At some point while building the design team at SatSure, I realised I was not trying to help people become better designers. I was trying to make them become me. Those are very different things.
At Bempu Health, where I worked before joining SatSure, everyone on the team was a product designer in the broadest sense of the word. Research, product thinking, design, technology discussions, working with engineers, creating marketing collateral. The only thing we did not really own was pricing. It was a team where the definition of the role was wide and everyone operated across all of it.
That definition came with me when I joined SatSure as the first designer. I did not examine it. It was just how I understood the work.
What Being the First Designer Looked Like
At one point, I was working across six products in parallel alongside the product lead. I could move between them fairly easily because I had learned to understand the underlying technology, what we were actually selling, how it could be used in different contexts, and what could potentially be changed on the technology side. If something did not make sense, I would go to the tech team. Can we change the logic? Can we build this differently? What else can this become?
That felt like a normal part of being a product designer to me. It was how I had been shaped.
Then I started building the team. And somewhere along the way, I made an assumption I did not notice I was making: I expected the designers I hired to work the way I did.
The Thing I Mistook for Mentorship
I would sit with a PM and keep asking questions until I understood the business, the technology, the constraints, the use case, and the logic behind it. Then I would see someone on my team approach the same kind of problem differently and find myself wondering: why were they not going as deep? Why were they not asking those questions? Why were they not trying to understand what could be changed?
For a while, I thought I was helping them become better product designers. Looking back, I think I was partly trying to make them become me.
The feedback I was giving was technically about the work. But the underlying standard I was applying was my own working style. And that is a quietly unfair thing to measure someone against.
What the Team Eventually Taught Me
As the team grew, I started seeing strengths I had not initially given enough weight to.
Some designers were naturally much stronger at interaction design. The precision and patience they brought to a single user flow was something I would have rushed past. Some had an eye for visual detail that caught things I routinely missed. Some were brilliant at data visualisation in a way that made complex information readable without making it simple.
Some went deep into the technology in the way I did. And some were exceptionally good at understanding the person and the problem before touching the solution, which is a different and equally important kind of depth.
I started realising that a good design team does not need everyone to have the same definition of a good designer. It needs enough range that the team is stronger than the person who built it.
The Thing I Had to Unlearn
I am still figuring out exactly where the line sits between product thinking, design thinking, and product management. The boundary shifts depending on the organisation, the maturity of the product, and who is in the room.
But I know now that when I am hiring and building a team, my way of working cannot become the job description. The qualities I look for, curiosity, the ability to ask the question behind the question, comfort with ambiguity, are real. But the specific way I have learned to express those qualities is mine. It is not a template.
Going from being the first designer in a startup to building a team around you requires unlearning a particular kind of confidence: the confidence that what worked for you is what will work for everyone. The team that forms around that confidence will be a very capable version of one way of seeing.
The team that forms when you let go of it might be capable of things you have not imagined yet.