Your assuming a lot about what's being built. If you start designing a UI for a USB stick you have already failed. how are people going to interact with this?

Your assuming a lot about what's being built. If you start designing a UI for a USB stick you have already failed. how are people going to interact with this? UC1, you plug it in and it works. UC2, you unplug it and it keeps your files. End of use cases. That's not to say design is unimportant, just that plenty of teams are better off adding there 30th coder before their first designer. Others may be better off adding there 10th designer before there 2nd coder, but I have never heard of them.