Measure the outcome

When evaluating their team, a startup's founder's expectation is typically centered around inputs rather than outputs. It makes sense! They've identified an opportunity in the market and are now focused on building a team that can give their all to turn that into a reality. Starting a company is a giant leap of faith that requires a sort of obsession. So it's natural that they would want to spend every waking moment trying to make it successful.

So when they're presented with an option to hire a designer on a fractional capacity, it is natural to imagine the work in terms of hours spent working: "If I get X from a full time employee, I should get Y from a fractional partner." This is natural and totally understandable. However, just like hourly pricing doesn't make sense with creative work, this model also doesn't align for how to think about a designer's impact in an organization.

In 1998, after Citicorp and Travelers Group merged to form Citigroup, designer Paula Scher from the firm Pentagram was hired to create a unified identity. During her very first briefing with executives, she casually sketched the word "Citi" with a red arc over the "t" (symbolizing the Travelers umbrella) on a napkin and declared, "This is your logo." When critics questioned the price of a design created in seconds, Scher's response was poignant:

It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds.

One hour of design time is informed by thousands of hours before that spent developing an intuition that enables a designer to skip past the wrong turns. Beyond that, the work doesn’t stop when they leave the desk. Most designers I know are constantly thinking about design solutions: while they're washing the dishes, showering, brushing their teeth — should those be billable hours?

Founders are used to measuring value in hours or presence, but it's important to shift that conversation toward outcomes. What do we want to achieve this week? This month? This quarter? Then deliver on that—ideally ahead of schedule. That changes the perception of value and helps reset the incorrect assumption that time spent on a creative task = productivity.

This is where fractional work starts to make a lot more sense.

A startup may not need 40 hours of design every week. What it needs is enough of the right design work to keep moving in the right direction. Someone who can identify the important problems, make good decisions quickly, produce the work, and help the team avoid spending weeks heading down the wrong path.

For experienced designers, fractional work creates a model where companies can access years of accumulated judgment without needing to manufacture enough work to fill a full-time role. The designer can focus their time where it has the most leverage, while the startup pays for the impact rather than their presence.

The question becomes less “How many hours of a designer do we get?” and more “Are we getting where we need to go? For many early-stage startups, that might be the better way to build a design team in the first place.