Design – Your Ultimate Competitive Advantage Technology has flattened the competitive landscape, lowered the barrier for entry. The cost of starting a business is lower than it ever before. The ability to scale globally can happen faster than ever before. Today, having a great user experience is table stakes. The start of a good experience is a well-designed experience. Zack will teach you how thinking about the design of your product through the lens of your user is your ultimate competitive advantage.

1. DESIGN
The Ultimate Startup Competitive Advantage
Zack Onisko
CEO, Dribbble
zack@dribbble.com
@zack415

2. Hi, I’m Zack. I grow startups.

3. - Top 20 website (Comscore, 2004)
- Innovators in growth
- Focus on vitality. 140mm users
- Acquisition (over $100mm)
- Ran the Growth Team
- 30mm user signups in 90 days
- Raised $49M from top VCs
- Acquisition
- Chief Growth Officer
- Fastest first year marketplace growth
- XX% M/M revenue growth
- Acquisition
- VP of Growth
- Raised over $100M
- Profitable in 2017
- IPO Bound

4. How many of you are marketers?
! Show of hands…

6. Marketing
Product Design
User ExperienceEngineering
Analytics
Psychology
GROWTH

7. ! Show of hands…
How many of you are designers?

8. " I’m a designer.

9. In a study conducted by Stanford, it was revealed that 75% of
users make judgments (made in 1/20th of a second) about a
company’s credibility based on the visual design of its website.
Bad design = No growth
📉

10. Design is your Competitive Advantage
Technology has flattened the competitive landscape, lowered the barrier for
entry. The cost of starting a business is lower than it ever before. The ability
to scale globally can happen faster than ever before. Great design is table
stakes. The start of a good experience is a well designed experience.
🥊

11. Design is the Future of Growth
Even though we may concentrate on big data, mobile, social, or content
being the future of marketing, if you really think about it, all of these
elements are only important in how they help us to enhance customers’
experiences with our brands.
To be competitive in the market, you have to think like a designer.
📣

12. Design thinking generates
big ideas
💡

13. Big ideas yield the biggest
changes to growth
💡

14. Converge existing ideas
Make
Choices

15. Diverge new solutionsConverge existing ideas
Create
Choices
Make
Choices

16. Source: Nielson Norman Group
Innovation is the output of the
design thinking process

17. So, what is Design Thinking?
🤔

18. Design Thinking starts with Empathy.
Design Thinking is a methodology used by designers to solve complex problems,
and find desirable solutions for clients. A design mindset is not problem-focused,
it's solution focused and action oriented towards creating a preferred future.
🤗

19. End-users before Business Goals
Design Thinking philosophy requires moving the growth goals to the side
and seek to meet the unmet needs, both rational and emotional, of the user
)

20. Understanding User Needs
Design Thinking is when designing anything meant to be used by another
person—whether that’s a Facebook ad, landing page, onboarding flow, or
checkout flow—the designer must understand what that end-user needs.
*

22. Delight people with your product
Before any growth can happen, there needs to be engagement. An
engaging experience leads to a delightful experience and makes
users want to come back for more or share with friends.
😍

23. Source: Nielson Norman Group
Design Thinking Framework

24. Source: Nielson Norman Group
Sound familiar?
Lean Startup

25. Design tooling and resources have
become massively better
📐

26. Prototype faster and without a
single line of code
🙌

27. 👍

28. 👍

30. Good Design is a Commitment
Good design requires serious dedication and commitment, which must also
extend to your organizational culture, your personal working environment,
your approach to failure, risk and experimentation and to finding and
nurturing the best talent.
💪

31. Good Design is an Investment
Fortune 500 companies look at how design led companies like Apple
and Airbnb have used design as a differentiator in the market and are
making huge investments in design. In the past 5 years, the ratio of
designer to engineer at IBM has grown from 1:72 to 1:8 (1:3 for mobile).
0

32. Good Design is a Super Power
🔑
By investing in building the best user experience, your competitive
advantage becomes the design of your product, because you’ve
designed a product that your customers love to use.

33. Zack Onisko
CEO, Dribbble
zack@dribbble.com
@zack415
Thanks
🙏