Product Designers: When to Outsource vs. Bring In-House?

Perhaps you recently raised a Seed round and you’re at the point in your journey when you need to make a decision about product design: Work with an outsourced designer or bring a product designer in-house. Which do you do?

After hearing both from founders and designers in Sunflower’s network, we thought it would be helpful to pull together a quick guide for you to refer to when you find yourself at this point in your own startup journey.

Outsource your product design if:

You’re too close to what you’re working on and need a fresh take.

This is especially true for Seed stage companies that are still operating with only a few full-time people (typically the co-founders and possibly an additional 1-3 full-time hires). Internal resources may be strained. You may be feeling like you have a million other things going on and no one in-house who can really “own” product design without having multiple people to bounce ideas off of and own the process. If this is the case, we recommend working with a small studio where you can get multiple fresh perspectives from designers under one roof. Good designers love to be challenged with finding the best UX/UI solution for a product – especially at the early stages. A small design studio could feel like an extension of your team at this stage – you just need someone who is committed to running point with the team, and that all stakeholders sign off on the designs at each stage of the process.

You need to move quickly and you’re optimizing for speed.

Perhaps you need to get your product to market ASAP or there are other factors influencing your need to get a product out there and start testing it. If this is the case, we recommend outsourcing a freelancer or a small design studio to be able to mock up product screens and flows quickly and efficiently. This doesn’t mean sacrificing quality for speed, so we still recommend taking the time to partner with the right designer or studio. If you don’t know where to begin with the search for the right partner, solutions like Sunflower were built to help founders navigate this decision efficiently and thoughtfully. 

You’re still too early and you’re capital-restrained.

If you’re still ironing out your product to see if has potential, then definitely outsource your product design to a freelancer or a cost-effective design studio. If you’re capital-restrained but need to test your idea in the market, then we recommend working with an outsourced freelancer. 

Bring a product designer in-house if:

You plan to constantly iterate on your product for the foreseeable future.

If this is the case, then it’s not only more cost-effective for you to begin your plans for bringing someone full-time in-house, but it’s now critical. You’ll need someone close to the core team for an indefinite period of time, and it’ll become much easier for you to have that designer in-house to grow with your team.

You are not optimizing for speed.

If time to market is a nonissue for you, you may want to consider bringing a designer in-house. This is more of a rare instance for companies; however, it can happen. Just be sure that if you bring a product designer in-house when there’s not an urgency factor, there’s enough for the designer to work on. Otherwise, you’ll be burning through capital inefficiently.

You’ve reached the capacity of what your outsourced designer can own.

Perhaps you’ve had success working with an outsourced designer through your Pre-Seed and early Seed stages, but maybe you’ve outgrown the capabilities of what your outsourced designer can do. We hear a lot about how companies want their designers to “own” elements of the product, but when studios are also working on 5-10 other projects at a time, this can get increasingly difficult to remain a priority while only paying a retainer.

For example, we received this email from one of Sunflower Fund’s portfolio companies, and it’s a common situation companies find themselves in as they continue to grow:

“We're running into issues with our design agencies because they can't own the product as we had hoped. They were AMAZING when customer behavior and design standards weren't that important, but now we're running into issues. So we're thinking about bringing on someone in-house. How should I go about this process?”

There’s no one-size-fits-all to when you should outsource vs. bring in-house. Finding the right product designer to join your team full-time can take months, so if you find yourself nearing that decision, we recommend you start putting together your job description now and floating the role around to your networks.

We hope you’ll find this guide helpful. Good luck with your decision, and as always, we’re happy to chat if you find that outsourcing is the right solution for you at this time.