Startup By Design emerged from a simple yet unaddressed observation : ninety percent of startups fail, but there seems nothing anyone can do about it. Amongst the top three reasons is failure to achieve product-market fit. This is not a surprise if you understand that most startups are engineers and by nature engineers like to build. Empathy, something so natural to designers, and what makes designed products so useful is missing in the mindset of most engineers, and causes them to drift from the customers needs. Having been one, we know this is simply how engineers are trained.

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We wanted an approach to integrating design, empathy and emotion into the product development cycle that would help engineers self-correct, made sense to them and worked with a startups rhythm of trying things out a piece at a time. The result is four jobs, any one of which can be applied to get results immediately: 

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• Experience design helps you craft signature moments into your experience

• Experiment design helps you run experiments and validate your core bets

• System design helps you define and refine your flywheel effect from the smallest unit upward

• Product design helps you define and refine all your product touchpoints into a seamless whole

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As over one hundred and thirty startups will attest : it works.