Jim Zarkadas

Shipping a feature is the "easy" part. Getting people to adopt it is the actual project. Quick intro if we haven't met: I'm Jim, founder of Love at First Try. We embed top 3% product design teams into SaaS companies to grow them to their next million: designers who think like founders and design like builders. At one of the SaaS companies where we lead product design (scheduling software for cleaning businesses), customers had been requesting checklists for years. Cleaners get a to-do list per appointment, mark items done, and the owner can send the completed checklist to customers as proof of a job well done. Building it was the smaller half of the work. Making people adopt a feature comes down to two things: make it insanely easy, and keep the motivation super high. Here's what that looked like in practice: 1/ Surface it where people already are. Owners spend 90% of their time in the calendar, so the appointment sidebar is where the feature gets discovered. We added a small "Try now" to bring attention to it. 2/ Empty states that sell. Not "No checklist applied" but "Keep this appointment up to your standards by using a checklist." Sell the why, not the what. Plus a 5-minute demo video for people who want to see it first. 3/ Templates to kill the micro decisions. A new user doesn't know what a great cleaning checklist contains, they're figuring out their business as they go. A blank editor is pure friction. But a template raises its own objection: why should I trust it? So we answered it: these are real checklists from our own customers making over $1M/year. Start from a proven one, edit, done. And before any of this: research. Feature requests on Canny, support tickets, actual customer calls, then a scope with MoSCoW (must/should/could/won't have). That's PM territory, and honestly that's where great feature adoption starts, not in the UI. For the PMs and devs reading: next time you ship something, budget as much thinking for the adoption path (discovery, empty states, first-run friction) as for the feature itself. A feature nobody adopts is just maintenance cost. Hope you found this useful! Every Tuesday I share stories and tips on growth design and how we grow SaaS products with it, feel free to connect if you want to follow along :) --- FYI if you're a SaaS founder making $25k+ MRR or more and feel your onboarding can do better: you can get a FREE video of one of our ex-Zapier growth product designer using your product as a first-time user and sharing 5 easy UX fixes within 48h. Lemlist ($10M+ ARR) did one, and Jerome (CEO of CaptainBook) called it "so valuable, I recommend this to anyone serious about their SaaS". Why free? Cause we prefer helping SaaS founders than spending on ads. The audits do our marketing for us and we help, instead of spamming :) Grab yours for free: loveatfirsttry.io/saas-free-…

One of our designers said today: "Im not exaggerating when saying this is the best most fun and quality oriented project Ive done in my whole life, I cant be any happier 😅 " That's smth I take for granted nowadays (and I shouldn't), that all of our clients are companies we LOVE working for and feel proud of and not just companies that pay well. It took me YEARS to be at a position where I work with companies I feel inspired from and companies I or my team genuinely likes and wants to hang out with weekly. This message was from Mo, our motion designer was about a hype video we're designing for a new feature we'll announce soon at ZenMaid 🙂 Excited to share this soon as well!

AI products I am really hyped for: Products that act as teammates with proactive thinking and specialized workflows like meetnance.ai/ and ploy.ai/ The core idea is not the silly AI hype of 'they do everything, they're the best, you can go and fire your whole team'. Instead they are a specialized tool that is able to THINK and SUGGEST and understands how autonomous it should be in each case. Where many people in my opinion lose the point with AI is when they think of it as black or white. It's either a traditional SaaS where you just add data to it and it displays them , or it's an insanely smart AI that does everything for you. The sweet spot is in the middle imho. It's building a SaaS tool that knows where it can push for full automation and when to loop in humans and is not overconfident. For example at @Zenmaid one of the AI features we designed recently is called anomalies. AI is watching your account and spots anomalies like a strange behavior from an employee of yours for example (calling out sick too often) and surfaces them for you to review with suggested actions. We didn't automate the full workflow. We automated the research an office manager had to do weekly and now we surface to them the insights and then give them suggested next steps that have also some of their parts automated. The whole point of AI in SaaS is that know your software can THINK and DO and it's not just a system of record but also a system of action. And to me as a product designer this is the most fascinating thing that has ever happened to SaaS and I am really excited to build valuable cool features with it :-)

