You’ve built something brilliant. It solves a real problem, it’s technically elegant, and your beta testers are impressed with the powerful functionality it offers. So why didn’t your launch pan out?

You might have fallen into a common pattern. Founders of high-tech startups often obsess over performance marketing metrics, iterate relentlessly on product features, and heavily invest in engineering talent to push out “just one more” release. Meanwhile, brand strategy—if it’s even considered at all—comes in after the fact.

If you only start to consider creative after the product is named, the UI is instrumented, and the homepage copy is drafted, you’re too late. Creative isn’t decoration. It’s direction.

Product-led growth works until it doesn’t. Teams in this situation often learn the hard way that what’s missing isn’t more features or a tighter media buy, but the connective tissue: a network of creative strategy touchpoints that underlies the entire product lifecycle, weaving functionality into feeling and software into story.

At Amato Consulting, we often work with early-stage and growth-stage teams to bridge this gap, embedding creative from the very beginning. And this is what we’ve learned.

What happens when you skip creative strategy?

When creative strategy isn’t a core element of your product direction, the product can still launch, but it might not land. Without a creative lead at the table from day one, many startups experience the same symptoms.

First, users get frustrated by unclear documentation or technical jargon. What seems like the obvious unique selling point (USP) to the engineering team might read like a riddle to customers, who skim and then scroll past the ad.

Second, a product-first marketing approach fixates on features instead of benefits, leading to flat messaging that excellently describes the product but fails to communicate why anyone should care. It’s all pitch, no hook, and only catches the highly tech-savvy prospects who know exactly what they want and why they want it.

Third, the UI—developed in isolation from brand or content teams—ends up clunky, joyless, inconsistent, or poorly written, creating a weak first impression that bleeds into churn.

According to Forrester, companies that invest in their user experience (which means involving a creative team early in the development process), can increase conversion rates by up to 400%. And, in a study from Stanford’s Web Credibility Project, 46.1% of participants admitted to judging a company’s credibility based on its website design. 

Nearly half of all people surveyed viewed an unappealing or poorly designed website as incredible, the Internet equivalent of attending a board meeting in two different shoes, torn pants, and a tank top.

But these aren’t just surface-level problems that can be easily fixed with creative decoration. They’re structural issues caused by skipping the earliest and most important creative question: What does this product mean to the person using it?

What are the consequences of letting product teams lead branding?

How many graphic designers have any degree of expertise developing and engineering technology products? You can confidently say, “Very few.” Because, when somebody specializes in one discipline, they don’t have the time to do more than dabble in others. Even so, many technology leaders still feel comfortable putting product team members with little to no design experience in charge of the UX design process.

Putting technology before art leads to products that work but don’t connect with their users.

Companies that prioritize customer-centric design don’t just perform better than their competitors, they dominate them. According to a multi-year study by McKinsey, businesses that invested heavily in design and integrated it early saw 32% more revenue growth and 56% higher total returns to shareholders compared to their industry averages.

It’s easy for logical, fact-based developers to believe that the technical specifications and capabilities of a product are enough to sell it. But buying is far more of an emotional experience than you might think—even for those same developers.

Former Harvard professor and behavioral scientist Gerald Zaltman famously said that 95% of purchasing decisions are made subconsciously, driven more by emotion than logic. Further studies have shown that emotionally connected customers are 52% more likely to buy something if it invokes a sense of nostalgia for them.

And yet, in tech, the default is often the reverse. Product teams go to market with content focused on features and benefits and provide rigid instructions to the creative team near the end of QA. That’s how you end  up with onboarding docs that read like whitepapers, interfaces that feel sterile, and FAQs that raise more questions than they answer.

Case study: Product-led marketing reduces the impact of a global product launch

We’ve seen it firsthand. A technically advanced PaaS startup hired a member of our team to help craft content for a post-launch campaign, stating that the launch of their cutting-edge platform barely made any waves in the industry. Why? Because its users didn’t understand what it was for.

The product team could articulate the function of every microservice, every piece of the solution architecture, and every feature—but not the human impact. Without a captivating way to earn attention and keep it from the first to the last word in every email, the launch announcements fell flat.

By the time we rewrote their messaging, redesigned their landing page, and rebuilt the pitch from the outside in, they were already months behind.

This is the real risk of product-led branding: it creates work for users instead of doing the work for them. And, in an industry that moves this fast, confusion is conversion’s greatest enemy.

Design- and marketing-led teams win

When creative strategy sits at the heart of product development, tech brands become more than functional. They become memorable. They create experiences that are not only intuitive, but emotionally resonant. And that emotional edge often proves to be a powerful growth engine.

Duolingo used creative to explode in popularity

Take Duolingo as a prime example. The company didn’t just build a gamified language-learning app, it built a personality. From its irreverent, unhinged TikTok persona to the friendly notifications from its now-famous green owl, Duolingo’s creative team helped turn an educational utility into a daily habit people enjoy doing.

As a result, the company’s monthly active users more than doubled from 40.5 million in 2021 to more than 116.7 million in 2023. During that same span, bookings also grew by roughly 40% year-over-year. That growth wasn’t product-led, it was creative-driven.

