Sole designer at a startup? How do you grow in your role? What are the challenges of being a sole designer?

Are you the sole designer in your startup? How do you grow into your role and further your UX skills? What are the challenges you face as a solo UX advocate? I'd love some of your time to chat about all this. If you work at a startup that has a sole designer, I'd love your help connecting them with me 🙂For context, I'm a designer with 15 years experiences in UX, in various work environments and teams. I've worked in small seed and Series A startups, as well as agencies, and at a large company. I was a head of UX at Google (Firebase) where I grew a UX team and created end-to-end UX from scratch, managing a multi-disciplinary UX org of ~25 designers and researchers. I also became the first UX person at Wonderschool, where I grew a team and introduced UX best practices across the company. Today I spend some of my time mentoring designers and UX practitioners and I want to offer resources for startups that have limited resources dedicated to UX.

I had a very brief experience being the sole designer of a startup which ended up not being the right opportunity for me for a number of reasons.. It's something I've briefly considered again as I look for jobs but feels like a lot to take on, especially with everything currently going on in the world. I actually recently spoke to someone who was a sole designer for a startup right out of college and they mirrored some of the same concerns. It's a lot of responsibility for one person, especially if there's no other design-y people in the company. They mentioned that if anything went "wrong" it felt like they were blamed and that mistakes were not tolerated.. It came off to me as a shared misunderstanding of how design works and that it's an iterative process. I feel like it would be better for startups in general to hire two designers to start.. Like a senior designer and a junior designer, to balance things out. To me, that shows an investment in design and not simply checking off a box. Unrelated: I contracted for Firebase earlier this year and wanted to say hello!