My biggest takeaways from Ramli John (Founder at Delight Path): Quick context if we haven't met: I'm Jim, founder of Love at First Try, and on my podcast I research how top 3% SaaS teams create onboarding experiences that convert. This week's guest is Ramli John, founder of Delight Path, where he helps product teams turn more of their users into happy customers. He's also the creator of Product Leaders Lab and the author of Product-Led Onboarding and EUREKA. We went deep on taste, delight and AI onboarding. My 8 biggest takeaways: 1/ Delight = exceeding expectations Users show up with expectations, delight is going beyond them. Think of your first Uber ride: no cab to flag, no card to pull out. 2/ AI is just the average In Ramli's words, AI is "essentially just an average of whatever's online". The insights outside that average come from talking to your users. 3/ One audience's delight is another's annoyance Notion users might love the confetti. A busy cleaning business owner might find it annoying enough to leave. 4/ Train your taste on purpose Analyze what you like and don't like in products, and WHY. Then learn from peers, like chefs do. 5/ The 4 levels of AI in onboarding AI tells (a chatbot on your knowledge base), AI guides (it launches the right tour), AI generates (a custom template per user), AI acts (it does the task after you approve). 6/ Just pick one One SaaS he worked with, showed new users ~10 things at once, so they froze and left. Routing them to 2-3 core jobs made a real difference. Simple things move the needle. 7/ 5-10 onboarding calls are enough To find those core jobs, Ramli skips the event data and digs into onboarding calls: why did they sign up, why did they buy? 8/ Automate the boring stuff Ramli connected Granola to Claude through MCP: a daily agent preps his meetings, another suggests weekly content from his calls, and ClickUp stays up to date on its own. Full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=wRtX4CiN… Hope you find it useful!

Harsh truth: Your new users don't need to see all 50 features. They need to see one. I dug into this with Ramli John on my podcast (episode dropping soon), and it's a pattern we both see in a lot of SaaS products. Showing users more features makes them use your product less. Here's a pattern I see in a lot of SaaS products. A new user signs up. They land on the dashboard. And it asks them to do ten things at once. Set this up. Connect that. Try this feature. Invite your team. To the founder, this looks helpful. To the user, it looks like homework. When people face too many choices, they struggle to pick one. So they pick none. They close the tab and tell themselves they'll come back later. Most never do. It's not a design problem. It's a focus problem. I understand why it happens. Founders spend years building their product. Every feature solved a real problem for someone. So it feels wrong to hide any of it. But new users don't know your product yet. They didn't sign up to explore everything you've built. They came with one problem and a small window of patience. If they don't see progress on that problem quickly, they leave before they ever see what your product can really do. So how do you know what to show first? Start with conversations, not data. Analytics show you what users click. They don't tell you why they signed up, what they were hoping for, or what almost made them choose someone else. That's why onboarding calls and sales calls are so valuable. Go back to the moment each customer started searching for a solution, and ask: → What were you trying to get done? → Why did you sign up? → What made you choose us? Five to ten calls are usually enough. The answers start repeating quickly, and you'll find two or three main reasons people come to you. Then design around those reasons. Ask new users one simple question when they sign up, like "What brings you here today?" Use their answer to send them straight to the part of your product that solves their problem. Help them get one small win as fast as possible. Once users get value, they start to trust you. Once they trust you, they explore on their own. That's when your other features finally get noticed. Not because you pushed them. Because users are ready for them.

