I work as a product designer in Sweden (3) Big companies vs. small startups

Large companies: Every decision is stressful, you need a super-sophisticated design process, and you need to be able to stick to the user experience under business goals.

Large companies tend to have a polished image and a sense of quality assurance. In the silicon stock market, everyone wants to enter the FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google), and in Sweden, everyone is talking about Spotify, H&M, Klarna and other well-known Swedish companies. There are many advantages to big companies, and today I've picked three that I think have the most impact on designers to introduce.

1. Clear business goals:
   Large companies usually have relatively clear business goals, often the revenue or net profit of the current year. The reason is that large companies have achieved the so-called "Business model/market Fit", that is, they have their own stable business profit model. Therefore, if there is no special innovation goal every year (some companies have social corporate responsibility goals, they may different), usually focusing on generating higher revenue.
   Clear business goals allow designers to draw a good target and then design. When making every decision, you can clearly know the impact of this design change, but it should be noted that one of the most important responsibilities of designers is user experience. It is necessary to balance business goals and user experience. Create sustainable products/services.
2. Complete organization and division of labor:
   Due to sufficient resources, it is relatively difficult for one person to have multiple roles, and the segmentation method of each product-team can be very detailed. The complexity of the design is lower, and the control difficulty of research variables is relatively easy. Attention will be on how resources are allocated and how product requirements are prioritized.
3. A proven design system or design principle:
   In fact, this may or may not be available, depending on how long the company has developed its own design language, but it is usually not too bad. In a company with a mature design language, the work efficiency of designers can be greatly improved. Most of the time, as long as the defined components or styles can be used flexibly, the work can be completed.

 💥 Designer's Challenge: Change the color of a button to the wrong color, the revenue will drop by 2%, and the loss will be millions!
Taking an e-commerce website as an example, a small button does not represent a button, but the key to whether the order can be completed. Therefore, in order to ensure that such situations do not occur, we will require more rigor in the design process. And what is the rigor of the process? We generally start with website/product data, flag conversion rate bottlenecks, and perform user interviews to explore why users are popping/stopping. After developing some design options, do a small-scale usability study first. The goal at this point is Still getting "views", doing a medium-scale usability research, at this time, the goal is to eliminate "use barriers", and will continue to iterate the design during the research process, and after developing a design that is most likely to improve product indicators , but also conduct a small-scale AB test (may be to select a market with a small influence first, or only cut out part of the traffic for testing), and then gradually open other traffic to test after confirming that there is no negative impact on other indicators .
Therefore, the design cycle may be very long, or it may take a long time to see your design landing. The whole design process will also require clear logic (because of A, so we design this way), the ability to verify your own design, and the ability to accept that the design you spent three months on may fail, and then quickly organize Mood, learn from failure, and jump right into the next design iteration.

What if you are…

• Design rookie: I hope to learn step by step and organized. The complete system of a large company can allow you to receive good education and training, and even have a mentor/mentee system to lead you to start your design career.
• Design supervisor, old bird: familiar with the design and development process, and able to manage the design team or product output, and can bear the responsibility and pressure. Large companies will want you as a talent, and you can also turn your past experience into Strong development capabilities drive product growth.

Xiaoxinchuang: To be able to do everything, and to be able to expand and contract freely to complete your design.

Small startups can often gather a group of like-minded partners. The atmosphere and culture in the company are very attractive. In the startups I have worked for, the enthusiasm of team members for products is higher than that of the other two organizations. Being a designer in Xiaoxin can maximize creativity and have the most capital to challenge the status quo (status quo). In addition, the following three characteristics are also hoped to be a reference for readers who want to enter new companies to design:

1. Budget is limited, flexibility is important <br class="smart">Sometimes we may read that user research requires interviewing ten people, or collecting hundreds of questionnaires to be representative, but only on the premise of limited budget It may be difficult to recruit enough respondents, or there is no way to provide research tools (such as heat map analysis tools such as Hotjar), design tools (such as Figma is free to use, but the free version still has limitations) and many more. Designers must learn to be flexible and use the resources they have to complete the design.
2. Few restrictions, large design space:
   Especially in the initial stage, the product itself may only be a very bold hypothesis, and these initial team members need to design, develop and initially verify these assumptions. Therefore, whether it is product function, user experience, or even visual style, brand, can be created from scratch, there is a great space for designers to create.
3. Low cost of failure:
   Many people fear failure, but failure is the best way to learn. The cost of failure in new startups is the lowest, because the number of affected users is small and the resources for development are few. Sometimes, before the product has become the main source of income, it will not even have a big negative impact on revenue, so it is also the most suitable for training. The "Failure is the mother of success" mentality, a place to try new value propositions.

What if you are…

• Design rookie: There are many opportunities to learn by doing in new startups. If you don’t understand or don’t know what you don’t know, you can ask Google for help. With the low cost of failure, there are many opportunities to try different design/research methods.
• Middle-level designers: Due to the less framework and restrictions, middle-level designers will have a lot of room to use what they have learned. If you have the ability of design thinking, you have a good chance to lead the direction of the product and make the product your masterpiece.

