UX for Business

Working in Different Companies

UX at Startups

Here, I am not talking about big, famous tech companies; those aren’t startups anymore. I mean companies that are smaller than a couple hundred people, funded by investors, and expected to grow as fast as they can.

Startups are short on time because they are growing faster than they can afford (or want to). This means they are literally running out of money at all times! And the only way to solve it is to grow their users or revenue fast enough to get more investments.

When resources are very tight and expectations are very high, you need to be a value machine. The smaller the company, the more you should focus on pure value creation. As it starts to work, you should live more and more in diagnosis mode. Generally, you don’t have time for a lot of probability work until the company becomes more stable.

Be ruthless about your own time because you need every hour of work to take you closer to more value. If you’re fine-tuning, you’re wasting time. Time is everything at a startup!

UX at Big Companies

Honestly, enterprise UX sometimes makes me sad. At the very least, it often makes me bored, because I was raised in the fires of startups; but if big companies have one advantage over startups, it is time.

Anybody working in a big company and reading this might be tempted to tell me how busy they are and how much pressure there is to deliver. Yeah, but that is not pressure caused by a lack of time. It’s caused by the complexity of ...