When you are the first designer in a startup, your way of working quietly becomes the definition of good design. That is a problem. And it takes a while to notice it.
I had a fairly clear picture of what a product designer needed to be good at. Understand the user. Understand the business. Understand the technology. Ask a lot of questions. Go deep into the problem. Figure out what can actually be built. Then make the thing work.
It made sense to me because that was how I had learned to work. It was the model that had served me well. So when I started building the design team at SatSure, I naturally looked for people who could operate in a similar way. Not consciously. It just happened to be the lens through which I evaluated capability.
When Other Ways of Working Showed Up
Then people joined who were very good at things I was not particularly great at.
One designer would spend what felt like an absurd amount of time getting an interaction exactly right. Not the flow, not the logic, but the precise feel of a single transition. I would have moved on. They stayed with it until it was right in a way I had not trained myself to notice.
Another would catch visual inconsistencies I had completely missed. Things that, once pointed out, were obvious. But I had walked past them. They had not.
Someone else could take a complicated set of data and make the visualisation immediately understandable in a way that felt almost effortless. I would have laboured over the same problem and arrived at something technically correct and less clear.
And there were designers who did not need to understand every technical detail to ask the one question that completely changed how we looked at the problem. Where I might spend an hour building technical context before forming a point of view, they would cut straight to the human question that the technical context was failing to answer.
My first instinct, sometimes, was to think: that is not how I would approach it.
Which, I have realised, is a fairly dangerous sentence for a design leader.
How Your Way Becomes the Standard
When you are the first designer in a startup, a slow and largely invisible thing happens. Your way of working becomes the definition of good design. Not because you consciously make it that way. It just happens through the accumulation of small moments.
You hire people. You review their work. You explain how you would approach a problem. You show them what you consider good. You give feedback based on what you notice and value. And before long, everyone is getting better at doing things your way.
That sounds like it might be a good outcome. It is not. Or at least, it is not the full picture.
The whole point of building a team is that eventually it should contain capabilities you do not have. A team that has gotten very good at thinking like you is a team that has your strengths and your blind spots in equal measure. It has not expanded what design can do in your organisation. It has simply scaled you.
What I Started Looking For Instead
I have become much more comfortable with a designer solving a problem differently from how I would. What matters to me now is not the method but the reasoning. As long as I can understand why they made the choice, I can trust the choice even when it is not mine.
That distinction took me a while to land on. There is a difference between a design decision I would not have made and a design decision that lacks clear thinking behind it. I used to conflate the two. I do not anymore.
I do not want a team of designers who can all think like me. I want a team where my blind spots are covered by someone else's strengths. Where the person next to me notices the thing I walked past. Where the approach I would not have taken turns out to be the right one for that particular problem.
That is one of the less obvious benefits of building a design team. You do not just get more hands. You get more ways of seeing.
And more ways of seeing, it turns out, is the thing that makes the work better. Not more hands doing the same thing faster.