How to speedrun building a product design career in 90 days — for free
Okay, maybe this title is too provocative — ninety days is, indeed, ambitious. In my opinion, the majority of roles in the tech industry are impossible to acquire unless you have work and skill to show for it. However, I think you can get that quickly (maybe even within ninety days!), and most certainly for free— if you are very disciplined, that is.
I’ve talked about this before, but I enjoy the concept of speedrunning applied to any topic. On Wikipedia, speedrunning is defined as such:
A speedrun is a playthrough of a video game, or section of a video game, with the goal of completing it as fast as possible. Speedruns often follow planned routes, which may incorporate sequence breaking, and might exploit glitches that allow sections to be skipped or completed more quickly than intended.
The question, then, becomes: how might I speedrun myself into a product design career, if I were to do it all again? First, consider the minimum requirements.
What are the minimum requirements?
In general, every designer needs the following:
- Resume,
- LinkedIn,
- Portfolio site — with probably at least two case studies.
Focusing on each requirement in the list above:
Resume
If you’re an early career person, you likely don’t have many relevant experiences to put on your resume, but this is not the end of the world. In my experience, recruiters are not likely to read your resume — especially if there are no widely known companies on it. Assuming this is true, your objective for this hiring artefact is: make this look nice and presentable. But don’t fuss after the content overly much.
See above. Just make sure you have one.
Portfolio site
This is the big boy requirement, and what the majority of this opinion piece will concern itself with. Some portion of designers may pass-wall their case studies, or may not even show any at all, but this is not the norm — designers who do not make case studies publicly available are more likely to rely on the known names on their CVs to get around this requirement. This may be an option for them, but this will not be the case for early career designers.
With that said, here’s what you need in a portfolio:
- Good visual design,
- Meaty/plausible case studies (probably no less than two).
This being said, an early career designer may be left with the following question:
How do I build case studies without a job?
Answer: make your own. Speaking entirely plainly (and feel free to disagree), here’s what you should not build a case study on:
- Website redesigns (e.g., site redesigns of your local coffee shop or floral arrangement company, etc.),
- Clone of any current product (e.g., to do lists; meditation apps; music apps; etc.).
What’s wrong with website redesign case studies?
Consider this: you’re looking for a product design role, meaning you want to show products you have worked on. Products change entirely based on user behavior; websites, on the other hand, are largely static. For this reason, it cannot be said that, for most sites, there’s any product work needed to be done.
To put this another way: Slack’s marketing site (slack.com, but when not signed in, of course) is a website. It shows information about what Slack is, why you should use it, how to get it, links to documentation for developers, etc.
However, the actual product is what we know of as Slack: the chat app. Slack does, indeed, offer web experiences (slack.com, but only when signed in) and native ones, too (see: App/Play store), but these are all apps (in other words: products), not websites — they use web technologies under the hood, but the usage of web frameworks and protocols does not make something a website.
In short: you need product case studies. So you need to work on products, not websites.
What’s wrong with cloning a current product?
Technically, nothing. If you want to clone a currently available product (e.g., Headspace, Calm, Spotify, Apple Music, any chat app, any to do list, etc.), this can be useful towards learning to use Figma. This will not help you get hired, though.
Consider this: unless you have a specific, new value proposition for this clone (which wouldn’t make your product a clone, in a strict sense, but a competitor), you will be unlikely to be proposing a clone that’s better than the source product. Your case studies should be plausible — people reading should be able to find the premise of the software you’re proposing to be convincing. The problem with cloning an app is that one is simply reproducing screens, not adding a plausible value proposition. More specifically, the probability is high that whatever you make will be less considered, less complex, less interesting, and less beautiful than the source product. Instead, consider the following prompts to build case studies on:
- How might we build an experience into Chirp Social, where people can discuss special interests and talk just amongst each other about them?
- How might we build a karaoke experience into Gisnep+ for parents to play with their kids?
- How might we build a mentor/mentee matching experience into LinkedOut?
- How might we build a dating service into LinkedOut for professionals?
- How might we build an experience into 32andYou that allows customers to easily find genetic matches for the purpose of organic material donation/receipt?
- How might we build an experience into 32andYou that allows customers to easily take part in trials or studies for rare diseases?
- How might we build an Accord that’s easier to navigate?
- How might we make Gas better?