 💥 Designer's Challenge: Who Am I? Where am I?
It is very likely that early stage companies have not yet found a business model or even defined their target audience. They have successfully raised funds with a bold idea and used the funds raised to explore the company’s long-term goals. In the first two years of creation, it is often a period when funds are sufficient and the team is full of enthusiasm; but when funds are gradually burning, but a stable cash flow has not yet been found, designers may face sudden pressure, and because the direction is not yet clear, and Feeling overwhelmed.
During this period, if designers can cooperate with product managers and even marketing teams to analyze the behavior of early supporters and the values they value through user research and market research, and use this as design input, they must not only improve Problem/Solution Fit, but also start Define Product/Market Fit and use it as the cornerstone to expand your customer base.

Growth-oriented startups: The team should have strong communication skills, be able to keep up with the compact product development speed, and have the ability to position products.

When a small start-up company has survived the initial exploration/R&D stage, once it enters Vision/Founder Fit, it will start to grow rapidly. This growth may be to find Product/Market Fit faster, or it may be to quickly enter and capture the market. It also has the following three characteristics:

1. Requires immediate combat power:
   Growth startups often require innovative thinking and active product development roles when recruiting talents. That is to say, if you are used to waiting for instructions, or if you want to have time to slowly start the new job, this may not be the case here. suits you. In a growing startup, the company does not mind recruiting talents with high salaries, but it also places high expectations on talents and expects you to be the driving force for the company's growth.
2. Frequent cross-departmental communication:
   Due to the innovative features, the organizational structure is usually not very rigid, and more often a whole company will work on products/projects together as a team. Therefore, cross-departmental communication and collaboration becomes very important. The designer does not just deliver the design, but also spends more time discussing the roadmap with the product manager, confirming the technical feasibility with the engineer, and working closely with the customer service team to obtain Signals from early supporters also need to be coordinated with the marketing team to ensure consistent brand identity.
3. The rhythm is tight and varied:
   Whether exploring a new market or exploring a new product line, in many cases the last Sprint is still busy with the planning of a product, and a new project will appear in the next Sprint. It is common for projects to be shelved or terminated. After all, opinions from the market, users, inside the company, and even investors are pouring in, and the designer’s work speed is bound to keep up with the changes.

What if you are…

• Mid-level designers: I think mid-level designers are best suited to hone in on growth startups. Designers in this period have been able to independently produce high-quality design products. The environment and challenges provided by growing new ventures will allow designers to explore different solutions to the greatest extent, and even lead product development, standardize design principles, and design systems. and many more.
• Design supervisor, old bird: The design supervisor can effectively lead the team forward in the growing new venture, and can quickly discover and even solve the design problems encountered in product development, and has more experience in cross-departmental communication, so that the product can be developed at a high speed. maintain consistency in experience across changes.

 💥 Designer's Challenge: Defender warriors who defend design ideas! out!
Due to cross-departmental communication and the endless emergence of demands and suggestions from all directions, almost everyone will think that the value they care about is the most important value. For example, engineers care about the efficiency of the development process, and will want to reduce all requirements if the requirements are not directly related to product indicators; the marketing team will care more about visual effects and SEO; sometimes, if the company founder has a great idea, then this The idea is also very likely to overwhelm the designer's early research and conception, and the original design concept may disappear.
Therefore, designers need to have clear logic and superb communication skills. If the design concepts they adhere to are objective (for example, from user research) and can promote product growth to a certain extent, they should be transformed into Be the first line of defense in defending the user experience and be accountable to your users.

Before making a choice, do an in-depth user interview with yourself.

To be honest, salary and benefits are my top priorities. But when the salary and benefits are similar, in addition to seeing what kind of environment you can play in, you need to interview yourself well and ask yourself what you really need. These are the questions I ask myself when making a decision:

"What's your current work situation like? Do you like it?"

"Is there anything that needs to be changed in the current work situation?"

"Why do you want to choose this company?"

"If you join this company, what do you think your daily routine will look like? Will you like this routine?"

"How would you feel if you couldn't get into this company today?"

"If your friend or junior came to ask you the same question today, how would you advise him?"

Epilogue

Sometimes I will make choices based on certain external conditions. To be honest, H&M is not my first choice for finding a job, but at that time, my considerations were "get a work visa as soon as possible", "satisfactory salary", "enough" annual leave”, so I didn’t seriously ask myself if I really wanted this job. Of course, it can't be said that there is no gain in doing it now, but sometimes I still ask myself how long can I do this job?

Based on my own conditions, I would say that I am at this stage from a mid-level designer to a design director. If I follow this article, I suggest to you, I will think that I am more suitable for a growth-oriented startup, or a small startup. company. On the one hand, I still love hands-on design and come up with innovative solutions, on the other hand, I also want to accumulate more experience in pivot product roadmap. Therefore, when entering a super-large company like H&M, I would think that there is not much room for me to play in design, but maybe I can learn the management methods of large companies.

I hope this article can help readers who are looking for a job, and welcome to leave a message to share your different views with me!

 Thanks for reading this far! If you like my article, please help me clap 👏 and share 📣! If you have any cooperation invitations or simply want to exchange ideas about going abroad to design, you are also welcome to find me on my LinkedIn, Facebook or IG. Stella Hsiao | LinkedIn / @imsyc | Instagram / Stella Hsiao | FaceBook