Everyone Talks About Product–Market Fit. A Good Designer Can Help You Find It.

Founders pitch value.
VCs assess value.
Product managers try to deliver value.

But if I’m honest, the people I see consistently uncovering real, meaningful value — the kind that drives retention, word-of-mouth, and actual growth — are designers.

Yes, I know I’m biased. I’ve been a designer for over two decades, co-founded one of the UK’s first UX agencies, and now coach design leaders and invest in early-stage startups through Seedcamp. But having worked across both design and venture, I’ve come to believe this more strongly than ever:

VCs look for value. Designers help discover where it actually lives.

Let me explain.

Features Aren’t Value. Fit Is.

Many founders I meet are obsessed with features.
“We’ve got AI baked in.” “We just shipped four integrations.” “Our roadmap is stacked.”

But users don’t care about your roadmap. They care about outcomes. They care about whether your product helps them do something faster, better, or more easily than what they were doing before.

And that’s not about having more features — it’s about having the right features, delivered in the right way, at the right time. That’s about fit.

Designers are trained to uncover fit. Through discovery, journey mapping, usability testing, and pattern recognition, they identify what people actually need — not just what the team assumes they want, or even what users think they want. Designers go deeper to understand the underlying problems, behaviours, and motivations — the stuff that actually drives adoption and loyalty.

The Missing Thinking Style in Most Boardrooms

In business, I see a lot of deductive and inductive reasoning.

• Deductive thinking: logical, engineering-style problem-solving.

• Inductive thinking: trend-driven bets based on market momentum.

What’s often missing is abductive reasoning — the ability to look at an ambiguous set of clues and make creative, informed leaps about what’s really going on. It’s how detectives think. And it’s how great designers think, too.

That’s the kind of thinking that surfaces hidden user needs and leads to genuinely differentiated products. It’s the difference between following the trend… and seeing the opportunity before the trend takes hold.

Design Matters Most at the Earliest Stages

This is why I love working with startups at the zero-to-one stage. It’s where design has the greatest leverage.

Before there’s legacy.
Before there’s technical debt.
Before workflows get baked in.

At that stage, the product is still malleable — and a strong designer can help shape it around real user needs, not just founder assumptions. Yet too often, designers are brought in too late, expected to polish the UI of a product that was never designed for the people it’s meant to serve.

Design Is a Growth Lever, Not a Cosmetic Layer

In my book The Growth Equation, I talk about the seven core drivers of early-stage growth: audience, motivation, value delivery, stickiness, virality, friction, and competition.

Design plays a role in nearly all of them.

• It helps identify the right audience — and speak to them in a way that resonates.

• It reduces friction and accelerates time-to-value.

• It makes products more habit-forming, more shareable, and more trustworthy.

Done right, design isn’t just about making things look good. It’s about helping people feel something — clarity, confidence, delight — that makes them want to stick around and tell others.

Designers Help Spot Opportunities Others Miss

As a VC, I often get asked what I look for when evaluating startups. Yes, I care about the usual things — team, market, timing. But I also care deeply about how well a product understands its users.

Sometimes, what looks like a “small” UX issue to a spreadsheet-minded investor is actually the reason people churn. Sometimes a subtle workflow improvement is the unlock for 10x growth.

Because I come from a design background, I see those things. More importantly, I believe in the power of product experience as a competitive advantage — not just a nice-to-have.

If You’re a Founder, Ask Yourself…

• Do we understand the frustrations people have with existing solutions — or are we just hoping they’ll naturally switch?

• Do we really know what sets our product apart — not just in features, but in experience, clarity, and emotional resonance?

• Are we building around actual user workflows — or hoping people will adapt to ours?

• Have we uncovered real user value — or are we still guessing?

• Are we bringing design in early enough to shape the product — or too late to fix it?

If you're not sure about any of the above, you probably need a designer — not just to make things look better, but to help you think better.

Because uncovering value isn’t a data point. It’s a design skill.