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After advising 50+ consumer companies over the last year, the one thing that separates those who can execute and those who can't:
Having a full-time designer in the room at all times
I've met with countless companies that have raised millions—and even one that has raised billions—that do not even have a designer on payroll.
This makes product development broken:
1/ You simply cannot have constructive conversations about ideas without visualizing them in real-time
2/ Your experiments will frequently have inconclusive results because users cannot discover features or they misunderstand how they work
3/ There is no one who can galvanize the team with a vision of what the product could look and feel like
And to be abundantly clear: I'm not referring to visual UI or graphics. I'm talking about someone who can think through the fundamental building blocks of product comprehension—like navigation, interaction and copywriting—and is technically savvy enough to visualize those components in high resolution.
There can certainly be exceptions to not having a designer, like where the CEO is an exceptional visual thinker, but that does not scale beyond a small team.
At the end of day, products live and die in the pixels: it's what the users see and tap. And without someone shepherding that process, you are effectively wandering the desert blind.
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