Episode 152 of The Informed Life podcast features a conversation with Andy Budd. Andy co-founded pioneering UX design agency Clearleft. After leading and growing that company for fifteen years, he became an advisor, VC, and coach. He’s now published The Growth Equation, a book on how early stage startups can benefit from good design. That was the focus of our conversation.
Andy has worked to raise the profile of design throughout his career. This requires that businesses understand how design can help and that designers understand business needs. The approach many designers take — promoting design for its own sake — doesn’t cut it. As Andy put it,
I’ve always felt that design hasn’t ever quite been valued as much by people outside the design as it is by designers. And that’s understandable. We’ve made career decisions based on our love of design, so of course we’re gonna value it more than a sales person or a marketer or an engineer.
But of course, designers must work with other people. Finding ways to provide value to their colleagues helps them gain traction. Again, here’s Andy:
the only way that I think designers can have influence is by understanding what that business is and by delivering it. By understanding the pain that your stakeholders have. When your salesperson says, “Hey, look, I need these two features to be installed in order to close this half a million dollar deal,” you don’t go back to them and say, “How do I know that this is important? I need to go off and do two months worth of research to prove that this is an anomaly and this is…” That isn’t gonna make you any friends. What’s gonna make you friends is to go, “Yeah, sure. Let me move the backlog around. Let me try and get this done. Let’s squeeze this in. Let’s close that deal.” And suddenly, the salesperson, you’ve helped them not only close a deal, but you’ve helped them make their target at the end of the month, and they’re gonna really love you.
While this attitude matters in all organizations, it’s especially critical in venture-backed early stage startups. That’s because they have short windows (usually eighteen months) between rounds to prove they’re capable of generating revenue. Growth is a good proxy for value-creation potential.
Most early-stage startups are also strapped for resources. They must operate with clarity, focus, and agility. Although The Growth Equation is targeted primarily at startup founders, its underlying thesis is that design can help with all three. It’s going to be valuable to both founders and designers.