I launched my own business in 2020 after years of helping others build their startups. You see, I’d spearheaded the creation of a venture design practice at global design consultancy IDEO. Our role: help our corporate clients to incubate startups. Because running a big company takes a very different set of skills than starting one, we’d guide our partners through everything from understanding customers to finding product-market fit to hiring a team. 

Working with company after company, I’d honed both the practice of helping startups launch well and the polish with which I supported them. I knew all the pitfalls and how to gracefully avoid them.

And yet, when I launched my own company, I fell head first into pitfalls.

Why??? 

I’d like to blame the cobbler (his children not having shoes and all), but in reality, it’s because when you’re inside the launch of a startup, you feel a sense of urgency. Generally, to get the nerve to start a company, you have to be convinced there is a problem so big that once you solve it, the world will heave a hefty sigh of relief. You’ve committed your precious time and energy to doing so, when you could be making money in other ways. So there’s that, which of course makes a founder want to skip steps. But complement that with a dose of righteousness (“I learned the rules so I can break them”): well, let’s just say it’s a recipe for disappointment.

Fast forward three years, and my startup is finally headed in the right direction and gaining traction. 

Looking back, I’m pretty sure I could have saved myself time and angst by not breaking this one fundamental rule of design: before you try to build the thing right, make damn sure you’re building the right thing.  

What do I mean by this? 

The wrong thing is something that doesn’t sufficiently solve a big enough problem for a big enough group of people who are willing and able to pay for it. A lot of founders focus on the thing part of it… but the crux of building something that scales well is actually getting super clear on the problem. It’s so tempting to short-circuit the steps that help us gain that understanding by assuming… assuming we’re the customer and we know the problem… assuming other people live and behave like we think they do… assuming that just because something is a problem, people will pay (or can pay) to solve it. 

When we start with big assumptions and launch a product or a prototype, we either end up at a quick dead end (this often feels like a marketing problem or a features problem… how can we explain our product better or add features to make it more enticing). Or worse, we pour a lot of money into it and we end up scaling problems.

Design provides a toolkit to make it easier to avoid these pitfalls. 

Design, put simply, is about making things work better for people. That could be visually (the look of an app or an item of clothing), functionally (how a room supports an activity or how a product helps you accomplish something), or organizationally (how a company is structured to support its clients and employees). 

At its heart, design asks that before you do anything, you need to really truly understand your customers and their lives. And once you understand, continually ensure you’re designing into their lives, not against them.  

Here are three ways design can help you ensure you’re building the right thing, right.

1. Designing the RIGHT THING begins by getting curious.

The first thing design teaches us, even if we think we have a great idea, is to step back and ask questions. Spend time people who could be customers and learn about their lives. This is not a chance to ask them their thoughts on your idea or prototype. (I know, it’s so tempting, but that time will come!) It’s a chance to find out how they live and what their current reality is in the realm of your product.

Hoping to provide a new tool to make retirement planning easier? Ask them to walk you through how they’re planning for retirement now. What process are they using? What are their stumbling blocks? Get curious about the difference between what they hope to do and what they’re really doing. If they feel comfortable enough, have them show you their current tools. 

Your goal? To understand the functional and emotional blocks or pain points in their current experience. And equally, to learn what their current behaviors are. Understanding pain points is important because you need to make sure you’re solving a big enough struggle that people are willing to pay to make it go away. 

And knowing their behaviors is important because unless your product is mind-altering, you’re unlikely to prompt significantly different actions. After all, the average success rate for a new year’s resolution (something that someone signs up for willingly) is 9%. It’s a safe assumption that the best way to get someone to use a new product or service is if it builds on their existing behaviors. 

So, begin by spending time with your potential customers.

Sometimes when I’m coaching founders on this part of the design process, they remind me of the infamous (and as it turns out, fictional) Ford quote: “If we’d asked our customers what to build, they’d have said faster horses.” 

That line has done the startup world such a disservice, because it makes people think they don’t need to really understand their customers’ worlds. 

Sure, if you’d asked them what to build, they couldn’t have envisioned a car. But, if you asked them what was wrong, they’d have told you things like “my dog died because we couldn’t get her to the vet fast enough” or “my business is limited to the area I can reasonably service in a day’s horse-ride” or “I’ve had constant back pain from being in a bumpy carriage all the time.” 

It was Ford’s job then to step back and reflect on what their needs were telling him, the innovator. It was his job to prototype a car and ask: is this making your life easier? It was his job to refine that car until it didn’t break down in the middle of nowhere between villages.

In the same vein, it’s your job to understand your customers’ lives and it’s also your job to make sense of disparate stories and seemingly contradictory needs. 

By doing so, you’re on the path to understanding what the right thing is to solve their problems.

In the case of retirement planning, say you’re focused on young parents. Perhaps the first thing you learn from spending time with young parents is that many are completely lacking in structure around retirement planning. But as you dig deeper, you find that they have lots of structure in other parts of their lives (like detailed family calendars) but that emotionally they’re overwhelmed by the thought of retirement planning. It feels too hard to understand what money they’ll need, and even if they could do that, they can’t fathom how they’ll get there. So, rather than building a tool for structuring retirement planning, perhaps you’re offering services to help reduce the overwhelm: a fun planning tool that comes in the form of a game they play with their kids, or a monthly supper club with other couples where they socialize and take small, positive steps towards retirement saving. 

