Building Product When You Have No Designer In House

I have watched several companies stall for a year on "we will start once we hire a designer".

Hiring a product designer in Japan is genuinely hard right now. The pool is small and the good ones are not moving. And even when you hire one, whether that first designer succeeds depends almost entirely on what the company has ready for them.

The conclusion first. You can get a long way without a designer. But there is one role that has to be internal, and it is not the designer.

What has to be internal is the decider

You can outsource making. You cannot outsource deciding.

What to build, what not to build, which of two directions to take, when to ship. Those are business judgements, not design judgements. An external designer can produce the material for the decision. They cannot make it.

Outsourcing without an internal decider produces one of two outcomes. Either the decision is deferred and the project stops, or the external designer decides by default and you find out later that it is not what you wanted.

So the first person you need is not a designer, it is an owner for the product. Design experience is not required. What is required is that they understand the business, can decide, and can explain the decision afterwards.

What you can do without a designer

More than most teams assume.

Deciding what to build. Talking to customers, watching how the work is done today, writing down what the actual problem is. That is a business skill, not a design skill, and people close to the operation are often better at it than designers are.

Structuring screens on paper. Appearance comes later. Which information is needed in what order, what should be seen first. Paper and a pen are sufficient, and it does not need to be neat.

Using existing components. The number of situations that genuinely require designing something from nothing is smaller than it seems. Using what exists and thinking hard only about the parts that need a decision is faster and produces more consistent results.

Fixing the words. Button labels, error messages, explanatory text. A large share of how usable a product feels is decided by its writing. Anyone with good language skills can improve it, the effect is large, and almost nobody does it.

What is worth buying in

Three things.

The initial structure. The overall approach, how screens are organised, how components are built. Getting this right at the start makes everything added later cheaper. Skipping it means rethinking from scratch every time you add something.

The two or three hardest screens. Not all of them. Have an external partner do the difficult ones, then use those as the reference for the rest internally. This works considerably better than it sounds.

One off specialist work. Accessibility, multiple languages, defining the brand. Low frequency, high expertise work is more rationally bought than held.

A workable order

Name an internal product owner. It can be someone's second role, but give it a name.

Pick one process and one screen that matter most. Trying to plan the whole product is what causes the stall.

Build just that with an external partner. Make the deliverable "this screen, plus the approach for building the next one", not just the screen. This part matters more than anything else here.

Then build the second screen internally. If you cannot, the approach you were handed was insufficient. If you can, it works.

When to actually hire

When you have built the second and third screens internally and you keep hitting decisions you cannot make confidently.

By then you can say specifically what you are stuck on, and that description is your job requirement. Posting for "a designer" without having articulated the problem produces a hire who also does not know what they are meant to do.

Most first designers who leave do so because expectations were never defined, not because of a skills mismatch. Building something small first is the most efficient preparation for hiring that I know of.