Most founders hire the wrong designer at least once. Not because good designers are rare — they aren't — but because the hiring process for design is broken in a specific way: it optimizes for the wrong signals. Founders look at portfolios the way they'd look at a photo gallery, judge polish over substance, and end up with someone who makes beautiful screens that don't hold up once real users and real constraints show up. After eleven years designing products across HealthTech, marketplaces, and brand-new startups, here's what I'd actually tell a founder to look at.
Every portfolio looks good today. Figma communities, UI kits, and design inspiration sites have made it trivially easy to produce a beautiful case study that says almost nothing about how someone thinks. What you actually want to know is: did this person make decisions, or did they make screens? Ask them to walk you through one project in detail — not the highlight reel, the messy middle. Ask what didn't work the first time. Ask what they'd do differently now. A designer with real depth will have opinions about tradeoffs; a designer with only polish will describe outcomes as if they were inevitable.
When I talk through the Piction Health case study, for example, the interesting part isn't the final body-map interface — it's the decision to split the flow into two cognitive stages (a symptom questionnaire, then a separate visual selection step) instead of asking physicians to do both at once. That decision came from watching where people got stuck, not from a template. That's the kind of story you want to hear, regardless of which project they walk you through.
You're not just hiring a set of hands — you're hiring someone you'll be in a room (or a Slack thread) with every week for months. Pay attention to how they communicate during the interview itself. Do they ask you clarifying questions about your users, your business model, your constraints? Or do they jump straight to solutioning based on a five-minute pitch? The best product designers behave like consultants first and executors second — they want to understand the problem before they touch a screen.
This matters even more at the early stage, where the brief changes weekly and priorities shift under you. A designer who needs a fully-specified ticket to move is going to be a bottleneck. A designer who can work from 'here's roughly the problem, help me figure out the shape of the solution' is going to save you months.
This is the single biggest gap between designers who look good on paper and designers who are actually useful on a team with a real codebase and a real timeline. Ask directly: how do you work with engineering? Do they think about component reuse, or do they hand off one-off screens that require custom logic every time? Do they understand what's expensive to build versus what's cheap? A designer who has actually shipped product — not just designed for a portfolio — will talk about this unprompted, because they've been burned by ignoring it before.
The MinFirmahytte project is a good example of why this matters. Designing both the consumer marketplace and the internal admin dashboard for the same underlying booking system meant every UI decision had to account for a shared source of truth — real-time availability, double-booking prevention, the whole thing. A designer who only thinks in static screens would have proposed a dozen edge cases the engineering team would have had to quietly walk back later.
A designer who has spent five years perfecting enterprise dashboards for a Series C company is not automatically the right fit for your pre-seed MVP, and vice versa. The skills genuinely differ. Early stage design is about speed, ruthless prioritization, and knowing what to leave out. Scale-up design is about systems, consistency, and not breaking what already works for thousands of users. Ask candidates directly what stage of company they've designed for most, and listen for whether their answer matches what you actually need in the next six months — not in some hypothetical future where you're Series B.
Agencies sell you a team, but early-stage startups rarely benefit from a team — they benefit from continuity. A single designer who owns your product end to end (brand, UX, UI, and enough of an eye toward implementation to work directly with your engineers) will make faster, more consistent decisions than a rotating cast of specialists who each only see their slice of the problem. You lose a little bit of specialist depth in any one discipline, but you gain something more valuable at this stage: one person who actually understands why every decision was made, and can adapt as the product — and the company — changes shape under them.
If you're trying to figure out whether that's the right fit for where you are right now, I'm happy to talk it through — no pitch, just a conversation about your specific stage and what you actually need. Get in touch and let's figure it out together.
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