I'm getting skeptical about the whole 'designers are now builders' thing. And I'm the one who pushed my team into it... Quick intro if we haven't met: I'm Jim, founder of Love at First Try. We embed top 3% design teams into SaaS companies to grow them to their next million. Designers who design like builders with AI and think growth like founders. A few weeks ago we had our AI session with the team and I left with more questions than answers. Sharing my honest thoughts cause I think a lot of design teams are in the same spot. We've been learning how to code with AI for months now and it still feels chaotic. My personal feeling is that we fell into the AI marketing trap of 'everybody can build now'. That's not how real established SaaS companies that we work with operate in reality. We can't just build. There are process, quality and security standards and we can't just build and ship code without being a senior engineer. But, building a startup MVP? Sure, way easier now - however you can just use Lovable for that, you don't need to learn software engineering and coding. So the better question we're asking ourselves now is: 'For the SaaS teams we're working with, what do we actually want to achieve with AI coding and what's missing to get there?' Becoming a builder is just too broad and too hype-driven in the end. Some concrete answers we're debating internally: 1/ Build realistic code-based prototypes with the existing design system (already doing this) 2/ Ship PRs with simple UI-only improvements - visuals and interactions only, never backend logic 3/ Ship full frontend PRs where devs only add the backend logic (seems too ambitious since this is also frontend engineering which is a different skillset) 4/ Going deep into component engineering and scalable design systems (feels also like an overkill and too frontend engineering-focused) My honest thoughts: chasing 'good quality code that can go to production' is a dark hole for designers IMHO. Our clients see us as a growth investment, not as extra devs. They pay us to improve their activation, retention, user experience and brand. The prototype-first hand-off we already do with Claude Code might be the sweet spot finally - AI-generated code is much easier for devs to turn into shippable code than a Figma screen that they have to translate to code from scratch. If you're a designer or working on a SaaS product team I want to ask you: where do you draw the line at this moment and where are you focused on leveraging AI in the design process?

When new trials sign up to your SaaS, making a great first impression matters. One way to make a good impression to new trials is to delight them where they wouldn't expect to be delighted. As a product designer I love thinking how I can find boring areas of the SaaS products I am designing for and make them more delightful exactly where users wouldn't expect to be delighted. Here is an example from AllPaws, a scheduling software for petcare businesses: The first time the app loads after signing up why show a boring page loader to our trials, and not show instead a branded cute loading animation that's using your logo? Details like these matter and make a great first impression and show you go the extra mile, and deeply care about their experience as potential customers. Will this skyrocket activation of new trials? Of course not, but the thing is that activation is not a single-improvement fix. It's the result of many compounding improvements across the whole product experience. And they key is find the right mix and balancing 10% and 10x improvements.

A CTO gave me the best metaphor for AI design. Sculptors don't hand their drawings to a carver. Quick intro if we haven't met: I'm Jim, founder of Love at First Try. We embed top 3% design teams into SaaS companies to grow them to their next million: designers who design like builders with AI and think growth like founders. I've been designing a customer portal directly in code with AI at one of the SaaS teams we work with. When I asked the CTO how he felt about a designer suddenly building, he gave me a metaphor I keep thinking about. Building a product is sculpting. The old process was: the designer draws the sculpture, a developer carves it, then the designer iterates on the DRAWING to explain what the developer should remove from the STONE. Nobody makes sculpture like that. Sculpture is made by someone sculpting. With AI, the designer finally touches the raw material. I don't draw a picture of the experience and hope it survives translation. I shape the actual thing, feel it on my phone, and adjust while my hands are still in the clay. He sees two compounding effects: 1/ Velocity. When the designer implements as they design, you leapfrog most of the handoff and implementation phase. His estimate for our project: a 2-4x speedup. And if everyone on the team can work this way, you're not running one design-build pipeline, you're running several in parallel. 2/ Quality. This one matters more to me. Experiencing what you make WHILE you make it produces better decisions than reviewing a static picture ever could. You catch the awkward transition, the scroll that fights you, the flow that reads fine on paper and feels wrong in the hand. To be fair, the metaphor has limits (his same feedback included real concerns about code conventions, a story for another post). But as a mental model for where design is heading, I haven't heard better: stop drawing sculptures for someone else to carve. Hope you found this useful! Every Thursday I share stories and tips of how we navigate the AI world and the future we're investing into, feel free to connect if you want to follow along :)

