Design Led
Every Sunday, you'll get a new lesson about product, design & startups to your inbox. Researched, heavily user focused & without fluff.
Which Role Will AI Kill First? PM, Designer, or Dev (And How to Be the Last One Standing)
This week, I built a working prototype with Lovable. No code needed. Nice UI, working buttons, mobile friendly - all without writing any code. When I showed it to my client, one of the devs said: “Ok, we are doomed now!” He said it jokingly, but… The hard truth? AI is coming for all of us - designers, developers, product managers. Not a question of if, but when. And which role dies first. Don’t close this email thinking “not another AI doom post.” I’m not here to scare you. I’m here to help...
How Stripe Used Design to Build a $50 Billion Company
Stripe is the gold standard of B2B software. Some people even call it Y Combinator’s biggest success story. If you’re a founder or designer…Chances are…At some point…You’ve opened Stripe… And thought: “Damn… why doesn’t our product feel like this?” But what exactly did Stripe do… That most startups didn’t? How did they take something as boring and complex as payment infrastructure… And turn it into something that feels… Fast. Clean. And somehow… enjoyable? Let’s break it down. First: Stripe’s...
5 Brutal Truths every Founder Needs to Hear
If you’re building a startup and it’s not working, read this. Building a startup feels amazing.Until it doesn’t. Some days, you’re on fire.You get a new idea, talk to an excited user, finally fix that onboarding bug that was killing conversions. Other days, you sit in front of your laptop, stare at the analytics dashboard, and wonder if you should just go get a job. That’s the truth nobody talks about. Before I started my design studio Grauberg, I founded a startup, raised 6-figures in VC...
Where most software loses new customers (Leak revealed)
The biggest leak for new users is right between the website and the product. Here’s the harsh truth: A beautiful website with a bad product leads to drop-offs after 10 seconds. A great product with a bad website leads to no signups at all. Only when both your website and your product work together do you get real growth. Let me show you what I mean. The 3 Startup Configurations I See Every Week: 1. Good website, bad software: Lots of signups. Exciting at first. But users drop off quickly....
What is a Designer?
What is a Designer, really? A developer can make it work.A marketer can make it sell.A founder can make it happen. But only a designer can make it feel easy. Can make it look beautiful. Can make it click. There was this post I saw recently on LinkedIn, asking what a designer actually is. And it got me thinking… For me, it’s always been the same: A designer is someone with taste. That’s it. Taste. Now what does that mean? Taste is hard to define, but easy to spot. It’s the difference between...
The Lifecycle of a Product Feature
Most features die quietly. No one uses them.No one measures them.No one dares to remove them. In fact, over 80% of new features are rarely or never used, according to a feature adoption study by Pendo. Every feature is a bet.And to know if it paid off, you need to treat it like an experiment from day one. Here’s how I approach the full lifecycle of a product feature: 1. Discovery – Where the idea comes from Feature ideas usually come from one of three places: You feel friction in your own...
Why most dashboards suck (and how to build one that doesn’t)
Dashboards seem easy to design.But building one that actually helps your users? That’s a whole different story. In fact, I’d call it one of the hardest things to get right in product design. Let me explain why. Most dashboards are just data dumps Startups love to show off. “We’ve got all this data, let’s put it in one place!” But most of the time, that data is noise. Not signal. And when users land in a dashboard filled with irrelevant charts, guess what happens?They ignore it. Or worse......
The 3 Ingredients of S-Tier Designers
With most product designers getting started through courses and YT videos, the bar of entry is pretty low. Only a handful actually got a design degree. Which is fine. You don’t need it. But it for sure helps. As a founder and agency owner, I worked with probably 100+ designers so far. Either with clients, as freelancers, or hiring them for Grauberg. I soon recognized that it’s always the same 3 things that stood out to me at S-Tier Designers. So today I want to look at them from the...
Your Users Are Lying To You (And They Don't Even Know It)
Why Most UX Research Gets You Nowhere I’ve worked with over 30+ different startups now. I’ve watched so many designers do user interviews. And I’ve noticed one thing: Your users are lying to you. They don’t even know they’re doing it. It’s not on purpose. They want to help. But UX research as we know it is broken. It gets you polite lies, not hard truths. Here’s what I saw last week: Designer: “Would you use a feature that sends you daily metric updates?” User: “Oh yeah, that would be great!”...
Webflow vs. Framer: I Built the Same Website in Both to See Which is Better
Basically what the title says. Social media discussions about the best no-code tool for websites have been heating up more and more. And I can’t stand it anymore! So let’s clarify something… I’ve been designing websites for over 7+ years now, and after trying out almost every website builder, I got stuck on two: Wordpress Webflow Onepage Squarespace Wix Framer So I decided to build the same website template on both platforms and see how they compare with each other. The result might surprise...
The Only 5 Metrics You Need to Care About as a Designer (Everything Else Is Just Noise)
After 7+ years in product design, I’ve seen designers obsess over the wrong metrics. They track everything: time on page, scroll depth, click rates, heat maps, and dozens of other data points. Yet when the CEO asks how their work moves the business forward, they freeze. Here’s the truth: You only need 5 metrics to prove your design’s value and become indispensable to any company. Not 20. Not 10. Just 5. Let me show you which ones actually matter and why most of what you’re tracking is just...
Every Sunday, you'll get a new lesson about product, design & startups to your inbox. Researched, heavily user focused & without fluff.