Becoming a Designer Founder

User experience (UX) designers add necessary perspective and skills to early-stage companies, which are often overweighted with technical and business expertise. UX designers’ aptitude for considering holistic systems, desire to understand human motivations, visual thinking superpowers, and dedication to validated learning make them valuable early hires for startups. Increasingly, designers are taking more strategic roles at early-stage companies, but founders with a background in design are still relatively rare.

Watch this presentation to hear me talk about:

  • Why I joined Brooklyn Copper Cookware
  • Ways my UX career prepared me to be a designer founder
  • Consultant thinking versus owner thinking
  • What it means to be a design-led company
  • Examples of UX practices used at Brooklyn Copper Cookware

Thanks Mary Treseler and Leah Buley for inviting me to present “Becoming a Designer Founder” at the O’Reilly Design Conference in San Francisco March 2017.

Founder Myopia

My friend Ben Yoskovitz, author of Lean Analytics invited me to present at the AB InBEv ZXlerator program on June 21, 2016.

This talk was a new direction for me. Instead of talking “to” founders about what they should do, I’m now able to speak “with” founders and share my own direct experience. In this talk I discuss a common error of perspective founders can succumb to, illustrated with examples from my own company, Brooklyn Copper Cookware.