Building A World-Class Product Design Team

What if you had a chance to come in to a new organization as a Product Design leader and build your dream team from scratch?

The two main things I cover in this article:

1. Product Design holistically covers a lot of sub-disciplines. Everyone is unique in terms of the specific skillset they possess and in the ways they want to grow. There is a “toolkit” that comes to my mind and everyone on your team may have command of different things in that toolkit.
2. Product Design is very cross-functional within an organization. Some roles would be ones you recruit and manage, others may be shared resources with other teams. Therefore, think about the concept of a “team” as both people you hire/manage as well as key collaborators in the organization. It’s critical to get an idea of how well your organization understansd the Product Design process, and how they’ll support you in building a dedicated, cross-functional team.

Product Design Subcategories:

• Product Strategist: The “Product” side of Product Design. A strong understanding of users/customers, data, business opportunities, product strategy. Example deliverables: High level briefs or decks stating the problem/opportunity, supporting quant/qual data, competitive research, an AB testing roadmap.
• UX/UI Designer: The “technical/nerdy” side of Product Design, describing how something will work and designing the interface users will interact with. Example deliverables: flow diagrams, wireframes specifying the interface, information hierarchies, content taxonomies.
• Visual Designer: Art Direction/Graphic Design. This is about adding an aesthetic, branded look to the UX/UI through typography, color palette, imagery. Example deliverables: final mocks, style guides. This role might include other micro-specialties such as: illustration, photography.
• Interaction Designer: Designing Interactions and responses (animations, transitions), design patterns, design systems, prototyping. Example deliverables: high-level prototypes (with tools like Axure, HTML/CSS, Adobe After Effects).

Additional Specialties:

• User Researcher: analyzes and reports on engagement metrics, user sentiments, demographics/psychographics, conducts usability testing. Example deliverables: survey/interview results, usability testing results, segmentation profiles.
• Content Strategist: focuses on the planning, creation, delivery, and governance of content, suggests not just words, but also images and interactivity to enhance storytelling.
• UX Copywriter: specializes in succinct and effective copy to improve and enhance the user’s experience within a feature

Determining Individual Skill Sets and Crossover

Here’s where it gets interesting.

There are a lot of interpretations of the role “Product Designer”, both in how we perceive ourselves, as well as in an organization’s expectations. I define a “Product Designer” as someone who encompasses and champions the broader Product Design process. Any given individual is going to be calibrated uniquely in terms of experience within each Product Design subcategory.

There are no unicorns, are there?

There are no unicorns!

Ever seen a job description where they describe wanting one individual to own all product strategy, UX, final design, even coding? That’s likely a very scrappy startup or someone in HR who doesn’t understand how unrealistic this vast set of expectations are.

It’s extremely difficult to find someone has 100% skill level in all Product Design subcategories. In fact, I don’t buy that someone is at “100%” of any single category, since technology and the way we communicate digitally is constantly evolving.

For example, here’s where I graph myself with regard to my particular skillset:

I came up through my digital career as a coder and “tinkerer”, an analyst of users and the way they interact with technology. I didn’t have formal training as a graphic designer. I know how to “piggyback” design off of an established style guide, or work with a visual designer to polish UI.

I do look to continually improve my visual design skills, as this helps me to be a better Product Designer and mentor. Product Design is a robust discipline: the bar is higher literally every day. To stay current, we need to keep studying and improving, leveling up our game. Recently I completed courses in typography, color theory and animation, which inspired totally new ways of thinking about user experience.

“Product Design is a robust discipline: the bar is higher literally every day. To stay current, we need to keep studying and improving, leveling up our game.”

The real art to building a team is staffing up with people who have complementary skills that make the team more complete, while still leaving room for each individual to grow.

This is probably what my core “dream team” would look like. Depending on the size of an organization, there could be multiples of roles to scale to the number of projects in play, organized within squads focused on particular business initiatives. Ideally, these would be dedicated resources.

Crossover can occur between roles and skillsets:

• Product Strategy: As a Product Designer, I often find some crossover between myself and a Product Manager in that we both do analysis, strategy, and propose experiments.
• Visual vs UX Design: You may find a UX/UI designer who also has strong visual design skills. A candidate can have a graphic design degree, then 3+ years of experience designing digital interfaces. Or someone who went through a UX certification program then picked up good visual design mentoring/training on the job for a few years. The portfolio review, talking with the candidate, and perhaps a design exercise will demonstrate where they “graph” on the scale.
• Interaction Design: This could be a skill within the Visual or UX/UI designer’s toolkit. Or perhaps you have two UX/UI designers: one is also strong on visual design, the other strong on interaction design. Or… this role might actually be a coder. In my personal experience, the experience potential of what front end code can do is underexplored. I’m not talking about a simple button hover color, but the full capabilities of React, or advanced CSS transitions, animations, and 3-D. It’s too easy to focus completely on the visual. It’s the universe of little things that make a rich digital experience. That’s why I like to call out this particular specialty. If it’s not a specific capability within your team, it needs to be prioritized as a growth area.
• User Research: Many organizations have someone owning “Customer Research”. This person typically works closely within or with Customer Service, runs surveys, conducts customer interviews. I have observed that this role tends to be focused on the customer’s general experience with the business (the product, delivery, etc), not specifically the usability of digital products. An organization may also have someone in Product Marketing that’s tracking learnings about customers and helping create segmentation profiles. On my “dream team”, a User Research role would be focused on usability testing and tracking digital engagement, and would be closely aligned with anyone already doing product marketing or customer research (as it’s traditionally defined).

Some Final Thoughts

As Product Design continues to evolve, it’s been fascinating to witness how specialties have emerged and how roles may cross-pollinate. Virtual reality and AI are going to be key emerging areas that will shape our roles as Product Designers in even more interesting ways!

Before entering into a new opportunity, acquire a strong understanding around:

1. What business goals the organization is trying to accomplish
2. The organization’s understanding of how Product Design functions and how it will support those business goals
3. How the organization will support you in staffing up your team to be more complete with both dedicated and shared resources

There will always be some politics and challenges that prevent a perfectly “clear runway” to build your ideal team. Different organizations take different approaches to how they define their culture, teams, and cross-functional process. However, communicating a strong idea from the start of what will best serve the organization is flexing good leadership skills!

I’d love to hear your comments about your thoughts and experiences. Share them below!