Be The Rock
Culture clubs me over the head
Startups are personality soup.
High agency founders with a propensity for delusional risk are going to come with a few neuroses baked in. That and the culture is just a bunch of weirdos in a Slack org in those first few years, so you tend to start off with a grab bag of conflicting personalities bouncing off one another. Founders have the egos necessary to lift an outlandish idea off the ground, but if you’re one or two layers removed from the top, getting the strategy right is like catching fog in a bag.
This is why being comfortable with ambiguity isn’t just a plus for designers at early-stage startups—it’s mandatory.
At bigger companies, culture is a known quantity. HR and People Ops have spent years sandblasting the edges off until everyone more or less agrees on what “collaboration” and “feedback” mean. But at a startup? Culture is still getting made. Often in the worst way possible: by accident. Erratic behavior is ubiquitous. My secret weapon? Be the rock of the team. It’s served me quite well to be the calm presence who is capable of navigating uncertainty with aplomb. As a designer, people expect you to guide the user journey and make things look good, even when the brief is vague and the resources are limited. You are, in many ways, the lighthouse.
Of course, being that calm presence means knowing how to read the emotional room. Start thinking like a therapist. Ask yourself:
Are they young and feeling territorial?
Are they neurodivergent and I’m not communicating in a way that lands?
Are they a parent, overwhelmed and distracted?
Are they just burnt out and taking it out on a Figma file?
Understanding people—truly understanding them—is underrated design work. Especially now that we’re remote and have to decode emotion through pixelated Zoom calls and emoji reactions. Have real conversations. Ask how people are doing. Stay human.
And when it comes to the work:
Always have an opinion.
Be open to being wrong.
But don’t be a pushover.
There’s nuance here, and it’s not something you can learn in a bootcamp. You’re the design expert. Act like it. Push for your vision. And when you’re off course, adjust without losing your spine. Your job isn’t just to make things pretty—it’s to push the product toward growth, product-market fit, or at the very least, software that doesn’t make people cry. That’s how you become a rock.
Setting boundaries with founders – time, expectations, when number of iterations begins to lose the forest for the trees. Know when too many iterations are just forest-for-the-trees stuff. Watch out for leadership gaslighting. And help foster a “we’re on the same team” energy so things don’t spiral into territorial warfare. If people can’t take direct feedback? That’s a sign. Maybe even a job posting.
It takes years to build a real company culture. But you can start by being the person who refuses to add more chaos to the mix.
Culture is not a feature!