These are a variety of prompts I made up in a few minutes. You can make your own, too. Pick two or three, then spend about two weeks on each. Approach these prompts from this mentality: you are going to build a business on these product ideas, or you were hired to be the lead designer on these new experiences/improvements in outstanding products.
To start: ask yourself what the problems with these experiences are and how they could be better, in your opinion. For example, with the Accord/Gas prompts:
- What is frustrating about Accord’s navigation right now? What could make this better?
- How come Gas has all these extraneous experiences in it, when really it’s just a platform to sell, discover, buy, and play games? How are any of those experiences useful or profitable? Do we need to support all of them, still? How could all of this be better and more simplified?
- What new experiences would make sense in Gas, if any? Maybe streaming, so as to compete or integrate with Twitch?
If you are working on a prompt with a totally new idea, ask yourself what you know about these products and how these new experiences could (or couldn’t) work in them. For example, with the 32andYou donation prompt:
- If there was a donor matching experience in 32andYou, what kinds of donations could the recipients require? Just organs? Or blood? Marrow? What else?
- Can we work with established donation organizations, like the Red Cross, to facilitate these connections, or source organic material?
- Most states in USA allow you to mark yourself off as an “organ donor” when getting an ID/license — can we work with that infrastructure, somehow, to acquire potential donors?
- How can we source the recipients on the platform? Do we recruit via services hospitals currently use to manage their requests? Are there services that the recipients are all using right now that we can source from?
- What kind of legal issues could 32andYou face dealing with this kind of product? Is it too risky?
- Is this financially plausible? How could this be financially viable, if at all? Could this provide some new revenue stream to 32andYou somehow?
And so on. These are reasonable questions any adult, when considering a business built on these products, would likely be asking themselves. Likewise, these are questions that will go through the minds of people on your interview panels as you go through your case study. Just use the “reasonable person” test on your proposed problem, discover those holes in the proposal, and then answer them. This can mean that the product may not be viable enough to work on. Or it could be, provided certain assumptions are made. (Feel free to make those, and note them openly.)
But there is another question — one you are likely not asking yourself, but should (in my opinion):
How do I make good visual design?
Answer: the probability is low that you will be able to do this, especially in ninety days. This is not a skill you can easily farm, like you can with case studies, over a few weeks or months. This skill is not dissimilar to becoming extremely physically fit, or developing an acquired taste as you age— it takes a long time, with very dedicated, sometimes frustrating, work. But you only have ninety days, and your portfolio still should look good. So what do you do? Refer to the section below that corresponds best to your level of interest in visual design.
You’re not interested in visual design
Do not build your own portfolio site. Use notion.so, or even Medium, to manage your case studies.
You are sincerely interested in visual design
A portfolio site is highly personal, can have lots of personality, is based on the person you know the best (yourself), and is something you’re likely very personally motivated to do and get right — this makes it a perfect sandbox for developing visual design skills. You can also use this as an opportunity to pick up some skills with web technologies, which makes your life easier. If you are willing to take this on (buying a custom domain; finding a “no-code” solution to template management, such as Webflow, Squarespace, etc.; and so on), then this could be a good option for you.
However, I might still recommend using notion.so to simply get off the ground, getting your case studies publicly available while you work on your portfolio and visual design on the side.
Developing good visual design
A great way to do this is to exactly (and I mean exactly) reproduce everything you find beautiful, visually. Did you find a beautiful page in a book on Pinterest? Open an editor and reproduce it, or some part of it. Found a pretty app with some nice button and heading styles? Reproduce that entire screen. Reproduce it as many times as you need to get it perfect.
What you are doing here is developing your taste for what looks beautiful, and your skills around how to make beautiful things. It is a cognitive ability, in my opinion, but it is a very abstract one, and takes a lot of time. It is doable, however, but it can take some years. Being that this is a somewhat painful process that is hard to rush, people who are willing to endure this by way of sincere interest in visual design are the best match for acquiring this skillset. As such, the key to this skillset is sincere interest, tolerance, and willpower.
Summing up
All this being said, the cheapest (in terms of price and effort) speedrun package could include this:
- Making a presentable LinkedIn account,
- Making a nice looking resume,
- Farming two (or three) case studies (not website redesigns, nor clones of currently available apps — see above),
- Building a cheap (in terms of price and effort) portfolio, probably using Notion or some equivalent (see above).
These four actions, alone, could potentially be done in ninety days — provided you are dedicated and disciplined. But someone try this and report back — would like to see if this experiment works!
