We recently announced our $17 million Series A from General Catalyst, and I wanted to recap a whirlwind ~18 months, seeing autone grow into what it is today, and the lessons learnt along the journey. I hope this is useful for anyone looking to join (or at) a Product/Design team at a fast-growing startup.
We’re hiring for an epic Senior Product Designer (UI-leaning) so if you’re interested, take a look and apply!
1. Build trust above all else
This is the #1 learning I’ve had at autone and is the biggest difference in how I approach work today to how I did in July 2023.
When you’re a capable, experienced, high-agency individual, the number 1 blocker to your success is not you, it’s the person on the opposite side of the table.
In the first 3 months I joined autone, I worked on revamping the entire platform and built a Buying module that no one else in the market offered, all while building up my retail knowledge from 0. These massive projects I tackled from the jump allowed me to showcase my skills.
But these weren’t as important as two other things I did at the same time:
- Company-wide interviews — with every single member of the team, asking them about their expectations, worries and understanding of Product & Design
- Mapping the full value chain of autone — from the buyer at the top of the funnel, all the way through to habitual use from a user
These two actions contributed a great deal to building solid relationships with those around me, laying the foundation for us to do great work together. This trust-building was as beneficial as doing great work.
But I didn’t do enough to build trust.
I had struggles.
I only did those 2 things, and I did it mainly the start. I was premature in jumping into the building and delivering too soon.
In hindsight, I would’ve spent perhaps the first week purely dedicated to building trust with the people I’d be working with closely. I’d ask questions like the following:
- What would make you trust me completely?
- What are you worried about happening with a Product Designer?
- What would you hate to have to do when working with a Product Designer?
The only caveat to this approach is that you have to be highly capable. Ultimately, you want to build trust so you can go off and do your work. If you’re not at the level you know you need to be at, you’ll build trust slowly over time, by demonstrating good work.
If you’ve already highly capable and want to be able to operate on your terms, then get to trust first.
When your work is guaranteed to be good, you want to lubricate the track for you to run free.
2. Milk the low cost of conceptualisation
Getting ideas to reality is a key goal for any product. The reality of getting to reality is a long and hard road.
Design has a massive advantage in this respect.
The cost of ‘realising’ something from an engineer’s POV is extremely high relative to a designer’s.
Engineers have to get designs, code, deploy, test, and then finally you get to feel it.
The key is for people to feel something, feel the experience, feel the product, feel the solution they crave.
For a designer to make someone else feel something, the barrier is much lower. And this is a competitive advantage.
I used to believe that I was doing an ‘injustice’ to the design process by quickly creating something in high-fidelity on Figma. To quickly visualise something would be doing a disservice to the thought and care required to truly design something great — I thought.
Ehhhhh, sure.
But sometimes, the value of visualising something trumps all.
As a designer, I can jump into Figma, grab a few components, drag some noodles and boom, I’ve got a prototype that can make someone feel something. Much harder to do that in 30 minutes on VS code.
I’ve created concepts for a new approach to parameters, an LLM-based future for our reorder module, and pitched an ultra-flexible assortment matrix to users all through quick prototyping.
Trying to do these all from as an engineer would have taken a lot more time, and carried with it a lot more risk.
Making people feel things quickly is a powerful & valuable skill for all designers. Think big in different ways you can do this in your situation.
3. More whiteboarding = better decision making
There’s something about visualising an idea onto something physical. Whether it be pen on paper or marker on board. Both of these things bring things to life.
Surprisingly, I found the value of visualisation to be a neutraliser in the issues typically faced in multi-lingual workplace.
When a French person is working with an Italian and a British Asian, on a highly technical product, a simple word like ‘customise’ can mean a lot of things.
Visualising that customisation will make it mean one thing. This brings the clarity you need to make better decisions, faster, and with real alignment.
The whiteboard allows people to be less precious to ideas. They can come and go with a single wipe. This means being objective becomes easier, and the more objective decisions you make, the better the results will be.
I often force myself and others to draw out what they are thinking. Speaking it out loud can mean so many things. And when you’re forced to get onto the whiteboard, you will often find yourself distilling down the essence of your idea/point.
Respect the whiteboard. Your future self will thank you.
4. Be extremely high agency
Whoever sets the pace wins.
This is a quote from a good friend, Timothy Armoo.
It’s an important question to ask yourself whenever you’re doing anything. What is making you do it that way? What is making you do it by that time? What is making you do it that well?
Setting the pace yourself means you control your destiny. It stops you from victimizing your situation. It means that you can push whatever you think you should push.
So, I’ve learnt to set the pace and not be as cautious in asking for permission.
To trust my gut.
But…
Only if the research has been done, the decisions can be backed up with strong justification, and when you’re coming at it for the right reasons (typically for growth in some way).
Sometimes you’ll piss people off. It’s fine. When you’re trying to do things for the right reasons people will be forgiving. Plus, no one has succeeded without pissing anyone off along the way…
So go and set that meeting, set the process, create that mockup, share it in the company channel, DM people on LinkedIn for user research, cold email Product leaders to ask for help on a specific question, offer multiple ways of solving a 25-year-old problem, create looms to explain experiences to new joiners, go to a store manager at a massive retailer and ask to see their stock-tracking app.
Do all of these things.
Set the pace, and you will win.
5. Dig deep for adjacent products
adjacent product
əˈdʒeɪs(ə)nt/ ˈprɒdʌkt/
a digital product which solves similar problems to your product, but in a different industry
The idea of an adjacent product is extremely powerful in B2B design. The types of problems you can face in B2B are often highly contextual to your industry or users.
And if you’ve got a closed-off, non-PLG market of competitors, getting access to how others have solved the same problem can be hard, often impossible.
Therefore a little bit of ingenuity can go a long way. When doing product research, analysing the deeper UX of other products can help you find one that is solving a similar problem, only that it has a completely different context or set of users. This inspiration can be invaluable.
Hygraph was a great find during my weekly product research time. It came through an episode of Sneak Peek I watched (unbelievable content you need to watch if you’re a designer).
Hygraph is a CMS, with data and configuration at the heart of the product. It houses a lot of data, and it was the perfect inspiration for some of the horizontal table designs I was working on for autone. In retail, you generally also house a lot of data, so trust me when I say this was a saviour, I mean it.
I struggled to find a solid data-heavy product to analyse with initially. HR tools came closest, but when I discovered CMS platforms, I knew I was onto something. This discovery came late in 2023, and I felt so grateful to find a product that had so many similar product challenges to autone.
Spend time to find your adjacent product, it will become a powerful wall to lean on when dealing with specific problems in your product.
Hopefully, you’ll find more than just one, and then you can start to mix and match and truly create something epic. One final tactical piece of advice on the topic of product research is this:
If you find a top-notch product you use for inspiration, don’t share it openly with everyone straight away. Ration the goodies over time, it sprinkles a touch of mystery and magic in your work.
Bonus: choose a modern design system
This last learning comes purely as it is a pet peeve.
I inherited Material UI and trust me, once you choose a design system or library, you’re not going to change it. No matter how much you think you’ll get to swapping the libraries later, you will not do it :)
Pick something modern today, and at least it won’t piss you off for ~3 years.
Medusa JS is one that’s stood out for us:
Good luck building!
If this post inspired you, let me know by email.
