The Agency Designer Trap: Why Your Startup Needs Product DNA
The culture of the company is not only with whom you work, it's even more with whom you don't.
Just finished a call with my friend.
He caught me right after dinner, wine in hand, hoping for a peaceful evening. "Hey, I'm building this renting car aggregator app with new agent" he said, "and I need someone to help with a 10-12 screen journey over the next couple of weeks. The only alternative is this person, check the Telegram - what do you think?"
A quickly clicked the LinkedIn link. 10 sec. I told him no, promised to connect him with someone better suited, and went back to my wine. But the conversation stuck with me. Why did I respond so quickly and definitively?
Hiring an agency designer for your startup is like buying a Ferrari when what you really need is a tractor.
The Ferrari might look stunning in your driveway and turn heads at car shows, but it can't help you plow the fields that will feed your family.
You're paying premium prices for features that actively work against your needs - low ground clearance when you need high, delicate engineering when you need rugged reliability, and fancy electronics that break down in harsh conditions.
The agency designer, like the Ferrari, has been optimized for show rather than practical work. They've been conditioned to please clients, not end users.
The cost of this misalignment is massive.
Agency designers operate in isolation. They receive a brief, disappear for a while, and return with a polished solution. What's worse, they're conditioned to treat engineers as mere implementation resources rather than equal decision-makers with deep customer insights. This is particularly toxic in a startup environment, where engineers are often the ones who understand customer problems best - they're the ones dealing with bug reports, analyzing usage patterns, and seeing where users struggle firsthand. The best solutions emerge when designers work as equals with engineers, respecting their customer knowledge as much as their technical expertise.
Perfect is the enemy of shipped, yet agency designers struggle with this reality for two fundamental reasons. First, they're shaped by the billing-by-hour model, where slower execution means more revenue. Second, they're paralyzed without detailed briefs and product roadmaps – documents that simply don't exist in startups. The result? Weeks spent perfecting shadows while competitors are shipping features and capturing market share.
Agency designers get their feedback in client presentations, not through usage data and customer behavior. They've never had to own metrics. When was the last time an agency designer was held accountable for user retention or conversion rates? This lack of metrics ownership creates a fundamental disconnect from the realities of product development.
While agency designers craft pixel-perfect mockups, your competitors are shipping and learning. Being slow is more dangerous than being wrong. You need someone who can ship quickly, measure ruthlessly, and iterate based on real data. If you can't measure it, it's not real - and many agency designers have never had to operate in this reality. Design is just a part of product journey, not the journey in itself.
The skills that make someone successful in an agency are almost orthogonal to what a startup needs. You need someone who can:
1. Solve real business problems, not design exercises
2. Make autonomous decisions with incomplete information - no briefs needed
3. Ship fast, measure results, iterate faster
4. Work as equals with engineers, not just hand off designs
5. Own and be accountable for customer metrics, not just pixels
6. Communicate decisions clearly in writing, not just in Figma
There's another insidious problem with senior agency designers: they've often mastered the art of political theater. To climb the agency ladder, they've learned to excel at grand presentations about "design thinking," cosmic visions, and abstract futures - all while playing sophisticated political games. They become experts at managing up and crafting narratives, rather than shipping products.
Do you really want to import this snake-pit culture into your startup? You need pragmatic builders, not political animals who speak in TED talk soundbites about "design systems" while actually optimizing for their personal influence.
This isn't to say agency designers can't transition to product roles. Many do, successfully. But there's usually a painful adjustment period as they unlearn both the agency habits and the political games. As a startup, you can't afford to be someone's training ground or detox center. And do you have a patience and energy?
If you're founding a startup and need design help, look for designers who have product experience, even if their portfolios aren't as flashy. Better yet, look for designers who have founded something themselves or been early employees at successful startups.
Remember: you're not hiring someone to win design awards or create a portfolio piece. You're hiring someone to help your business move faster and gain market share while your competitors are still perfecting their color palettes.
Your success will be measured in weeks to market, not Dribbble likes.
Choose accordingly.