All startups work with constraints. For some startups design & UX are less important than for others.

Products CAN succeed with crap UX (though it can severely penalize the outcome).

Products CAN NOT succeed without _product_.

So if an entrepreneur has to pick between a rails developer and a front end dev, in some cases he has to pick the backend guy.

Rock, Entrepreneur, Hard Place

Which is indicative of the problem - UX is not just about the front end stuff it's about helping define what product to build.

Y'know all of that "Get out of the building" stuff that Steve Blank goes on about? The whole validating that you're actually really solving somebodies problem?

The UX world has a phrase for that. We call it "generative user research". We have a whole stack of useful toys in our toy box for helping folk do that well. We've already made, and learned from, the mistakes that I see folk in the lean startup world making.

I keep encountering companies that are just throwing money away building stuff too early, when a half dozen five minute conversations with some actual users would help them figure out what the right thing to build is.

The model of having the UX person in "control" sucks. They should be a peer team member not at the top of the hierarchy. But the value they bring is a lot more than just making-the-product-work-nicer. The real value, especially in early stage startups, is helping figure-out-what-product-to-build.

if i'm clear, you are saying, "the backend dev won't build the right thing if they don't don't a good UI person to guide WHAT to build".

Exactly ZERO startups that require _A_ backend to be built have succeeded with the right idea of what to build but no backend.

MORE THAN ZERO startups have succeeded by buildilng backends without consulting, often building the wrong thing first, or getting lucky, or with users that accept a SUBOPTIMAL (but better than status quo) experience.

In a perfect world you get infinite resources.

Obviously I'm painting this a clear either-or dichotomy, which its not, but the point is that sometimes, due to other constraints, an entrepreneur might have to make the call.

It doesn't make him a crappy entereprenur. Please understand that when you think "I won't work with him because he doesn't prioritize UX".

Absolutely. The thing I'd like to happen is for it to be an informed call. The stereotype I keep hitting about UX work is that:

* It's expensive

* It's more cost-effective to do it late than early

* It's just about making things "pretty" / "easy to use"

When in reality the opposite is often true. For example doing user interviews and user testing early is stupidly cheap if done right. It stops you wasting money by building the wrong thing.

Please understand that when you think "I won't work with him because he doesn't prioritize UX".

I do not and would not think that.

I do think that people who don't prioritise UX often (not always) don't understand the value that UX work can bring - and think that all UX work done by bringing in high-paid agencies / consultants that do all the work up front.

I'd try and educate them with examples of how it can help save them money in the very short term.

For example - a few months back I was talking to founder who was planning to spend about £20k to develop an "MVP" for this social recommendation site he was planning. We talked through a way he could test his idea with his real users for the cost of negotiating a poster placement at a local gig (free to very low 100s of pounds), thinking up a hash tag (free) and looking at twitter during a certain period of time (free). A five minute conversation saved that guy between 15.5 & 20k that he's going to be able to spend in useful ways to further develop the concept.

Another guy I talked to was doing his "get out the building stuff" and getting out to talk to users. He was getting great feedback and was planning to build. Five minute chat about interview style and it came up that he was, unintentionally, directing the interviews towards the solution in his problem space. Gave him some tips on non-directive questions and getting users to tell stories. Got a call two weeks later to say thank you and a nice bottle of booze in the post because - when he went out again and talked to users - he discovered some new and interesting differences in what folk were saying that radically changed what he was going to build.

(Note to self: find ways to get paid for five minute conversations in coffee shops, although the whisky was nice :-)

To pick a personal example we've got an in-house project aimed at the health/weight-loss for folk who "don't go to the gym". Coz I'm rubbish at following my own advice (and was in the target group so thought I was scratching my own itch) I started building our fantastic idea straight away - coz I had a couple of weeks free and, y'know, building shit is fun :-)

And yes - once we actually put it in front of users - nobody wanted it. We'd built the wrong thing. A couple of afternoons watching and listening and interviewing folk in that market told us what was wrong with the original idea, and has given us some great ideas for what we should be building instead (basically we were building something for folk with intrinsic motivation, we should have been building something for folk with extrinsic motivation). We wasted 14 days of work because I was too dumb to spend 1 day talking to people first.

I want UX skills understood and in the hands of everybody - because in my experience its the most effective way of building successful products cheaply.

Let's face it. As an entrepreneur, you have limited resources. There're only so many dollars in the bank account. These dollars have to be stretched to cover everything from pay and benefits to basics like coffee and internet access. Few entrepreneurs have room in their budget for deadweight, and a designer who proposes things that can't be implemented is deadweight of the worst sort.

Paul Rand