Starting out in UX? How a startup might offer you better opportunities

5 things UX professionals need to know about working for startups

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

If you're looking for your first job in a recession, look towards smaller businesses and startups for better opportunities.

That's advice I received from the Recession Proof Graduate by Charlie Hoehn, and it's allowed me to have the UX career I have today.

I've spent half of my decade-long UX career working for startups and small businesses and learned a few key lessons the hard way. For example, I was fired from the first startup I joined because I didn't realize the company needed more than just UX.

So if you're a UX job-seeker and you're thinking about taking the plunge into the world of startups, here are 5 key lessons to take away.

"What else can you offer?" Or choosing multiple hats to wear

There's no getting around it; UX is not so important that it's the only thing you can do at a startup.

There are only two jobs in a startup that are allowed to wear only one hat:

1. Executives/decision-makers like CEOs/COOs

2. Revenue-generating jobs like Sales

Even Engineers wear multiple hats, doing QA and front/back end work or looking at Web Analytics to understand what's happening.

So if you sit around until it's time to do UX, you won't be at the job long. One thing that you need to consider is what else you can bring to the table. Here is a list of "other hats" I've seen UX people wear at startups:

1. Business/Product Knowledge (i.e., "Product Designer")

2. User/Business Research (Doing Competitive Analysis, SWOT analysis, etc.)

3. UX Writing/Copywriting

4. Data-Informed UX Design/Analytics

5. Front End Developer knowledge

6. Graphic Design/Infographics

7. etc.

However, while wearing multiple hats may be recommended, the primary purpose of UX Designers in startups is not to be a jack-of-all-trades: it's to reduce ambiguity.

Reducing ambiguity: your primary purpose in a startup

Startups are ambiguous by nature.

There is little time to document everything, and the roadmap or product direction might change (along with your priorities) from week to week.

However, there are likely two core truths that the business follows, and one of them is about your job:

1. The business will have established a "North Star Metric," which is a measurement crucial to long-term success

2. Your job is to ask questions, sketch ideas and cut down on ambiguity until your team finds the right path

For example, a business might want to create a community of user-generated content, with their "North Star Metric" being an increase in Monthly Active Users (MAU). Unfortunately, that may be all they know at the start, and it's your job to clarify what that means.

You would research to determine who your users are and what motivates them to contribute to communities. You would also question the business to determine if this is a marketplace, a community forum, a library of templates, or more. You'd then turn those into design sketches based on your knowledge to make what we're offering users more straightforward.

This is one of our hidden superpowers as Designers: the ability to hear an idea, understand it, and visualize it through sketches, design artifacts, and more.

Photo by picjumbo.com: https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-printer-paper-196645/

This is at the core of what UX offers, and it's what you should augment with those other hats you might wear.

However, there are other things to keep in mind. For example, one thing I didn’t expect when I started working in this environment was that it could be a little lonely (and awkward).

You'll often find yourself as a UX team of one

I’ve often been a UX team of one in startups and small businesses. As a result, I've often had to develop methods, practices, and resources to ensure I cover everything I need during my processes: if I don't, no other UX person will pick it up.

As a result, one of the things I've had to learn was how to ask for help. One strategy that has helped me during this time was ensuring that it is straightforward for other team members to provide you with the help you need.

One thing I always needed help with, for example, was getting participants for user testing (or other feedback) through e-mail. Unfortunately, my users were often busy, and I was often just another random person asking for their help.

As a result, I developed a strategy to leverage my boss's help (and authority): I would write an e-mail to my boss that spelled out exactly what to ask this person. All they had to do was copy and paste it (and send it to the user), but because it came from them, there was a greater likelihood of getting a response and scheduling a time.

This ties into the next point.

You have to seek out feedback, no matter how awkward it might be

The other part of working as a UX team of one is that you need to be the one that seeks out feedback. You might not have design reviews other than your bosses' final approval, but you must feel confident enough to hand off your designs to Engineering.

This is why you need to seek out feedback, no matter how awkward it might be to ask.

Ask to be part of sales calls and demos. Schedule time with customer support or ask to be included in e-mail threads. Use Tag-along meetings to get a 5-minute reality check scheduled during meetings. You might even bug other departments (like marketing or such) for feedback if necessary.

This was one of the most challenging lessons as an introvert, but one of the oddest strategies that helped me was telling myself that I didn't know everything about a subject.

For example, I only knew some of what there was to know about Network Monitoring or Clinical pathways, so it was better to ask people for guidance rather than make crucial errors in my design.

Lastly, you need to be aware of one more truth about working for startups. You must learn to prioritize and accept that things won't be perfect.

Learn to prioritize outcomes for MVP

You will always need more resources to do everything you need to make the user happy. However, if you learn to prioritize what is necessary, you can deliver value to users, even if it comes as a skateboard.

The two models of MVP and how to approach it

This model of the MVP comes from Henrik Kniburg, and it's crucial to understand how UX can help. First, MVP means you must limit the scope of features to bring value to the user immediately.

Rather than offer the customer a wheel (i.e., a polished feature but an incomplete product), offering the bare minimum end-to-end flow is best to get users interested in this right away. So UX needs to consider the bare minimum of features that are likely to bring value to the users and get them to engage with us.

If the MVP doesn't drive enough value, you won't have a second iteration: you (and many others) will probably be out of a job. So one last thing to remember is to understand which features to prioritize immediately to ensure you deliver enough value to the customer to do another revision.

If that sounds hard, it can be at times. However, it was the best thing I could have done for my career.

Working for smaller companies offers the chance to polish UX skills

By now, I've spent nearly half my working career in startups and small businesses.

Now that I have, I probably wouldn’t return to the large organizations I started in. The larger organizations were a steady paycheck and a great place to learn as a Junior UX Designer, but you never really get a chance to test yourself (most times).

The Design system was set, the rationale and research had been done, and there were a few things that I could influence. You might have felt this, too, if you were ever on a project that touched the home page of your organization's website.

Suddenly, you'd find yourself in tons of meetings, as many different teams had to talk among themselves to figure out what (if anything) you could change.

Working in small organizations, whether an early-stage startup or something a little more established, allow you to test and polish your skills. Of course, there is the danger that if you screw up entirely, you could damage the business, but you will probably get fired before then.

However, working in these environments is a place that not only allows you to improve your design skills: it allows you to learn how to make a significant difference with your designs as well.

So if you’re tired of looking at job boards of super large organizations, consider how life might be, working with smaller organizations or even startups. It's a real opportunity to become a better UX Designer and grow as long as you can work in an unfamiliar environment.

Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer, Data-Informed Design Author, and Data and Design newsletter author. His new free book, The Resilient UX Professional, provides real-world advice to get your first UX job and advance your UX career.