Every designer has felt it: that pang of frustration when you’re asked to make a product worse. Maybe it’s hiding a feature behind a paywall. Maybe it’s adding extra steps to the sign-up flow to capture more data. Maybe it’s cramming in additional ads in places you know will annoy people, just to squeeze out more revenue. It can feel like the opposite of what we signed up for. We’re here to improve things, not to degrade them.
One of the most common mistakes I see founders make is thinking about design too late. They’ll bring in a designer to “make things look nice” after the product is built—when the features are locked in, the UX is baked, and the real strategic decisions have already been made.
In 1999, James Dyson made a controversial decision.
After a decade of painstaking invention and a wildly successful UK launch, Dyson—the man and the company—relocated vacuum cleaner manufacturing from Wiltshire, England, to Malaysia. The move provoked public outcry. How could a proudly British inventor, one who’d made a name railing against poor design and shoddy performance, outsource to Asia?
For most startup founders, product velocity—the speed and consistency with which your team ships meaningful updates—is an obsession. And rightly so. In the early stages of a company, momentum is everything. The ability to move quickly can be the difference between winning early users or losing them to a better, faster-moving competitor.
But speed alone isn’t enough. High product velocity isn’t about frantic execution or cutting corners. It’s about consistently delivering value in a fast, focused, and sustainable way. And after working with dozens of early-stage startups, I’ve found it typically comes down to seven key principles.
In 1949, a crew of elite smoke-jumpers parachuted into Montana’s Mann Gulch to fight what looked like a routine wildfire. But within hours, the fire turned deadly. As the flames roared up the slope, their leader, Wagner Dodge, made a radical move: he lit a fire of his own. By burning the grass ahead of him, he created a patch of scorched earth the wildfire couldn’t cross. He lay in the ashes as the main fire swept over.
Starting a company is a crash course in humility. You’re juggling 100 decisions a day, half of which you’ve never faced before. You’re trying to build a product, grow a business, and stay sane—all at once.
Here are seven principles I’ve seen trip up first-time founders (myself included). If you're just getting started, I hope this saves you some scar tissue.