My spec missed a whole onboarding flow. Building the real thing made it obvious. Quick intro if we haven't met: I'm Jim, founder of Love at First Try. We embed top 3% design teams into SaaS companies to grow them to their next million: designers who design like builders with AI and think growth like founders. I'm designing a customer portal for one of the SaaS teams where we lead product design. Instead of mocking it up, I built it with AI: real database connection, working magic link sign-in, the actual product. And requirements started falling out of it that no spec would have caught: 1/ Because I built the magic link sign-in, I experienced the sign-in email. Oh right, there IS an email, and it needs to be branded. It was never going to be forgotten now, because I received it myself. 2/ Because I added a setting to change the portal's brand color and tested it, I started noticing the other settings: the logo, the staff avatars, the cancellation policy, the review link. And then the real insight landed: these settings are scattered across different pages of the admin. Nobody is going to visit seven pages to configure their portal. They'll keep the defaults, their portal won't feel branded, and they'll capture way less value. So the portal needs its own simple setup flow, a multi-step onboarding that collects everything in one place. That requirement exists nowhere in the original scope. I only saw it because I was USING the thing while designing it. The old way relies on someone imagining every gap: "will Jim think of this?" That's fragile, especially when you're working across five projects at once. The new way is that the gaps reveal themselves, because a working prototype confronts you with reality: emails arrive, settings need values, flows have dead ends. Specs describe what you plan to build. Using the thing tells you what you forgot to plan. That second list is where projects usually go wrong, and AI prototyping is the cheapest way I've found to read it early. Hope you found this useful! Every Thursday I share stories and tips of how we navigate the AI world and the future we're investing into, feel free to connect if you want to follow along :)

His best design tool is pen and paper. Mine is describing UIs to AI. We're both right. Quick intro if we haven't met: I'm Jim, founder of Love at First Try. We embed top 3% design teams into SaaS companies to grow them to their next million: designers who design like builders with AI and think growth like founders. I had a long call about AI and design process with the CTO of one of the SaaS teams we work with. He's a strong product thinker, and his position surprised me: the biggest driver of his design quality is pen and paper. His argument: 10 sheets of paper and a pen are faster than any tool for the creative phase, and there's zero AI in the loop, so every micro decision stays his. He designed some of the best features in the product this way. He even tried starting a feature with an AI prototype once, hated the result, rethought it on paper, uploaded a photo of his wireframes to the AI, and it did dramatically better. For him, hand-drawn wireframes are the rails that keep AI's influence out of the thinking. Then I started laughing, because what he described as pen and paper is exactly how I use AI. Pen and paper never worked for me. Too slow, too low fidelity, and the lack of editing kills me. The basics are already obvious in my head (of course it's a list of appointments, I don't need to sketch that). So I describe my design to AI in precise detail and use the working prototype to test what paper can't show me: does the flow feel right, do the transitions work, does it hold up on my phone. Same underlying principle for both of us: the human does the thinking, AI gets the vision out. Completely different mediums. And that's the realization I keep coming back to: there is no one design process anymore. It personalizes to how each brain works. He's a visual thinker who needs to draw. I think in descriptions and interactions. Someone else on your team is different again. So stop looking for THE AI design workflow to copy. Find the point where AI enters YOUR process without taking over your thinking, and let your teammates find theirs. Hope you found this useful! Every Thursday I share stories and tips of how we navigate the AI world and the future we're investing into, feel free to connect if you want to follow along :)

