I think perhaps the question we are avoiding here is exactly when it makes sense for a tech firm to bring in specialist design skills. It's easy to say "from th

I think perhaps the question we are avoiding here is exactly when it makes sense for a tech firm to bring in specialist design skills. It's easy to say "from the start", but in reality, if you've got maybe 1-3 founders starting a new tech business from scratch, it would be unusual for any of them to be a specialist designer. Maybe one of them has some decent design skills in addition to whatever their main role is, but that's probably the best you're going to get. The first hires will almost certainly need to be developers or salespeople. If you're looking for early funding, you need something to show potential investors and you need to know if you've found product-market fit. If it's a bootstrapped firm that isn't looking for outside investment, you need to bring money into the bank and establish a sustainable cash flow, and no amount of design will do that if you don't have something you can sell and someone to sell it. So realistically, you're probably looking at bringing in specialist designers no earlier than the "second wave" of employees. At that point, you probably already have some sort of MVP and maybe a few further iterations. If a designer can't come in at that stage and effectively guide the existing product towards better usability and aesthetics, I think they're going to find opportunities for work are very sparse. Then the question becomes, do all the commoditised toolkits and marketplace themes and colour scheme generators and icon packs do enough to make an early product useful before a "real" designer is involved? And I think obviously the answer is yes, because a lot of businesses have been doing that in recent years and it's worked for them. They're not ideal, but at that stage, they're good enough. And so finally, I think the fundamental issue is about how a team building a new product without a dedicated designer can use those off-the-shelf tools and make something with good enough usability to be useful and attract business, while recognising that this is ideally a temporary situation and keeping everything as flexible as possible for the next stage of design when it starts to become more important and maybe they're starting to have team members with those specialist skills coming in to take responsibility for that aspect of the product. This is a subject that I see very little discussion about, compared to all the talk about one ready-made tool or another, or how an established design team might respond to different requirements later on.