The job isn’t designing the product, it’s deciding if it’s the right one

Most founders think they need someone to design the product. What they actually need is someone to question whether the product they have in mind is the right one.

Those are not the same job and the gap between them is where most early-stage design leadership either earns its place or quietly fails.

I have been in early-stage environments long enough to know that the brief you receive on day one is rarely the brief that matters. Not because the founders got it wrong, but because founders are close to the problem. Too close, sometimes, to see its full shape. The story they tell themselves about what they are building is the story that got them funded and got the team moving. It is a necessary story, but it's almost always, incomplete.

When I joined Casim as VP of Design, the company had a clear product ambition. AI-first eInvoicing infrastructure for the UAE market. Compliance-heavy, trust-critical and genuinely hard. They knew what they wanted to build. What they needed was someone to stress-test whether what they wanted to build was actually the ceiling of what was possible.

Not flows, not a design system, not a brand. Research, real research.

That is what I did first. Talking to the people this product would serve, understanding the compliance anxiety that sits in every finance team in the region, mapping the competitive space and where everyone else was getting it wrong. Looking for the gap between what the market was offering and what businesses actually needed.

What came back was bigger than anyone had aimed for.

I brought the findings to the CEO and the team. I showed them the opportunity spaces, I showed them where the initial product concept would eventually hit its ceiling and how far beyond that the real opportunity sat. I showed them what it would mean to build not just a product but a category.

It’s an interesting feeling when you have conviction, have finished talking and the room goes quiet.

And then, it didn't. Smiles, nodding and comments I won't repeat here. The kind of positive energy that only appears when a team sees beyond their own horizon for the first time and realises the view is better than they thought.

That moment is what changed everything. Not a solution, a new way of seeing the problem, grounded in user perspective and translated into what that means for the business. From there, the work became something different, because we had a better question to answer and a vision none of us had fully seen before that conversation.

The organisation needs to see through the same lens

I built the lenses through which the whole organisation could see what we were doing and why. Across brand positioning, AI interaction models, the design system and the product journeys, I built the strategic playbook the whole organisation operates from.

That’s the job. Turning an idea into a direction the whole company can see, use and commit to.

We had no legacy systems to work around. No politics. No ways of working that predated us. What we had was a blank slate and a team willing to follow the thinking wherever it led. That is not a comfortable environment for everyone. For me it is where the best work happens.

You're probably hiring for the wrong thing

If you are building something early-stage, the question worth asking is not who can design this product well, it is who can tell me whether this is the right product to design. Those are different people. The second person is harder to find, harder to evaluate in an interview and significantly more valuable at the stage you are at. You need someone who can build, not just run.

If you are a design leader, the question is simpler - are you solving the problem in the brief, or are you questioning whether the brief is right. Only one of those changes what the company becomes.

We could have released something with the original idea. It would have found an audience but it would have found its ceiling faster than anyone realised, by which point everyone else would have caught up.

What we built instead, was a reason for that ceiling not to exist.