Best Practices
All the examples below are my first-hand experiences with startups and hopefully this helps prevent the same from happening to your product.
Hiring freelancers/agencies instead of hiring partners.
Agencies train their designers to sell whatever they've designed and not to design what's best for the product and the users. They do not have a company's long term goals in mind.
Problem
Freelancers tend to prioritize quick deliverables over long-term product growth, which can lead to a lack of continuity and commitment.
Example
A seed-stage startup, Company A, hired an agency to design their product from scratch. Agency designers never own product outcomes, only deliverables. This resulted in outdated UI and poor UX, caused low user adoption and high churn. Company A later spent 3 out of their 12 months of runway revamping the entire product to fix these issues.
Prioritizing speed over product architecture.
If you want sustainable speed for years, you need to map out all possibilities and take a scalable approach to designing your MVP. Startups often prioritize short term speed in the first few months at the risk of losing speed later on due to a weak product foundation.
Problem
Many startups underestimate the value of building a strong foundation early on. This oversight can severely impact the product’s scalability, leading to costly maintenance down the line and unnecessary use of their limited runway.
Example
Company B, a seed-stage startup, was heavily engineering-led. Their product ended up being complex, with technical jargon and confusing navigation. The issue became apparent when they adopted a partial PLG model, and the product struggled to retain users. To recover, they halted feature development for 4 months to revamp their product architecture and fix the usability issues.
Overlooking the user experience.
This might seem obvious, because many founders preach this but don't practice. Asking the user for direct feedback is very important in your goal to build a product that users will adopt.
Problem
If the goal of a feature is simply to make it functional, the bar is already set too low. Many companies build products that cater to their internal preferences rather than focusing on the user, which often backfires in the long run.
Example
Company X launched their product on Product Hunt, and it quickly went viral, attracting a large number of users. However, most of them churned due to a confusing UX. This happened because the team relied solely on internal testing, where testers, already familiar with the product, overlooked key usability issues.
Chaotic product process.
Successful products always have a Product Led culture. Not engineering led, where engineers decide the scope of the feature (they only prioritize what's easy to execute) and not founder led (founders add a lot of scope creep) but actually product led, where the product team who is in touch with the users decide what to build next.
Problem
Many design features never make it past Figma due to the absence of a clear roadmap and prioritization framework. This wastes valuable design time that could be better spent on user research, testing, refining existing screens, or developing higher-priority features.
Example
Company Y operated on a tight release cycle, with the team constantly busy. However, only 40% of the planned goals were completed for each release. Frequent shifts in priorities, driven by a stakeholder’s uncertainty about what to focus on, derailed progress whenever their thought process changed.
Lack of UX maturity.
Stick to the basic, tried and tested processes of product building. Companies lack UX maturity either because of not hiring a good product designer or because of not listening to them.
Problem
Significant time and effort were spent designing features based on unvalidated hypotheses, often addressing problems that weren’t critical. This led to thoroughly designed but hypothetical features being released, with a high likelihood of failure.
Example
A customer told Company Z that one of their screens looked too busy. Agreeing on this single piece of feedback, the company completely revamped the screen—restructuring its architecture, rearranging sections, and redesigning components. They implemented these changes without usability testing and deployed them. Post-deployment, there was no noticeable feedback or impact, positive or negative.
