What Founders Get Wrong About Design Thinking (and How to Do It Right)

Research Design

Visually Mag

April 15, 2025

You’ve got a product idea, a lean team, and a short runway.
Investors want traction. Users want value. You want to launch something meaningful—fast.

But are you building the right thing—or just building fast?

That’s the question that separates clever features from real solutions.

Design thinking isn’t just a corporate buzzword. For founders, it can be the difference between spinning your wheels and building something people actually need.

Here’s how to apply the five stages of design thinking—Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test—when you’re racing against the startup clock.

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1. Empathize: Skip the Survey—Talk to People

One of the most common missteps early-stage founders make is skipping this step entirely. They assume they already know the user because they are the user—or they rely on a few survey results and move on.

Empathy goes much deeper than that. It’s about understanding the emotional and practical realities of your users’ experiences. That means observing, listening, and digging into their context.

OXO Good Grips: A breakthrough in Universal Design

OXO’s Good Grips product line is a great example. The team spent time watching people with arthritis struggle to use kitchen tools. That hands-on research led to a line of ergonomic products that not only served people with mobility issues—but improved usability for everyone.

Intuit takes a similar approach with its “Follow Me Home” program, where product teams observe users in their natural environments. That method led to over 120 product improvements for Quicken.

If you’re short on time (and you probably are), five user interviews will get you much further than 500 survey responses. Ask open-ended questions. Record calls so you can focus on listening. Look for themes and outliers—not just what users say, but what they struggle to articulate.

Empathy isn’t about checking a box. It’s about getting the clarity that helps you build something people genuinely need.

This is where many founders think they’re saving time—but skipping real empathy often leads to wasted months of development. You might be moving fast, but you'll end up lost.

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2. Define: You’re Not Building a Product—You’re Solving a Problem

After listening to users, it’s time to make sense of what you heard. This is where a lot of teams go from insight straight into feature-building—and lose the thread.

The Define stage is about taking all those raw observations and turning them into a clear, focused problem statement. Not a list of complaints. Not a wishlist. A real, user-centered challenge.

The key is to reframe what you’ve learned through the user’s lens. Airbnb didn’t just ask how to help people find cheap places to stay. They asked how to help people feel like they belong anywhere. That insight shaped their entire company.

Slack’s origin story is similar. It wasn’t just an internal chat tool—it was a solution to messy, inefficient team communication. That problem was broad, relatable, and deeply felt.

A good problem statement sounds like this:
“[User] needs a way to [solve a need] because [insight you uncovered].”

When you define the right problem clearly, everything that follows—ideas, solutions, prioritization—becomes easier.

It’s detective work. But it’s worth it.

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3. Ideate: Creativity Loves Constraints

Ideation is often misunderstood as a free-for-all brainstorming session. But in a startup context, the most effective idea generation is focused, structured, and bound by real-world constraints like time, budget, and scope.

You’re not just trying to be creative—you’re trying to be useful.

A standout example comes from the design team at Eleken, who worked with PayUp, a platform helping freelancers get paid faster. While building a new bill creation feature, the team hit a wall. Traditional forms felt clunky and outdated. So they experimented with expandable cards instead—a flexible, intuitive format that became one of the app’s defining features.

Early ideas are usually safe and expected. Real innovation comes after you’ve exhausted the obvious options. That’s why techniques like “Crazy 8s” or the “Bad Idea Challenge” are so effective—they lower the stakes and help you push past creative blocks.

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The goal isn’t to get it right immediately. It’s to explore multiple paths, quickly, and find the ones worth testing.

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4. Prototype: Don’t Build. Sketch.

This is where many founders burn valuable time and budget—by building a fully functional MVP before they’ve validated the core idea.

You don’t need to launch a polished product to test your concept. In fact, you shouldn’t.

Prototyping is about simulating the experience in the simplest way possible so you can learn from user interactions. That could mean a sketch on paper, a clickable Figma mockup, a Notion page with fake data, or a Typeform masquerading as a product.

A founder testing a local services marketplace did exactly that. He mocked up listings in Notion, collected “bookings” through Typeform, and handled everything manually on the backend. It wasn’t scalable—but it was testable. And that helped him prove demand before writing a single line of code.

Use whatever tools help you move quickly and gather feedback—Loom, Canva, Webflow, even role-playing a user flow on a call. Prototypes don’t need to be impressive. They need to be informative.

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You’re not building to ship. You’re building to discover.

You’re not building to launch. You’re building to learn.

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5. Test: Listen for the Surprise

Founders often run tests hoping to validate what they’ve already built. But real value comes from the unexpected.

Testing is where your assumptions get challenged—and that’s a good thing. You want to uncover friction, confusion, and unmet expectations before launch, not after.

Take a usability test with just five users. Watch how they interact with your prototype. Don’t explain. Don’t guide. Just observe.

James, a founder working on an onboarding flow, was confident the UX was intuitive. But during testing, three out of five users missed the main CTA entirely. That insight helped him rethink the layout before it went live.

Look for emotional cues—frustration, hesitation, delight. Ask simple questions like,
“What did you expect this to do?” and
“What would you do next?”

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You’ll learn more from watching than from listening. And you’ll iterate smarter because of it.

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Design Thinking Isn’t a Checklist—It’s a Mindset

You don’t need to be a design expert. You don’t need to master every UX tool, run polished workshops, or build pixel-perfect wireframes. But you do need to think like a designer.

That means staying curious. Staying close to the problem. And staying honest about what’s working—and what isn’t.

Start scrappy. You don’t need a massive research budget to talk to five users and pull out patterns. You don’t need a dev team to prototype an idea with a Google Form or a Notion page. The key is momentum, not perfection.

Keep your users close. They’ll tell you where you’re off track—if you’re willing to listen.
And keep your ego closer.

Design thinking only works when you’re more interested in solving the right problem than being right about your solution.

And remember: this process isn’t linear. It’s messy, iterative, and full of loops. That’s not failure—that’s progress.

This week, talk to one user. Just one.

Ask better questions. Don’t sell—listen.

Design thinking starts there.

What Founders Get Wrong About Design Thinking (and How to Do It Right)

What Founders Get Wrong About Design Thinking (and How to Do It Right)

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