2022: a few hours of freelance work on an onboarding flow. 2026: leading product and brand design at a 5M+ ARR SaaS. Last week I was in Spain for my 4th team retreat with the ZenMaid team! We're remote all year and co-work in person for 1 week in the summer season. Being in the same room with your team just feels different - the trust, the familiarity, the motivation afterwards.. This year it was a lot about making ZenMaid AI-native and finding valuable use-cases of AI without following the hype. We prototyped a ton with Claude and built AI-native onboarding concepts we believe will grow our trial retention further (hope to share more on this soon) My story with ZenMaid starts back in January 2022 when I started freelancing and helped with improving their onboarding flow. What started as freelancing became a senior design department (me plus a brand and motion designer) owning the 'taste' and UX across the whole company. Back then: team was half the size, 1M ARR. Now: almost 25 people, 5M+ ARR which has been a really amazing journey to be part of with lots of learnings in it. The 4 things that I learned and changed me the most that last few years: 1/ 80/20 thinking. It's so easy in design to keep adding creativity and tech complexity. 80/20 is the best framework I know to simplify them. 2/ The MoSCoW framework. When everything feels important, this is the tool to use to define scope. 3/ If you want a great team, build an environment senior experts truly value (and guess what - that's not doing Friday drinks). Amar Ghose is one of the very few CEOs I've met and respect a lot. He pushed me to grow and challenge my beliefs, but always respected boundaries. He focuses on outcome over rules and processes and I honestly feel lucky and honoured to lead design to his company. He has been an inspiration to me in various ways when it comes to building a business and a team. 4/ No matter how cool and user-friendly the product is, if your marketing sucks you're f***ed. I've seen it across PE-owned, bootstrapped and VC-funded SaaS that I worked with: great product, problematic marketing, stuck at ~1M ARR for years. ZenMaid grew so much cause the team kept investing in marketing and getting great at it, not just the product. That's all for now :) will share more of the cool stuff we build and our learnings in the coming months!

Leading product at a SaaS? Your best peers will sail in Barcelona for 2 days, with roundtables and dinners in between. Apply to join! (it's free) Here is what's happening: 25 CPOs from top SaaS companies will come together for 2 days in Barcelona on the 25th and 26th of November, to learn from each other and build real connections. We call it the "Product Leaders Inner Circle". Here is why we're organizing it... Being a CPO is one of the loneliest jobs in SaaS. The product leader absorbs pressure from everywhere. The CEO wants the roadmap faster. The board wants the numbers. Sales wants that one feature. Engineering wants fewer changes. And who do you vent to? Not your team - you're their leader, you carry the calm. Not the CEO - half your worries ARE about alignment with them. Your friends? They love you, but 'my activation rate dropped' isn't a dinner conversation they'll enjoy 😅 You're often the only person in the company with your job. And what helps you is talking to someone with the SAME job, at a company at the same stage, carrying the same weight. That's the whole idea behind the 'Product Leaders Inner Circle'. An invite-only 2-day retreat in Barcelona for 25 CPOs and VPs of Product, all working at $5-30M ARR SaaS companies. I'm co-organizing with Vincent Jong (ex-CPO at Dealfront), and together with Mind the Product. And the best part? It's free! Sponsors cover the program, you only cover your hotel and travel and there is no ticket to pay for. Here is what your days will look like: Day 1: a boat cruise along the Barcelona coast with tapas and cava, and then dinner. Connections and deep conversations are the focus of the first day. Day 2: expert keynotes (like Dave Killeen on the 'agent harness' that keeps your product org and company in sync), and then facilitated round tables on your ACTUAL day-to-day problems. Focus of 2nd day is on sharing knowledge and practical insights. So... If you're leading product at a SaaS and you feel excited about this, apply below! Keep in mind the event is strictly curated and we'll accept only 25 CPOs in total. So expect spots to be gone pretty fast :) innercircle.events/product-l…

