There's a moment in every growing company's trajectory when the conversation shifts from "should we hire a designer?" to "what kind of designer should we hire?"
It's a deceptively simple question with remarkably high stakes.
I've watched this decision play out across startups, scale-ups, and enterprise divisions spinning up new product lines. Sometimes it goes well. More often, it doesn't. And when it goes wrong, the consequences ripple through the organization for months or even years.
The most common failure mode? Companies try to hire three different people in one body—a manager who can build a team, a maker who can ship designs, and a strategic unicorn who can do both while also evangelizing design across the organization.
Let me save you some time and pain: that person doesn't exist. Or if they do, they're not looking for your role.
I see it constantly. A company posts their first design role with requirements that look something like this:
Senior Product Designer / Design Lead
Requirements:
This isn't a job description. It's a wish list written by a committee that couldn't agree on what they actually need.
What they're really saying is: "We don't know what we want, so we're hoping someone who can do everything will figure it out for us."
The problem isn't the ambition. It's the fundamental misunderstanding of what a first design hire should accomplish.
When companies think about their first design hire, they're usually conflating three distinct archetypes:
The Manager: Someone who can build a design organization from scratch. They hire well, mentor effectively, establish processes, interface with leadership, and advocate for design's seat at the table. They're exceptional at the strategic and organizational aspects of design leadership.
The Maker: Someone who ships. They're in Figma every day, working alongside engineers, iterating rapidly, and delivering work that moves business metrics. They're exceptional at the craft and execution of design.
The Unicorn: Someone who supposedly does both at an elite level, plus strategy, plus research, plus maybe some front-end code. They exist primarily in the imagination of hiring managers and occasionally in LinkedIn job postings.
Each archetype is valuable. But for your first design hire? Only one makes sense.
Here's what I've learned after building design teams across a dozen organizations, from 10-person startups to global enterprises: your first design hire needs to be a maker, not a manager.
Let me explain why.
In the early stages—whether you're a startup finding product-market fit or an enterprise team launching a new initiative—you don't need design process documentation. You don't need a hiring plan. You don't need a design system governance model.
You need designs. Plural. Shipped. In production. Moving metrics.
Design leadership earns its mandate by demonstrating value, not by declaring it. Before you can justify building a design organization, you need to prove that design drives outcomes the business cares about.
A maker establishes that proof. They deliver work that engineers can build, that users respond to, that stakeholders can see. They make design tangible and measurable.
A manager, by contrast, is optimized for a different problem: scaling what already works. They're incredible at taking a proven design function and expanding it. But if there's no function to scale yet? Their superpowers go unused while they're forced to spend 80% of their time doing execution work they didn't sign up for.
In the first year of establishing design within an organization, the primary constraint is almost never process or team structure. It's execution capacity.
There are designs that need to ship. Features to improve. User problems to solve. Technical debt to address. And there's exactly one designer to do it all.
What you need isn't someone who can theorize about the ideal design team structure. You need someone who can sit in a room with three engineers, a product manager, and a whiteboard, and emerge with a validated design direction that the team can build next sprint.
This is craft work. It requires deep skills in interaction design, visual design, user research (even if it's scrappy), and prototyping. It requires the ability to make smart decisions quickly with incomplete information. It requires comfort working in the weeds.
Makers excel at this. They're built for the intensity and ambiguity of being the only designer in the room.
I've seen this failure mode repeatedly: a company hires a "Head of Design" or "Design Lead" as their first design person, expecting them to establish design as a function while also cranking out execution work.
Six months in, everyone's frustrated.
The designer feels bait-and-switched. They were sold on building a team and shaping strategy, but they're spending 90% of their time in Figma churning out mockups because there's no one else to do it. They're good at the strategic work but exhausted by the execution grind.
Leadership is disappointed because they paid for senior strategic leadership but aren't seeing the organizational transformation they expected. They don't understand why their "Head of Design" can't hire a team yet (there's no budget), can't influence the product roadmap yet (design hasn't proven its value), and can't implement best practices yet (there's no team to implement them).
This isn't a personnel problem. It's a sequencing problem.
The company hired for stage three when they were still at stage one.
When I say your first design hire should be a maker, I'm not suggesting you hire a junior designer who only pushes pixels.
The right maker for a first design hire has three critical characteristics:
They need to be legitimately excellent at the core disciplines of product design. They should have a portfolio that demonstrates high-quality work across multiple products, ideally at different companies or in different contexts.
Why does quality matter so much? Because your first designer sets the standard for every design hire that follows. If they establish a bar of mediocre work, that's the culture you'll inherit. If they establish a bar of excellence, that becomes your foundation.
