This topic comes up a lot. Since my position has changed on this over the years, I decided it could be useful to publish my current thinking.
If you read nothing else, here’s one of my last statements up front:
Recognize the value of being a more articulate, capable, and informed technologist, but don’t put it on a pedestal. It’s just another tool.
What follows is a message I shared with a colleague.
Since I was a programmer long before I was a designer, I am very biased. That said, for any designer who doesn’t code, I cannot stress enough that you shouldn’t start learning how to code without having a strong “Why” behind it. Ultimately, effective design is all about effective communication, so it never hurts to learn the language of the people you are trying to communicate with. Every product designer — or UX/UI designer, full stack designer, or whatever they are calling it — should be slowly learning the language of everyone they rely on to be successful:
• Learning about business constraints, salesmanship, project management, and running a room from PMs
• Learning about automation, manual testing techniques, writing meaningful tickets, and helping people feel good about releases from QA engineers
• Learning about market trends, the market gap your work is trying to fill, latest updates from competitors, positioning for current and future releases from PMKs (product marketers)
• Learning about coding methodologies, new technologies, capabilities of current dependencies (and, therefore, constraints on your design work), technical debt, and anything stealing joy from the build process from FE & BE & Ops engineers
• Learning what non-product people are learning from the customers and users they try to convince every day including marketing, sales, support, account services (success), operations, and partner vendors
• Learning what makes executives tick, how they spend their day, how to make the most of the limited time you have with them, and how their beliefs about their business have changed (or haven’t) over time
• Learning about soft skills, values, cultural appetite and tolerance for specific topics, and whether things are getting better or worse internally from HR
• Learning how to communicate your wildest dreams in a practical way to your boss, your fellow designers, your creative team, your video team, and anyone else who might want to partner with you to magnify your influence
• Learning how to set boundaries with others in your life and manage priorities outside of work that affect, inform, and constrain your work to continue advancing in your career
I know that was long-winded, but hopefully my point is clear: there are many languages to learn. Is code the best thing for you to be focused on right now? In my experience, learning to code can help with one or more of those. But doing something small every week to advance your communication skills in all those areas is critical to your growth. Recognize the value of being a more articulate, capable, and informed technologist, but don’t put it on a pedestal. It’s just another tool. 🙂
In other words, don’t lose your focus on learning how to relate and serve people while you learn to code. After all, isn’t that what you are trying to accomplish by learning to code?
