
Use cases ground decisions in reality. When someone proposes a new feature, you can ask: Which use case does this serve? If the answer is “none of our validated use cases,” you’ve just saved your team from building something nobody needs.
Use cases create strategic alignment. You’re not just pushing pixels or following orders. You’re constantly evaluating decisions through the lens of: Does this serve our users’ real-world scenarios, and does it deliver on the promise we’ve made to them?
This is how you become a strategic designer, even in uncertain environments. By making use cases so clear and consistent that they become the framework your entire team uses to evaluate decisions.
Doing more with less isn’t about time. It’s about focus
Right now, designers are being asked to deliver more, faster. It’s the unfortunate reality of the market, and how many teams have shrunk back down to startups.
To work effectively in this environment, it’s not about compromising quality or abandoning user-centered design. It’s about focusing on what’s unchanging rather than what’s changing.
What’s changing? Tools, team sizes, organizational priorities, market conditions.
What’s unchanging? Users have specific problems in specific contexts. They need solutions that address those problems. They’ll pay for products that deliver genuine value.
The designers who thrive in 2025 can quickly identify these fundamental truths and keep them at the forefront throughout product development. Use cases are how you do that.
Your work remains valuable. You’re simply adapting your process to the constraints you face. Creating use cases involves the best of traditional design practices while ensuring that you’re not sacrificing quality for speed.
So if you’re feeling overwhelmed, because you’re in a startup but never signed up for startup life? Start creating use cases.
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and Data and Design newsletter author. He teaches a course, Data Informed Design: How to Show The Strategic Impact of Design Work, which helps designers communicate their value and get buy-in for ideas.
This is exactly what I needed at the moment! Thank you for sharing your thoughts.