BUILDING TECH PRODUCTS THAT PEOPLE LOVE REQUIRES A DESIGN-CENTERED APPROACH.
Founders who call me asking for an intro to a technical cofounder allow me to get personal - and practical with you.
Great products start with design, and design begins with the User.
We've all experienced lousy products:
Apps that aren't intuitive, so we uninstall them right away
Product assembly instructions that are difficult to navigate
Chairs that look sleek but are crazy uncomfortable to sit on
Bad products are often the result of poor design: failure to understand a user's intuitive and unspoken wants and needs.
Software products should make someone's experience more efficient, enriching, or entertaining. And to arrive there, UX designers lead the way.
In late 2014, ten months after deciding to build a tech product (a B2C marketplace), I found a technical cofounder. I'm beyond grateful for having found a partner who's an incredible human being and CTO who can build software like no other.
As we started having discussions with startup accelerators and VCs, we learned that they significantly value teams with technical cofounders. And I, too, understood the value. But, 8 months into building our product, my cofounder and I realized that we couldn't achieve a successful outcome without a UX design leader.
Building a tech product from scratch and later becoming a CEO of a software corporation that designs and builds software for clients, I learned that a design-first approach to building great software products is the only way.
A favorite quote from Steve Jobs: "Start with the User or customer's experience and work backward to the technology."
A design-first approach is not only a philosophy. It's an efficient business strategy that lends to a better product. And when all startup team members or leaders across departments at fortune 500 corporations align on design-centric thinking, it helps everyone understand what matters first!
Practical benefits of starting with design vs coding = quicker and less costly to test & determine product market fit.
Product concepts or MVPs need to find product/market fit before scaling or becoming a product that people love. Coding can follow.
High fidelity prototypes are ideal for testing concepts because founders can modify, iterate and learn a lot about their users at a relatively low cost.
Design is an iterative process that centers on the users' implicit and explicit benefits, needs, opportunity costs, and frustrations in every product development decision. An iterative design process continues to lead the growth and evolution of the product – FOREVER.
Design thinking acknowledges that there is more than one way for a product to solve a problem.
Being a designer (UX, interactive, product, etc.) means that a specific person or people in the company embodies a high level of intuition, above-average design talent, and a design process that makes design their core function and specialty.
But anyone that touches, impacts, or makes decisions about the product is a design thinker to varying degrees – and that's nearly everyone in a startup or every department head in a large corporation.
At our software corporation, NicheeStudio, no matter what "role" or "title" someone holds, everyone involved values a design-led approach and is sincerely obsessed with understanding and placing the User at the center.
If you're a non-technical founder concerned about finding a technical cofounder, find a strong UX design lead or cofounder first.
And don't get me wrong. A clearly articulated vision will attract a great team. But, if you're successful at achieving product/market fit, you'll have a far greater time attracting a CTO or Dev partner to lead your technical architecture and build.