In this segment, Speaker B explains the common mismatch between founders' or product leaders' expectations of a designer's role—typically limited to creating the user interface—and the broader, strategic contributions designers actually provide. Designers begin by asking foundational questions about the target users, their tasks, and the underlying data structures. They then engage in extensive app mapping and data‑flow analysis, creating artifacts such as flow diagrams and data‑source mappings. These early‑stage activities often trigger "eureka moments" for startups and enterprise clients, revealing hidden complexities in how their products function and interconnect. The resulting documentation becomes a valuable reference for multiple teams across the organization, even though many stakeholders are unaware that such design work is an option.
Chapters
When a founder or a product leader first brings you in, what's usually the gap between what they think they need for their project and then what they actually need?
We'll get brought in and folks will think of design as, oh, they're going to put the interface, the interface together. And then we usually come in with, all right, we got a lot of questions like, who is this for? What are they doing? And then we kind of get into like the data side a little bit so we can understand what needs to be represented where, how does this transform throughout the process, what's important in these different roles. And we spend a lot of time working in this like foundational app mapping process with a lot of our customers. And sometimes, you know, a lot of our early-stage startups and even some of the enterprise customers, they have this like eureka moment when we go through with that because they don't always understand even how their products currently work or how those things are connected. And that helps us drive a lot of insights and really understand what's in, what's important right off the bat. And sometimes it feels unnatural for folks that a designer is coming in and doing that, especially on the, on the data side. A lot of times we'll do like flow diagrams, but really understanding like where does this come from, especially enterprise customers, because data sources come from all over the place. It's not just one single feed that pulls in and we need to understand how that stuff functions. So a lot of times we'll do that before we do any sort of interface thing. And a lot of times those artifacts become really valuable throughout the organization in a way for other teams and other disciplines to come back and look through that stuff. And a lot of people don't, they don't assume they need that or even know that's an option of something that can be created for them.