A full platform prototype in 6-8 hours. (The brief was a giant messy spreadsheet.) Quick intro if we haven't met: I'm Jim, founder of Love at First Try. We embed top 3% design teams into SaaS companies to grow them to their next million — designers who design like builders with AI and think growth like founders. On our internal weekly design call, our designer Brit walked us through how she shipped a complete mentor platform prototype (calendar, sessions, pulse checks, the whole thing) in roughly 6-8 hours spread over a couple of weeks. Here's her workflow: 1/ Start from the messy source, not a polished brief. The product owners keep a giant spreadsheet that's basically a brain dump of every feature in their heads. Instead of manually translating it into Figma screens, she feeds the whole spreadsheet into Claude Design, together with the design system and reference examples from Mobbin. 2/ Don't expect a one-shot. The first draft is rough and that's fine. She just needs something clickable to react to. Critiquing a rough prototype is way faster than designing from a blank canvas. 3/ Functionality first, polish last. She deploys to Vercel, shares the public link with the product owner, and they click through the prototype together. Only when the functionality is signed off does she spend time polishing. 4/ Speak your prompts. She uses Whisperflow instead of typing. Her insight: you don't type the way you speak. Typed prompts get economic and vague, spoken prompts stay descriptive. Better prompts in, better UI out. 5/ Ask for custom controls. In her prompt she asks for navigation controls to jump between the steps of a flow (no more filling in a form every time just to reach step 3), and toggles to switch between states like member vs non-member inside one prototype. The part that stands out for me: none of this is about the tool being magic. It's about giving it a ton of context (the spreadsheet, the design system, the references) and treating the first output as a draft to react to, not a final deliverable. Hope you found this useful! Every Thursday I share stories and tips of how we navigate the AI world and the future we're investing into, feel free to connect if you want to follow along :)

Your SaaS can have a top 3% UX and brand for $8k/month. Here's how ↓ Love At First Try is an in-house design team as a service. We help SaaS teams grow to their next million by building SaaS PLG specialized design teams that fully integrate into their product and marketing team, in an in-house manner and lead their UX and brand. Every team we build consists of: - a lead product growth designer that leads your product UX - a brand designer that leads your brand - and a motion designer that brings any crazy ideas the design team has, into life All of them are top 3% designers who think growth and priorities like founders and design like builders with AI. There are no managers or juniors and each designer is DEDICATED to you. They work with up to 2 SaaS teams at the same time. This way they get exposure to the SaaS industry, stay an expert and also stay dedicated to you. For every SaaS team we work with, we fully own 3 areas: 1/ Their product. 100% of it, always. The onboarding flow, the UX, the UI, all the product copy, and the retention and growth design. For example: an empty state shouldn't say "Create your booking form" - it should say "Turn your website into a 24/7 sales asset". We sell your product inside your product. 2/ Their website. Content and design. B2B landing page copy is not about crazy creative statements - it's about surfacing the things your buyers actually care about. For example: if your best plan includes 1:1 coaching and nobody can tell from your pricing page, you're leaving money on the table. We find those gaps and fix them. 3/ Their onboarding emails. During the trial we send almost one email per day, rotating a few themes: customer stories, workflows you can achieve with the product, and so on. Plus the automated emails your platform sends to bring people back. 4/ And on top of all that: their brand. 99% of SaaS teams at this stage don't have a mature brand, so we form a brand vision and execute it to make you stand out. Top 3% quality and you don't have to hire an external agency and pay them $40k to improve your brand. We do it in-house with you in an iterative way. Now, what does 'top 3%' mean? - 10+ years of experience - Ex-Zapier - Ability to combine growth with taste. The combination of visual craft, brand design, UX and growth expertise. - True leadership: We think like founders and OWN your UX and brand. We look at your product, ask the right questions, form the priorities and always come to you with a plan. You'll never hear "hey, what should we do next?" from us. If this sounds interesting, you can try us out for FREE, with NO commitments and pushy sales calls. If your SaaS is making >$50k+ MRR one of our lead product designers will record a free 45mins video using your product as a first-time user and will share 5 easy UX fixes your dev team can implement, in their next sprint. Order it for free here: loveatfirsttry.io/saas-free-…