How to get curious:

• Arrange to spend time with a handful of people from whom you can learn. Often the best candidates are demographically in your target market but behaviorally extreme: e.g., for our financial services example, young parents who’ve already built a sufficient nest egg for retirement, or on the flip side, a couple who have zero savings at all. 
• Spend time with them and ask all about them (when these conversations go well for design purposes, they often feel like therapy to the participants… it’s all about them). Ask about their goals for retirement, sure, but also about their processes, what makes it hard for them, have them draw an emotions map for the past ~10 years, showing when they’ve felt good and when they’ve felt bad about their retirement trajectory. Then ask why.
• Reflect on what you’ve learned. Does anything contradict assumptions you’ve made about your product? 

2. Designing the THING RIGHT starts with experimentation.

Once you have a sense of peoples’ greatest needs and how you might solve them, you know the thing, the product or service you’ll be offering. Now, you can begin to design the thing right. Design is just as critical in this phase as a way to determine what the best incarnation of that thing is. 

Coming back to retirement planning, let’s say you’ve honed in on solving the emotional overwhelm problem. You’re going to start with a supper club. A lot of questions need to be answered with the customer in mind: Who exactly will it target? Will they come once or over a course of months? What will be the mix of experiences in any given evening? Will they take retirement actions live at the supper club, or instead be prompted to do something the next day? Will they have homework before each session? What happens at the end of the event (whether it’s a day or a year)?

How do you answer those questions? Start experimenting.

I like to encourage founders and innovators to ask: what can we learn in a day? In a week? Design small, focused experiments that help gain confidence quickly and clearly. In order to learn quickly, the question you’re asking needs to be really narrow. Begin with the most impactful questions (the ones which, if you’ve gotten your assumptions wrong, will wreak havoc with your offering). Perhaps for our retirement example, the first question is: Shall our events focus on identifying what is needed for retirement or skills to help build that nest egg? To experiment with that, we can put up a landing page and offer two courses: one on each topic. We don’t even have to plan them out, simply give an overview of what they’ll take away. And see where the signup weight is going: are more people signing up for one or the other? 

Continuing to flesh out the experience is a process of unpeeling the layers of the onion: asking and answering the biggest and most impactful questions then moving on to the next ones. We keep doing this in iterative design cycles until we’re at some of the more minute details… until we’re finally down to small details of the experience. At its best, this feels like a continuous process of experimenting, learning, refining, and doing it all over again. 

How to start experimenting:

• Map out all the questions you have about the product or service you hope to build. Make sure you challenge yourself to identify what you know for sure and what you think to be true. 
• Consider which are the biggest questions. These tend to be the ones which could up-end your plans if you got the answer wrong. 
• Craft a really small, simple experiment in which you learn more about that answer. Challenge yourself not to build out a fully functioning experience in order to do that. 

3. Designing the RIGHT THING RIGHT requires reflection and humility.

Say we’ve honed in on solving the emotional overwhelm aspect of retirement planning and we have experimented with supper clubs. We are now at one of the most critical moments of designing an amazing service: making sure the customers we’re serving love what we’re offering. They have to be loving it so much they’re telling other people about it. They must be so confident in the benefits we’re delivering that they’re paying us. If they are not doing those things, it is not a marketing problem or a features problem… it’s that you haven’t hit on the right thing for the people you’ve decided to serve.

If you find yourself blaming the marketing messaging or thinking “if we just add X feature, they’ll love it,” challenge yourself to ask if that’s really what’s going on. So often when I hear that, I dig in and find that the team doesn’t truly understand the customer’s pain points. Catching this requires us to be really honest with ourselves and to have the humility to ask: What have I missed? What else can I do to learn from my customers? 

I advise founders to be checking for customer love BEFORE they have any significant product or revenue. If you’ve solved the right problem well, a simple prototype or partially working alpha product will garner rave reviews, even in its imperfection. The more you build out a product (especially starting to code it up) before getting to this point of confidence, the more you believe your assumptions are facts… and the harder it is to unravel and correct course. 

How to reflect with humility:

• As you start to match customers to your product, be honest with yourself. Are they paying you enough that you could make a business out of this? If the answer is no, don’t justify it away (e.g., once I’m at scale I can charge less). Instead, get curious about why the answer is no. 
• Then, run more experiments to learn more. 

If you’re building a startup or launching a new product or service, I encourage you to pin these two questions on your wall and come back to them frequently:

• Am I building the right thing? (People are paying well for it and telling others about it.)
• Am I building the thing right? (Customers are finding it easy to find, use and pay for.) 

And then grab from the designers’ toolkit by getting curious, designing experiments, and reflecting with humility. 

I promise, there’s no shame in circling back to the first question again and again. Take that from someone who quite literally wrote the playbook and is still iterating on her own product design. Luckily, I caught myself early enough in the process that I hadn’t spent a lot of money. Because after all, it’s much easier to learn and pivot when you’re at the start than after you’ve invested time and money in building out the wrong thing.