My first week at Sell2Rent, I sat in the marketing meeting on Monday and the dev meeting on Wednesday. Nobody else was in both rooms.
Marketing needed things built: landing pages, email automations, lead capture tools. Dev had no idea why any of it mattered. I was the only product designer in a startup of 35 people. My job description said “design.” But what I saw that first week told me something different.
The gap between those two rooms was where everything was breaking.
The Plugin Nobody Asked For
The marketing team had been trying to automate asset creation with Canva for weeks. I knew Figma could handle it better. Nobody asked me to build it. I proposed it, built a plugin in one week, and shipped it.
Then the VP of Marketing left. Seven days in.
Leadership vacuum. Projects with no owner. A colleague took the seller side. I took everything else: investors, all company design, and every orphaned project on the board.
What Adaptability Actually Feels Like
Here’s the part that never makes it into LinkedIn posts about “growth mindset” or “wearing many hats.” Adaptability doesn’t feel like a strength when you’re living it. It feels like you’re abandoning what you trained for.
I migrated the CRM from Zoho to HubSpot. It had been paid for four months. Nobody was using it. I built the entire investor pipeline from scratch: lifecycle stages, email sequences, automation triggers, matching logic between deals and investors.
Then the brand refresh. Then the full website redesign. Then CRO across the entire site.
Here’s what nobody tells you about startup design leadership: the job expands to fill whatever gap nobody else is filling. That’s not a bug. In an early-stage company, that’s the design brief.
The Numbers That Changed My Perspective
One of many CRO optimizations: a legal disclaimer popup at the end of the lead form. It covered the company legally but scared users away. I turned it into a pre-checked checkbox with hyperlinks. Same legal coverage, zero friction. Result: +18% converted leads. Each potential lead averages $22,500 USD in revenue for Sell2Rent. One design decision, measured with real A/B testing in Pagesense.
That’s one example. Two call-to-action buttons added to the hero section drove +10% monthly organic leads. Removing a confusing step after the address field improved form continuation by +30%.
None of that was in my job description. All of it needed to happen.
The Contrast With Pure Design
Before Sell2Rent, my work was closer to traditional product design. At Keller Offers, I spent six months redesigning information architecture and lead creation flows. At Customela, I designed 48 screens for the MVP, built a design system from scratch, and coordinated QA across two dev teams.
That work was clean. The kind of ux design process that fits neatly into a portfolio case study. You can see how that thinking translates into real projects on my work page.
But somewhere between the second meeting I wasn’t supposed to be in and the fourth project that wasn’t in my job description, I realized something: in design in early stage startups, if you see what’s broken between teams and do nothing, you’re part of the problem.
What the Best Product Designers in Startups Actually Do
The most valuable product designer in an early-stage startup isn’t the one who runs the cleanest process. It’s the one who notices what nobody else is looking at.
This doesn’t mean abandoning craft. It means expanding the definition of what your craft is for. The ux design process you practiced in your first job was built for organizations with clear lanes. Startups don’t have clear lanes. They have gaps, and someone has to be willing to step into them.
That someone, more often than not, ends up being the designer. Not because it’s in the job description. Because it’s what the company actually needs.
Am I Still a Designer?
The most valuable product designer in a startup isn’t the one with the best Dribbble portfolio. It’s the one who sees the gap between teams and fills it, even when that means stepping outside the job description.
Design got me in the door. Adaptability kept me in the room.
If you’re a designer in a startup and you feel like you’re doing “everything except design,” you might not be losing your way. You might be finding it.
If this resonates, take a look at my work to see how this plays out in real projects. And if you want to talk about what this looks like for your team, find me on LinkedIn.