🧂5 mistakes when designing between idea and vision

Hey there. Happy Saturday! Today, I want to share common mistakes made as ideas strike and your vision begins to come to life.

How founders shouldn’t get trapped by their grand vision and design

Recently, my studio encountered an early-stage team that had gone through at least three versions of their design, created by different designers/teams, and still hadn't landed their ideal MVP.

They initially found us to redefine their brand/visual language, but after exploring their app and discussing their previous journey, we found that the bigger problems lay in the product definition.

While many startups often bring in a designer at a later stage, when everything is almost ready—just needing a designer to polish things—there's a danger in working with an inexperienced designer too early.

What are some common mistakes early-stage founders can make when designing a product?

1. Focusing only on the wrong things at an early stage

Building a product is all about launching the right features at the right time. Allow customers to experience the value of the product with minimal engineering cost, if possible. That’s why building an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is essential. Design bridges the gap between what the team is planning and the value customers receive.

While many tech founders understand the process of building a product, launching the right features at the right time with limited resources becomes the bottleneck.

In Silicon Valley, many have seen Henrik Kniberg’s famous image showing how to build a car—start with a skateboard, then a scooter, then a bike, then a motorcycle, and finally, a car. Building a product means solving the essential problem from the MVP stage, even if the solution isn't ideal or delightful just yet.

However, the mistakes I often see are that founders either focus on the grand vision of what a "perfect product" could be, causing every step to take months (sometimes years, especially for part-time teams) to accomplish, or they focus on the "look and feel" of the final product, thinking that will attract customers because their product is so different—yet it doesn't even solve the basic needs of their ICP (Ideal Customer Profile).

The right way to launch an MVP is knowing exactly the pain points of your ICP, and then delivering a product that addresses them—even if the look and feel is completely ignored. Users can still use your product to solve a particular problem.

In B2B, many build manual services before they automate them as software features. In B2C, it needs to capture the basic need even if it's not AI-driven or advanced just yet.

2. Hiring the wrong designer too early and expecting too much

It’s never too early to hire a designer as a contributor, but hiring a designer too early and expecting them to define the product's core value proposition is the wrong move.

Why? In the earliest days of a startup, the biggest risk isn’t design execution—it’s building something people want. Until the core technical insight is proven and the market need is validated, adding a designer and expecting them to "figure out" the product puts them in the wrong role. You're not asking for design—you’re asking for product-market fit, and that’s a different job.

Designers thrive when there is clarity around:

• Who the product is for (defined users)

• What problem it’s solving (a real pain point, not a guess)

• Why now (a compelling reason to exist today)

• What’s already working (data or insight from a prototype, demo, or customer conversations)

At this stage, design becomes a multiplier: it helps express the vision, reduce friction, and improve user understanding. Designers can shape flows, branding, and UX to better match the market need—but they can’t invent that need from scratch.

The wrong type of designer compounds this problem. The wrong designers will have a large gap between ideas and building feasible and viable versions of products that can be "shipped." This is the major difference between any "UX/UI designer" and designers who’ve worked at Silicon Valley startups—it’s never about how creative the ideas are or how beautiful the UI looks. It’s about understanding tech and market constraints and finding ways to design viable versions that can bring valuable insight to the team to learn and iterate. This is called product thinking, which many UX/UI designers do not possess.

I myself transitioned from graphic design to UX/UI and then to product design. In the early stages of my career, I often gave a lot of "great ideas" to the team, but I always got stuck when the CTO asked me, "But how?"

Graphic or digital designers are naturally creative and good at divergent thinking, but an even better product designer would already consider technical feasibility and only provide solutions that can be shipped NOW.

Many founders do not realize that every type of design is different. A designer who is good at branding and graphic design can be really bad at interaction and product design, while an interaction designer who thrives in wireframes and flow charts can be the worst judge of visual style. Unfortunately, startups need both to ship amazing brand experiences. Finding the right designer and team is half the success in realizing the vision a startup team is building.

The right stage to bring in a designer: Core technical and market value is defined and validated. The startup team has a clear understanding of whom they are serving and what problems they are solving at the current stage. A designer’s role is to bridge the team’s vision to customers' needs.

3. The "design by committee" trap

One of the most common yet overlooked mistakes is involving too many voices in design decisions. When founders try to incorporate feedback from every advisor, investor, team member, and potential customer, the design becomes a watered-down compromise that serves no one well.

This typically happens when founders lack confidence in their design direction or want to minimize risk by seeking consensus. The result? A product that feels generic, confusing, and lacks a clear point of view.

A related problem: Not designing for your actual users. Many teams fall into the trap of designing for themselves or Silicon Valley tech workers when their ICP is completely different in age, tech-savviness, or context of use. When you combine this with "design by committee," you end up with products optimized for the loudest internal voices rather than the people who will actually pay for and use the product.

Why design by committee fails:

• Different stakeholders have conflicting priorities and contexts

• Compromise solutions often solve multiple problems poorly rather than one problem well

• The loudest voice (often not the user) tends to win

• Decision-making becomes slow and circular

• The team ends up designing for themselves rather than their actual ICP

The danger signs:

• Design decisions require multiple stakeholder meetings

• Every feature needs approval from 5+ people

• You’re constantly revising designs based on individual opinions rather than user data

• The design keeps changing direction based on who gave feedback last

• Your product feels intuitive to your team but confusing to your target users

The better approach: 

Establish a clear design decision-maker (ideally someone with strong product sense) and create structured feedback loops. Collect input from stakeholders, but filter it through your understanding of user needs and business priorities. Remember: you’re not designing for your investors, advisors, or even yourselves—you’re designing for your users.

Great products have a clear point of view. That requires someone to make opinionated decisions based on deep user understanding, not consensus-driven compromises.

4. Don’t limit freedom in design iteration

One of the most damaging mistakes founders make is micromanaging the design process or being too rigid about their initial vision. Great design comes from iteration, experimentation, and the freedom to explore solutions that might not be immediately obvious.

When founders lock designers into a specific aesthetic or interaction pattern from day one, they’re essentially paying for execution rather than problem-solving. The best product designers need space to:

• Question assumptions about user behavior

• Test multiple approaches to the same problem

• Iterate quickly based on user feedback

• Push back on requirements that don’t serve users

This doesn’t mean giving designers complete carte blanche—it means establishing clear success metrics and user outcomes, then allowing creative freedom within those constraints. The goal is to solve user problems, not to match a founder’s initial sketch.

Some of the most successful products emerged when designers were given permission to challenge the original concept. Instagram started as Burbn (a location-based check-in app) before the team realized photo-sharing was the killer feature. Twitter began as a podcast platform before pivoting to microblogging.

5. Only design, never ship

The final and perhaps most critical mistake is getting trapped in design perfectionism—constantly iterating on mockups, prototypes, and concepts without ever putting anything in front of real users.

I’ve seen teams spend months perfecting their design system, creating pixel-perfect mockups, and building comprehensive prototypes, only to discover that their fundamental assumptions about user needs were completely wrong. All that beautiful design work becomes irrelevant when the core value proposition doesn’t resonate.

The antidote is to embrace "good enough" design that ships. Your first version doesn’t need to win design awards—it needs to solve a real problem for real people. You can always improve the visual polish, but you can’t improve something that users never see.

Successful startup design follows this rhythm:

1. Ship quickly with minimal viable design

2. Learn from real user behavior and feedback

3. Iterate based on what you discover

4. Repeat the cycle, gradually improving both function and form

Remember: A shipped product with mediocre design beats a perfect design that never launches. Your users will thank you for it.

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