They need to thrive in ambiguity. There's no design team to collaborate with. No established process to follow. No design system to reference. They need to be comfortable defining their own workflow, making decisions without consensus, and shipping work without a safety net.
This isn't about being a lone wolf. It's about not needing organizational scaffolding to be effective.
While they're exceptional at the craft of design, they need enough breadth to understand adjacent disciplines—engineering constraints, business strategy, user research methods, and product management thinking.
They don't need to be expert at everything. But they need to be conversant enough to collaborate effectively with non-designers and to recognize when specialized expertise (research, content strategy, accessibility) is needed, even if they have to wear those hats themselves initially.
Here's what the smart sequencing actually looks like:
Stage 1: Hire a maker. Someone senior enough to work independently, skilled enough to set quality standards, and pragmatic enough to ship in imperfect conditions.
Stage 2: Prove design's value. For 6-12 months, this designer ships work, collaborates with engineering and product, and demonstrates measurable impact on the business.
Stage 3: Hire a second maker. Once design has proven its value, bring in another strong IC. Now you have a tiny team that can tackle bigger problems and support each other.
Stage 4: Hire or promote a manager. When you have 3-4 designers, that's when organizational leadership becomes necessary. At this stage, you can either promote your first design hire into a leadership role (if they have the aptitude and interest) or bring in an experienced design manager to scale the function.
Notice what this sequence accomplishes: each hire is aligned with the organization's actual needs at that moment. You're not asking anyone to be something they're not. You're not creating role confusion or misaligned expectations.
What about the mythical unicorn—the designer who can manage AND make at an elite level?
They exist. I've worked with a few. But here's the reality: if you're hiring your first designer, you almost certainly can't attract them, you probably can't afford them, and you definitely shouldn't optimize for them.
True unicorns—people who are legitimately world-class at both strategic leadership and hands-on craft—are rare, expensive, and usually already in roles that are difficult to leave. They're founding designers at successful startups, creative directors at top agencies, or senior leaders at major tech companies.
More importantly, even if you could hire one, it's not clear you should. Unicorns are often most effective when they have teams to amplify their impact. Asking them to be a one-person design department is like hiring a symphony conductor to play solo violin—technically they can do it, but you're not using their actual superpower.
The unicorn hire is a bet that you can skip stages 1-3 of the maturity curve and jump straight to having a scaled design function. That bet almost never pays off.
Everything I've described applies primarily to startups and scale-ups, but the logic holds in enterprise contexts too—with one important modification.
In large organizations, the "first design hire" is often actually the first design hire for a specific team, division, or product line. There might be a design organization elsewhere in the company, but this is a new pocket of design investment.
In these cases, you still want a maker first—but one with enough organizational savvy to navigate enterprise politics, interface with existing design teams, and advocate for resources.
The mistake I see in enterprise settings is hiring a manager to "establish design" in a new part of the organization without giving them any designers to manage. They end up as an individual contributor with a director title, which satisfies no one.
Better approach: hire a senior maker embedded with the product team. Let them prove design's value in that context. Then, if the investment is successful and you're expanding to multiple product teams, that's when you bring in design leadership.
If you're about to make your first design hire, here's how to think about it:
Clarify what problem you're solving right now. Not the problem you'll have in 18 months. The problem you have today. Chances are, it's "we need someone who can design and ship product improvements."
Write a job description for that specific problem. Be honest about the role. If it's 90% execution work, say so. If there's no team to manage yet, don't pretend there is. The right makers will be excited by this. The wrong ones will self-select out.
Look for execution horsepower, not management potential. You can always assess leadership capability later. Right now, you need to know they can ship excellent work consistently.
Resist the temptation to hire for your future state. You'll get there faster by hiring for where you are and sequencing correctly than by trying to skip steps.
Focus on craft quality and cultural fit. Your first designer sets the tone for every design hire that follows. Choose someone whose work you want to replicate, not someone you're hoping will grow into the role.
The irony of the "first design hire" dilemma is that companies overthink it because they understand how important it is—and then make it worse by trying to solve too many problems at once.
Your first design hire doesn't need to be the person who builds your design empire. They need to be the person who proves design is worth investing in.
Get that right—hire a maker who can ship exceptional work—and the rest of the organizational scaling becomes dramatically easier. Get it wrong—chase unicorns or hire a manager with no one to manage—and you'll spend the next year cleaning up the mismatch.
The shortest path to a world-class design organization starts with one person doing excellent work. Not three people's jobs in one body.
Manager, maker, or unicorn?
For your first hire, the answer is simple: maker. Everything else comes later.
Building your first design team and not sure where to start? Empirika helps organizations define the right design roles for their stage, hire exceptional talent, and sequence growth intelligently.
Let's talk about getting your first hire right—so your tenth hire is easier.