Olivia’s SaaS company was at that exciting messy stage where early success creates as many questions as answers. Her platform helped mid-sized retailers bring together their sales and stock data, the kind of tool that when it worked smoothly, felt like a superpower. Customers were signing up, revenue was growing, and investors were circling.
But with growth came growing pains. Their product development roadmap was overflowing with ideas. The team had doubled in six months and hiring was still reactive. The culture, so alive when five people huddled round a table, was stretching under the weight of ten, then twenty.
This was opportunity, and Olivia could feel it: if they wanted to keep building momentum, the business itself needed to be designed just as thoughtfully as the service they sold.
That realisation sent her back to first principles. Not to ask, “what’s broken?” but “what could be designed better?”
What it really means to be “well designed”
In business, design is too often treated as surface polish, branding, logo colours and website, or the final coat of paint before you go to market. But the kind of design that shapes lasting companies runs deeper. It’s about the experience people have when they interact with your product, your team, or your culture.
A product can be technically sound but still feel confusing. A hiring process can find great candidates but leave them disheartened by day three. A team can have the right skills but waste energy in clumsy meetings.
Every one of these moments is design at work. The question that remains is whether you’re designing your company deliberately or by accident.
Seeing design with fresh eyes
Olivia began the reimagining of business design by pulling her team away from their internal debates and back into the world of their customers. Instead of assuming they knew what was best, they watched real people use their service.
Two developers sat with new customers setting up accounts. Someone else phoned three retailers who had signed up and then drifted away. When Olivia shadowed a support call, she saw that they didn’t pitch, defend, or explain, they noticed and observed.
By the end of the week, the office walls were covered in sticky notes: “Confusing setup,” “Data import anxiety,” “No clear ‘win’ in week one.”
That last one in particular stood out. Everyone had been talking about “activation” – that critical point when a trial user decides the software is valuable enough to pay for. But no one had described the first emotional moment behind that decision, the instant where a customer thought, “yes, this is worth my time”.
Framing the opportunity
Instead of saying “let’s fix onboarding,” the team wrote a sharper statement:
“First-time admins need to feel an early sense of momentum, ideally within the first 30 minutes, because otherwise setup feels like a chore with no payoff.”
This more focussed approach opened up the opportunity to put customer usability first. It became the guide the team could use to measure their decisions against. Every idea, every feature, every conversation now had a clear test: does it help new users feel momentum early?
Prototyping the moment, not the monster
Rather than building a polished new onboarding system, the team sketched quick prototypes.
Ahmed, one of the developers who had been with the company since the early days, mocked up a banner nudging users to import a single dataset. Another teammate drew a five-step guided setup, showing only one screen at a time. By the end of the week, they’d tested both with real users.
Some ideas fell flat, the one that gained the most traction was when users saw a simple chart created from their own messy data. That moment, seeing value immediately, became a key KPI. Now the team could stop drowning in a backlog of feature rollouts and start working on the smallest, fastest path to a meaningful first result for their clients and trial users.
Designing the team as carefully as the product
Olivia realised the same principles applied inside the company. As her company grew, hiring felt rushed and culture sometimes felt fragile. These too she recognised, were design opportunities.
They reframed job descriptions around outcomes, not CV checklists. “In six months, this role will have achieved X.” Candidates were asked to complete a short, real-world exercise: “Help a confused customer make sense of their data.” It revealed skills, but also empathy and communication.
They mapped an onboarding journey for new hires day by day. Then they tested it with a current team member. Friction points surfaced immediately and were designed out before the next person joined.
For culture, Olivia introduced a small experiment: a Wednesday Demo Circle, where anyone could share a work-in-progress project in five minutes. Feedback had to be specific, constructive and open minded. At first it was clunky, but soon it became a ritual of speed, trust, and shared learning.
The loop that builds momentum
At its core, Olivia’s team discovered a simple loop:
- Observe real people. Spend time listening to customers directly and watching how they use your product. It brings fresh insights and builds genuine empathy across the team.
- Frame the opportunity clearly. Turn what you’ve seen into a sharp, inclusive statement of the need. It gives everyone a shared focus and a sense of purpose.
- Prototype something small. Build a lightweight version that captures the essence of the idea – your own version of a minimum viable product. It doesn’t have to be polished; it just needs to reveal enough value for people to react to. This approach creates momentum, reduces wasted effort, and helps the team learn at pace. (For more on MVP thinking, I’ve written here: What is Innovation and How to Do It?)
- Test it quickly. Share your prototype with real users as soon as you can. Their reactions provide clarity and help the team move forward with confidence.
- Learn and repeat. Capture what surprised you, refine your approach, and loop again. Each cycle strengthens both the product and the company’s ability to adapt.
Keeping focus where it belongs
Whenever questions arose about why the team was spending time on design rather than simply racing ahead with operations, Olivia brought out the customer research. Hearing directly from users, their frustrations, their wins, and their words, reminded everyone who the company existed to serve.
That practice became a cultural anchor. Instead of slipping into internal debates, the team learned to come back to the customer’s voice. It stopped being about what they thought was right and became about what worked for the people using their product.
It’s a simple discipline, but a powerful one. In fact, many start-ups get stuck not because they can’t build a product, but because they never achieve true problem–market fit; the alignment between what’s built and the problem it genuinely solves for customers. I’ve written more about that here: Why Start-Ups Sometimes Fail. Designing around the customer isn’t a distraction from growth; it’s the foundation of it.
The rebuild: Clarity, momentum and trust
It didn’t take long before Olivia’s company had a streamlined their onboarding flow so that it delivered a clear first win in under 30 minutes. Activations went up and support tickets dropped. More importantly, the team itself felt lighter. Hiring was sharper, culture was steadier, and their new Demo Circle became a weekly highlight.
None of it required sweeping transformation. Just the discipline of noticing, designing deliberately, and testing quickly.
That’s the opportunity in front of every founder: to treat the way you build your business with the same intentionality as the products you sell.
What’s next
If you’re building, scaling, or still shaping product–market fit, assume everything is designable; your roadmap, your hiring, your rituals. So pick one small opportunity this week; observe a customer in action, rewrite a job spec around outcomes, host a five-minute demo circle. Then loop it, learn it, and repeat it.
Because the businesses that last aren’t the ones that grow fastest. They’re the ones that are designed, step by step, to keep growing with purpose.
Mark Jarvis
6x Founder | Interim MD | NED | Coach & Mentor
Author of:
The Very Best Business Handbook You’ll Ever Own
The 63 Point Business Blueprint
Work with me:
I build companies worth owning by supporting owners, founders and leaders to create a scalable business that works without them, Book a call with me here to ask a question and get started.
Remember, there are only three types of people – those who make things happen, those who wait for things to happen, and those who talk about why things don’t happen for them. Which one are you?
Recent Comments