My biggest takeaways from Mickey Alon (Co-founder & CEO @ Foldspace AI): Quick context if you're new here: I'm Jim, founder of Love at First Try, and on our podcast I sit down with SaaS founders and senior product people to explore what makes SaaS products sticky and unforgettable. This week's guest is Mickey Alon, co-founder & CEO of Foldspace AI, where he's building agentic interfaces for SaaS. Before that he built Insightera (acquired by Marketo), founded Gainsight PX and co-authored the first book on Product-Led Growth. We went deep on what AI means for the future of SaaS UX. My 9 biggest takeaways from our conversation: 1/ Clicks whisper, prompts yell. Click tracking tells you what users did, never why. When they chat with an agent they literally tell you their intent - for the first time you can combine usage data with the why behind it. 2/ Users don't come to learn your product, they come for the outcome. The old PLG playbook was driving people to an aha moment with tooltips. Generative flows don't reduce that friction, they eliminate it completely. 3/ 70% of users ask the agent to DO things, only 30% ask questions. Mickey's team measured this across industries, even with non-technical users. People already expect AI to act.. 4/ "Generate with AI" buttons are designed to fail. Without context it's like hitting "I'm feeling lucky" on Google. Context is the name of the game: which page you're on, your data, your objective and so on. 5/ Your UI is context you get for free. It already knows your defaults, your settings, the last 30 days filter. That's exactly what a pure MCP setup lacks - and why embedded agents beat headless SaaS, I think. 6/ UI is not dying, menu diving is. In their data, visual responses from the agent get dramatically more engagement than text ones. Chat is great for stating intent, visuals are how we actually consume. 7/ Think twice before a big UI revamp. New users say it looks nicer, existing users hate relearning where everything is - and the product didn't really get easier. Often it's lipstick on a pig (his words :)) 8/ The new stack: deterministic core, agent loop, agentic interface. AI takes the decision, your existing workflows execute it - so nobody books a phantom flight. Human in the loop before any meaningful change. 9/ The tools people love now are the ones that learn. Mickey's favorite "products" atm are an agentic CRM and a marketing agent his team built themselves in Claude. His prediction: the KPI shifts from number of clicks to number of prompts. Hope you found this useful! loveatfirsttry.io/podcast/mi…

A founder just redesigned our screens himself. That never happened in the Figma era. Quick intro if we haven't met: I'm Jim, founder of Love at First Try. We embed top 3% design teams into SaaS companies to grow them to their next million — designers who design like builders with AI and think growth like founders. Here's what happened. At one of the SaaS teams we work with, we shipped some designs async. The technical founder didn't like a few parts. In the past, that meant a feedback thread and another design round. Instead, he threw our screens into Claude Design and sent back his own tweaked versions: "here's what I would change." A technical founder, working inside a design tool. That would NEVER happen with Figma. For most founders, Figma is rocket science. On our weekly call, Brit (our designer) put the shift into words better than I could. Designers aren't going extinct, but we're going to be doing different tasks than what we've typically been hired for. Her value isn't her ability to click a mouse and polish pixels. It's how she approaches problem-solving, the questions she asks, and guiding teams toward the right thing to build. She spends most of her time on flows, interactions and educating the team, and lets AI handle the first pass of the UI. I see the same thing from the client side. SaaS teams don't want pixel pushers who need three weeks and a perfect brief to finalize a UI. They want growth thinkers who can build and move the needle in the product. The things around the UI matter more than the UI itself. Does that mean craft is dead? No. Some companies will keep paying for micro detail refinement (if I ran a company like Vercel, I might, even as a branding statement). But for most SaaS teams, thinking and execution beat pixels. This shift excites me way more than it scares me. The tools change. The thinking is still the job. Hope you found this useful! Every Thursday I share stories and tips of how we navigate the AI world and the future we're investing into, feel free to connect if you want to follow along :)

