Let´s talk about Unicorns! What are they? Where does this myth come from? Why do they use the term “unicorn” at start-ups? What about hiring unicorns on Design companies? Let´s go deeper!
Story and myth
The first references about unicorns come from Indus Valley Civilization, it is not sure if they talked about horse-like or goat-like animals, what is sure is that they had one horn: “its horn was said to have the power to render poisoned water potable and to heal sickness”.
In Europe, we saw it as an extremely wild forest creature, symbol of purity and grace, which could only be captured by a virgin.
Remember two things: the power is in the horn, and the power is about conversion. What do I mean by conversion? Up to you. Maybe some kind of magic and power that brings you to success, whatever you consider success.
Start-up Unicorn culture
There is a lot of noise out there about Unicorn companies. “A unicorn company or startup is a new business that is valued at more than $1 billion and is privately owned”. The term was coined by Aileen Lee, a venture capitalist, in an article written in 2013. She used it to describe the relative rarity of such companies, estimating that just 0.07% of software startups from the 2000s would reach valuations above $1 billion (from IG post).
Here you are the complete list of Unicorn Companies from CB Insights. If you work in one of these companies, yes, definitely you can really say you are a unicorn or work with them.
Unicorn Profiles
In the past we used to talk about unicorns referring people who could design and code, there are lots of posts answering the question “Should designers code?” In my honest opinion, we find different profiles here:
- Designers moving to Code (becoming programmers)
- Programmers moving to Designers, yes I know some
- There are some profiles than can design and code but not deeply. I mean, designers that can do a lot of things with code but usually they don´t get into more complicated things such as programming with frameworks. Maybe they are called Design Engineers, Design/Creative Technologists or UI Engineeers. See Invision Design Engineering Handbook where they call them Hybrids.
I think that now we hear more the term unicorn related to unicorn designers, not strictly related to design/code skills. A unicorn designer is someone that can do Research, can do UX, expert in UI, knows about Interaction, etc. Also we could talk about Product Designers: Here the point is about skills, besides their design skills, they are good at communication, at management and business.
Say you have a company, you are the CEO or you work as a talent recruiter, and now, you go in a hunt for a new profile. Say you don´t have really clear what you are looking for, could be a Product Designer, an Interaction Designer, DesignOps, there many names… Maybe you want a gifted candidate that can do research, design, write, code, knows about business strategies and whatever you want.
We see this kind of job offers for junior designers. You can go for a generalist or a specialist, maybe you look for a full-stack designer, or a T-shaped profile, maybe you don´t know what you really need: you just know what skills and values you need but you have an opened mind. So, what do you go for? You could be honest and just say it is an opened job.
Even Jacob Nielsen from NNGroup talks about the UX Unicorn Myth using a sport comparison. For him, generalist versus specialist is as mediocrity against excellency. Maybe the best is to have a broad understanding on the design field and workflow, the big picture, but specialized in something.
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