Design should be fast and messy, but it is too often slow and precious: slow because most designers struggle with “just getting started”; precious because our egos are tied up in the work.
Why "starting" is so hard
Today, I want to talk about creative resistance, why we as product designers often struggle to “just get started,” and a few quick things you can try yourself to overcome it—especially during the early days of a new project.
I'm talking about the fuzzy beginnings of a project, where there's maybe a draft PRD (product requirements document) from your PM (product manager) that you're trying to make sense of—or none at all and your PM has all but vanished, assuming you even have one of those. To be clear, I want to focus less on where your PM is in the situation (probably back-to-back meetings or buried in Jira/Slack), and more on how we react to it, as designers.
(To my PM friends: I appreciate you, and I could never do your job.)
Let’s get into the 2 most common struggles designers have with “starting.”
Struggle #1: Waiting for “enough” information
As designers, we can get overly attached to process and “the way things are supposed to be”—so much so that we have a hard time accepting the way things actually are. We have a tendency to resist operating in a world where our collaborators don’t follow the “proper steps” and, more specifically, a world where we don’t have perfect information.
First of all, if you’re not getting any information at all—not even so much as a one-liner and some bullets describing the product or feature your team wants to build—yea, that’s not enough information.
But if all you do have is a one-liner and some bullets, that can actually be plenty.
When you feel like you don’t know enough to start, consider:
- What do you know? Is there anything meaningful you can do, with what you do know, to drive the project forward?
- If not, what do you need to know to get started? Instead of waiting for that information, can you go get it?
- If not, are there assumptions you can make in the meantime?
- Is there an opportunity for you to take the lead, and use design to shine a path for your team and the project?
Seeing ideas “made real” on paper is a powerful thing! Design can be a major catalyst for progress. If you draw a line in the sand, put something tangible in front of people, and it feels real enough—and it’s shared widely enough 😬—they often will have no other choice but to engage and participate in creating definition around your project (ask forgiveness, not permission).
However, to be able to operate in this way—consistently, whatever the situation—you'll need to get comfortable with making assumptions.
As an example:
- Maybe all you've been given is: "doctors need a web app to manage and send texts to their patients"—can you extrapolate?
- To start, you might assume: doctors need a way to view patients, their details, and any messages received or sent.
- You might go further: maybe doctors can email patients too, as well as send links and attachments; maybe doctors can message multiple patients at a time, automatically, based on a set of conditions.
You can easily keep going here, but think about what you know is important to the business and your users, and any context you've gathered during your time working at your company—then take a stab, and have fun with it (design should be fun). Will you get some things wrong? Definitely. But I'd bet you get more right than you think, and you'll absolutely spark some interesting conversations.
Maybe that sounds like a lot of work, and maybe a waste of time, to you. Yea, it might be. But mockups are fast, cheap, and malleable; they’re just shapes in Figma—you’re not building a skyscraper here. If you can start thinking of mockups more as a tool to facilitate higher quality conversations with others, rather than as the endgame or final outcome, that mindset shift alone will take you far.
That said, I recognize the designer role at some companies are purely executional roles, where projects are well-defined most of the time and designers get to truly focus on craft, which is wonderful (if this world exists, please DM me, I would like to see it).
However, as a designer, you will absolutely encounter projects in your career that lack definition. In those situations, there is real opportunity for you to show your worth as a designer, beyond moving pixels in Figma. For all you budding design leaders who are hungry to grow and do more, be a true XFN (cross-functional) partner to your product and engineering counterparts, and use those design skills to help shape and “find the edges” of your projects, together.
Stop waiting for perfect information, or permission.
Struggle #2: Letting ego drive
Let’s face it. As designers, we all want our teams, peers, and managers to look at our design work and go:
“Wow. Yes. That is the answer, and what a beautiful answer it is. We can all go home now.”
This desire to impress others and prove that we’re good designers—our ego—it can compel us to wait too long to share our work with others, because we’ve set our bar too high. It can even lead us to choosing the wrong place to start: maybe a part of the project that’s easier, more fun to work on, and we know we can make visually impressive—but isn’t the most critical challenge to tackle first.
“But I just want to do the fun parts and make things look good.”
Y’all...there are already too many people that think of design’s role as “just making things pretty.” I won’t hold it against you if that’s all you care about, but that’s not all a product designer does.
It’s okay to want to do a good job. It’s okay to want to have fun. You can do a good job, and have fun, while still prioritizing the most critical work and lowering your bar for what’s ready to share.
Three things that come to mind here:
- Get comfortable doing—and sharing—mediocre (even bad) design, especially during the beginnings of projects. It is normal that your first ideas aren’t your best ones. You get through the bad ones, to get to the good ones; that is just a natural part of the process.
- Be ok with not having the answer right away. Instead, use design to facilitate more productive working sessions with your team, to arrive at a solution together. Being the idea person is overrated. Being an effective facilitator and synthesizer of ideas for your team is a way more valuable skill.
- Do design work, that aren’t mockups in Figma. Craft as a product designer is more than visual. Stop leaning on high-fidelity mockups as a crutch to prove you’re a good designer. Maybe the challenge at hand is more interaction design than visual; you might consider wireframes, user flows, or breadboards. Or maybe it’s more of an IA challenge, and you need to map out a taxonomy. Or maybe your team hasn’t even figured out what they want to build yet; help them figure it out.
The key to overcoming creative resistance—your insecurity, self-doubt, and perfectionism—is to take your ego out of it. Breakdown the challenge in front of you, pick a place to start, pick a tool from your toolbox, time box the effort, share early and often, and enjoy the process.
Here’s an affirmation for you, for the next time you’re in front of a mirror:
“I design to solve problems for people. My designs don’t need to be perfect or pretty to have value, but I am capable of making pretty things, when I so choose. I am a good designer, and I am enough.”
