It will teach you everything you need, if you survive.

Designers gush about how FAANGs do design and that’s okay. FAANGs are responsible for a lot of design innovation.

However, centering the design discourse around how big tech designs warps the perception of young designers of how design should be done.

Being a solo designer is more common than you think

In the US 99.9% of all businesses are small businesses. It’s common for B2B startups to hire a designer among their first 3 hires and, for some, it’s the 19th or 20th hire.

This means that the majority of (tech) companies in the US —and probably in the world— operate with just one designer. Yet when I speak with young designers, all they want to talk about is big tech design.

I’ve been a founding and solo designer 3x in my career and I love the role. So I want to do my part in helping solo designers share the spotlight and hopefully inspire more folks to take on the challenge.

Solo designer or founding designer?

Not all solo designers are founding designers and not all founding designers are part of the founding team. Founding designer is an unofficial title some startups give to their first design hire.

However, the designers I’ve spoken to prefer the title solo designer so, for simplicity sake, that’s what I often use.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the job.

The most exciting role of your career

Being a solo designer is an opportunity to do unique work and shape the design direction of a company. You get to develop a wide range of skills and, if you’re lucky, you’ll build a team to expand on your foundations.

However, if you don’t have a lot of experience, or you prefer structured environments, being a solo designer will not be for you.

Differences with big tech

Designers at big techs work on problems that someone else scoped out. Solo designers at startups have a lot more ownership over identifying and scoping problems worth solving.

They spend a large chunk of their day aligning stakeholders. If you ask anyone working at a large organization what they spend most of their time on, you’ll get the same answer: “meetings”.

Meetings can be important work, and they can be interesting, but it’s not what many designers would call fun.

Big orgs tend to pay much better than startups. As a solo designers, a lot of your compensation will come in the form of equity — you get to own a piece of the business— and sure, until the startup hits product-market fit, equity is the equivalent of monopoly money. If that happens, oh boy you’ll have a big pay day.

You also get paid in reputation. It’s hard to put a price on the prestige of working in big tech. Your parents sleep better a night if you work at a company that “exists”. You tell people where you work and they go “oooh, nice”. But if your startup makes it, you’ll become the coveted “zero-to-one designer” that recruiters drool over and that can open many doors of its own.

Solo designer isn’t for the faint-hearted

As a solo designer you often have to navigate challenges of influence, bandwidth, and scope of responsibility. All without having other design colleagues to bounce off ideas and getting support.

You are the director and the intern. You’ll spend Mondays working on high-level strategic research and Tuesdays creating social media assets. You’ll have to do a lot of stuff most designers look down upon, like making your boss’s pitch deck “pop”.

The responsibilities that would otherwise be split among multiple designers with varying levels of experience, are now all yours. You have a lot of leverage, but it can be hard to cope, especially if you’re early in your career.

It shouldn’t be your first gig

As if building a design practice from scratch wasn’t hard enough, doing it without a frame of reference is a recipe for insanity.

As a solo designer, you don’t have a lot of time to research and figure out how to do things. You’ll do much better if you’ve worked at other companies and you have an idea of where you want to take things.

However, if you’re a speed-learning machine, it can be extremely satisfying to be able to read a book on a specific topic and applying what you learn the next day.

Be a pragmatic generalist

This is the ultimate individual contributor (IC) role and you’ll thrive if you are a generalist who can see the big picture.

For example, building a comprehensive design system should be quite far down your list of priorities. There are tons of free frameworks and templates, that it’d be foolish to burn your scarce time building and maintaining a custom library of styles and components.

Instead, you can focus on creating systems for iterating fast and hitting product-market fit as quickly as possible.

If your startup succeeds, and you get to build a team, you’ll have plenty of time to worry about building a great system.

Solo doesn’t have to mean alone

As a solo designer, you shouldn’t think of yourself as a lone wolf. Instead, you should double-down on cross-disciplinary collaboration.

In the lack of dedicated teams for research and product management you are responsible for weaving the connective tissue between customers and stakeholders.

Meet people, ask for advice, learn from others.

Why would you want to be a solo designer?

If you’ve read this far, you now realize choosing between big tech and solo designer at a startup is not that straightforward. Here’s a quick summary to help you make up your mind.

Being a solo designer means:

• Taking responsibility for the design practice of the company. Branding, visual language, research methods, and building design maturity.
• Getting to decide on the design strategy of the startup. What are your market’s unmet needs and how your startup will tackle them.
• The ultimate IC role. You get to experiment with tools and methods to figure out what works best for your startup.
• Financial and reputational equity. You have skin in the game, not only financially, but also on the attribution of success or failure.

Conclusion

Being a solo designer is not for everybody. But it’s an opportunity for you to do unique work. It allows you to develop a wide range of skills and influence the design direction of your company.

It is especially interesting for mid-to-senior designers who want to work on many different product challenges, and who already have a sense of what good design practices look like.

Sure, it doesn’t have the sex appeal of working at a big company, but I’d argue it can be a lot more fun and rewarding, if you’re a curious generalist who really cares about the work.

Sources

• The Number of Businesses in the USA and Statistics for 2024 — Stats on US businesses
• Reddit discussion on designers working at FAANGs — Reddit
• Creating a startup headcount plan — Zinc
• Hiring your early team — Lenny’s newsletter
• The user experience team of one — Leah Buley
• Designers have a seat at the table. Now what should they do with it? — Fast Company

The solo designer: One seat, all the hats was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.