Why Designers Should Be Running Startups
- Tim Hoover and Jessica Karle Heltzel contributed in Design, Business and Entrepreneurship
After leading design-thinking exercises with startups in the portfolios of Facebook Fund and 500 Startups, I realized that strong design leadership at the founding-team level is critical to an integrated and sustained culture of design. You can host design workshops, office hours and consult, which are all helpful, but often startups revert back to their existing habits, and design becomes an add on, like putting lipstick on a pig. Who is going to lead, model and inspire design behaviors in everyone at a company? Who is going to truly champion the user-experience with the authority to make decisions?
This is an excerpt from Kern and Burn: Conversations With Design Entrepreneurs, a book that features candid conversations with 30 leading designers who have founded startups, channeled personal passions into self-made careers and taken risks to do what they love. Here, Jessica Heltzel and Tim Hoover talk with Enrique Allen, who founded the Designer Fund to help designers launch new startups.
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