Karri Saarinen says startups should hire product designers, not just visual or brand designers, because big-company roles are too narrow. Vet them by asking about specific past work and doing paid trials. Designers should contribute within weeks, not spend months on research.
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Then people ask like, well, I don't know, where do I find a designer? I don't know, what should I hire for? So I think first of all I recommend people looking for someone who has a product design background. I think you just need to understand there's different kinds of designers. There's graphic designers, visual designers, there can be UX designers or brand designers. So it's not like every designer is the same, that their skill set is the same. It doesn't mean that these designers can't do product design. But I think it's if they haven't done any product design, then they probably need to learn a lot, which then makes things harder. So ideally you'll find someone who has a little bit experience in this. Also, I don't recommend people getting too hyped or impressed by big company names like, yeah, this person worked at Facebook or Google or something. It doesn't exactly mean that they are a good fit for your startup. The reason is that large companies, the way design works in a large company is very different than how design works in startups. In startups you just try to get things done. You need to design everything like the whole product. In the large companies, a lot of times the designers are focusing on a very small area and working on a very small kind of visual areas or just features in general. So that's why I don't necessarily recommend that. I don't think again, you cannot hire from these large companies. I would just treat it as a flag that like, okay, like we need to check like in the interviews you just need to ask them like, okay, what kind of design did you do and try to get a sense that could they be a good fit. If you don't know about design yourself, you don't have like that background. Maybe you can try to use your friends that are designers or try to use your investors or try ask your investors, do they know any designers to talk to? So I think I call as, when you're building a company, if you don't know something, ask someone to help you. And I think you always find people can help you. So very simple example, like how do you interview designers? So one thing is, yeah, you should interview them like you asked about their background. Similar to any other role. Just try to understand what they actually have done and what kind of team they worked on, how many people are in the team, what kind of accomplishments they have done and I think the next step, often you can ask the designer to do a portfolio review. Usually designers have a portfolio. They basically, or they can create one and they basically just show the work that they have done and you let them present that to you, explain why they did certain things, and then you can see their style and also understanding that. And then you can ask questions too, like, why did you choose this direction? Or how do you feel about it now? Would you change something later? And that way you can kind of get a sense what is their experience. The third step, which is sometimes I don't know if it's. It's not always possible, but you can try to ask them, like, do some work. At Linear, we've been doing this work trials where we ask people to work with us on a project for a couple of days, but we will pay for that time. So kind of like a market rate pay for that? We pay for that time. At Airbnb, we asked them to do some home assignments. I think as a startup it might be sometimes hard to ask people to do this because I don't know if someone is applying to Airbnb and we ask them, you should do an assignment, they're like, okay, I will do an assignment. But as a startup, you don't always have that leverage. But I think the other thing you could do is just to ask them, let's hop on a call, let's look at some website or some product out there, talk about it, how they would change it or what kind of things they would do to make it better. And then you can kind of see what's their style or how they approach problems. And so that can be useful to get a sense. And just like I said to expectations, I think if you're hiring someone to a startup, I think usually they should start contributing as soon as possible. I think sometimes there might be maybe some designer worked in a large company, and usually it takes months to get anything started because you need to do this research and whatever. With the startup, you don't really have that luxury. You kind of have to set the expectations. Like, yeah, we can research things, but we also need to do stuff so we can do both at the same time. Usually as a startup, you talk to people, you build something, you talk to them again. And so I think generally my expectation would be a designer should, in a couple of weeks start producing something and not be like, well, I need to research this topic for like six months. Because then obviously you will be just wasting six months, so it's better to get started faster.