Sometimes a design system is a waste of money. Here's how we decide when it's worth building. Quick intro if we haven't met: I'm Jim, founder of Love at First Try. We embed top 3% product design teams into SaaS companies to grow them to their next million: designers who think like founders and design design like builders. We lead product design at several SaaS companies at the same time, and the contrast between them taught me more about design systems than any article. The same investment that's urgent at one company is worthless at another. On our mentoring call with this week, we broke down why. Company A is at $1M ARR and fighting for revenue. The only question that matters right now is: how do we make more money? So all our design effort goes into growth and activation. On top of that, the lead developer implements UI with a great eye for detail, so there's no messy implementation to clean up. Investing in a design system here is close to zero value atm. It would be design work for designers, not for the business. Company B keeps growing and reached $5M ARR. New features shipping constantly, the dev team just hit six people and they're hiring more. Different developers make different UI decisions, inconsistencies pile up, and we caught ourselves saying "this is getting out of control." That's the signal. And there's a second one: if another designer joined today, they'd have to dig through all our past projects to reverse-engineer every convention and decision we ever made. So my current rules of thumb: 1/ A design system is a scaling tool, not a quality tool. If the team isn't scaling, your design time is better spent moving revenue. 2/ Start before it hurts. Documenting 10 components is a small job. Waiting until you have 50 undocumented ones turns it into a project nobody wants to start. 3/ When you do invest, go 80/20. Christophe's advice: a few impactful moves get you 80% there fast. The last 20% takes forever, so compound it over time instead of chasing perfection up front. There is not one way to do design. It always depends on the stage, culture and resources of the team, and knowing when NOT to build something is part of the job. Hope you found this useful! Every Tuesday I share tips of how we help technical SaaS teams scale to their next million through product-led growth and product design. Feel free to follow along :) --- FYI if you're a SaaS founder making $25k+ MRR or more and feel your onboarding can do better: you can get a FREE video of one of our ex-Zapier growth product designer using your product as a first-time user and sharing 5 easy UX fixes within 48h. Lemlist ($10M+ ARR) did one, and Jerome (CEO of CaptainBook) called it "so valuable, I recommend this to anyone serious about their SaaS". Why free? Cause we prefer helping SaaS founders than spending on ads. The audits do our marketing for us and we help, instead of spamming :) Grab yours for free: loveatfirsttry.io/saas-free-…

In-house: months to hire, a year of risk. Freelancer: gone in 9 months. There's a third option most founders miss. Quick intro if we haven't met: I'm Jim, founder of Love at First Try. We embed top 3% design teams into SaaS companies to grow them to their next million. Designers who design like builders with AI and think growth like founders. Last week I recorded an outreach video for a bootstrapped SaaS founder hiring a fractional product designer - and it kind of pushed me to finally write down my POV on the design hiring market. When your SaaS is past the $1M ARR mark and you need serious growth and UX help, you pretty much have 2 traditional options: 1/ Hire in-house Takes a lot of time, it's super hard to find great people and convince them to quit their current job for your company - and it's high risk, cause you commit to that hire for a year and if it turns out wrong it costs you a lot (I'm sure you know). 2/ Hire a freelancer It can work, but freelancers tend to work with too many companies at once, even when they promise you'll be a priority (I've experienced this myself). Most love the project-based stuff, so it's hard to find someone that commits long term and really leads your product. And that matters, cause with every person you hire you invest a ton of time onboarding them and teaching them your industry - you don't want them leaving in 9 months. 3/ The new option: an 'in-house design team as a service' This is the model we're betting on - and where the market is going, I think. A small senior team that integrates with your company like in-house, but without the hiring risk and without annual lock-in. And it's not just theory - our longest client has been with us for 3.5 years now, another one for 2.5, and the team we embedded this January has no plan to stop. None of them is locked in an annual contract, they can fire us any time - for me teams should stay together cause the work is great, not cause a contract says so. Whichever of the 3 you pick though, the real question is WHO you're putting in that seat. The setup I've seen work in every SaaS team we've been embedded in is the same: a CEO that's great at selling and knows the industry and the customers deeply - and next to them a product team that understands software, iteration, branding and UX and can turn the vision into actual screens and flows. So the designers you want in that seat think like founders and design like builders. 80/20 thinking (how can we solve 80% of the problem with 20% of the effort), design that drives activation and revenue - not design that just looks nice on X or LinkedIn. wdyt? would you approach hiring design differently? Hope you found this useful! Every Monday I share my POV on hiring and what separates good designers from great ones, feel free to connect if you want to follow along :)