Highly regulated industries also win by leading with creative

We’ve also seen the impact of design-led thinking in highly regulated industries like fintech. Legacy banks used to treat design as window dressing—safe, sterile, and transactional. But today’s disruptors are flipping that script. Challenger banks have embraced creative UX, friendly language, and bold visual branding to make money management feel personal and, sometimes, even fun.

Across all these use cases, the pattern is clear: When you involve a creative team early, your product doesn’t just function right, it feels right. It speaks human, it stands out, and it converts. According to Forester, every $1 invested in UX brings back $100 in return, a 9,900% ROI. That’s what happens when you stop treating creative as a garnish and start treating it like the main course.

How to spot a product-first, creative-last culture

Even the most well-meaning teams can fall into the trap of building in isolation. If you’re unsure whether your company is sidelining creative strategy in favor of a product-first mentality, look for these telltale signs.

“It doesn’t matter what it says, people will figure it out”

Dismissive commentary that reduces copy to filler or places an undue burden on the user ignores the fact that every word in a UI is part of the user experience. Microcopy guides behavior, sets expectations, and builds trust. Treating it as an afterthought is how you end up with confusion, drop-off, and support tickets that don’t need to exist.

“Just use whatever color looks best”

Aesthetic-only color selection signals a deeper misunderstanding of design’s role in usability and perception. Color choices affect accessibility, emotional tone, and brand recognition. Dismissing an expertly curated color palette as “nice to have” is how inconsistent, inaccessible, or (in some cases) culturally insensitive brand interfaces make it first into your users’ hands and then into their negative reviews.

“Marketing can catch up after launch”

The mindset of treating creative like a packaging function, something that happens after the work is already done, sets your launch up to fail. If you want your story to resonate, the storytellers need to be part of the process from the very beginning.

“UX is just a skin on the product”

It’s not. Your UX is the product. Design is inseparable from experience. If your user experience is confusing, inconsistent, or emotionally flat, your “skin” isn’t just superficial, but a structural failure.

These signals aren’t as rare as you might think. They’re cultural defaults in many organizations across product-rich development teams. But they’re also easily fixable, if corrected early.

The solution isn’t to dilute your engineering excellence with unnecessary silos or bog down your product team with word selection meetings. It’s to find a partner who can amplify your product’s value through story, language, identity, and interface design. That starts by involving brand and creative strategy at Step 0. And it’s what we specialize in here at Amato Consulting.

Try this simplified creative strategy framework for tech teams

But what does “creative from Step 0” actually look like?

It doesn’t involve replacing engineers with brand strategists or slowing down sprints for the sake of aesthetic polish. It means embedding creative problem-solvers alongside technical ones, so the product isn’t just built well, but built to resonate well too. 

Here’s a simplified version of the framework we use at Amato Consulting to align product development with brand clarity from day one. Treat it as a diagnostic, but know that you don’t have to be “creative-led” to be creative-first. Your product team should absolutely still lead product ideation and development, but do it alongside creative experts.

1. Complete narrative mapping before feature mapping

Before you start designing interfaces or scoping features, ask, “What story is this product telling? Who’s the hero and what’s their conflict?” A compelling brand starts with a clear emotional and functional value proposition (e.g., “Become the hero of your procurement team by ensuring sustainability across your supply chain”).

This mapping becomes the foundation for everything that follows—naming, messaging, UX copy, visual tone, etc.

2. Name your product before designing its identity

A name isn’t just a label—it’s the foundation of your positioning. Building your identity early empowers your team to ensure that visual design, interface tone, and technical documentation can speak in one consistent brand voice, which, for startups, has historically proven to be a substantial challenge.

3. Begin user-centered design and onboarding early in the dev cycle

Bring in UX writers and designers when product requirements are still forming, not after wireframes are already locked in. Clear microcopy, intuitive flows, and visually guided onboarding should be co-constructed by the product team that understands the solution and the creative team that understands human psychology and purchasing behavior.

4. Collaborate in parallel creative sprints

Your product roadmap and your creative roadmap should look like Venn diagrams, each with their own spheres of influence but overlapping at key points. Build cross-functional sprint rituals where brand, content, design, and product all align on key milestones (e.g., feature rollouts, messaging shifts, documentation needs).

It’s about more than just finding a good way to collaborate. It’s about positioning your creative work as a piece of scalable infrastructure, propelling innovation.

Creative strategy is your brand’s operating system

All that to say, a great product isn’t enough. Not anymore.

In today’s tech landscape, the companies that break through aren’t the ones building smarter software, they’re the ones building clearer, more human stories around their smart software. And they’re doing it early, because waiting to involve creative after the prototype is finished is like trying to debug code without reading the error message.

The data speaks for itself. Design-led companies grow faster, retain users longer, and outperform competitors on everything from revenue to brand loyalty. Creative strategy isn't decorative, it’s structural. It’s not the pitch deck polish, but the scaffolding for how people understand, adopt, and advocate for your product in the open market.

At Amato Consulting, we specialize in building that scaffolding. We take complexity and shape it into clarity, empathy, and momentum. We’ve worked with engineers, founders, and growth teams to turn underperforming launches into globally impactful movements, not by reinventing the product but by reimagining the story that surrounds it.

So, if your product is live but not clicking, or if you're still in development and ready to build something people crave using, bring us in before you’ve even named it, before the interface is locked in, before your story writes itself without you.

Learn more about Amato Consulting’s creative strategy.