The rise in demand for product designers

In the Bay Area, roles are consistently being developed, reinvented or influenced to fit the needs of start-ups’ — one of them being product design. This role is one of the most influenced among the industry and currently one of the hottest and most in demand among organizations. What once started as the description of someone who designed the look, feel, and shape of your favorite household objects, is now referred to as a hybrid role between a product manager and a designer.

So why the sudden increase in demand? Let’s begin with the evolution of the role.

The evolution

The role of product designer has evolved over time. In the past, this was the person who quite literally designed the look of a product, now; however, this describes that of a digital “jack of all trades.”

Anna Meyer, Senior Consultant for Data and Design, states that “the term product design varies from each company and tends to be overgeneralized. Most companies, however, refer to this role as a “full-stack” designer meaning they can touch both UX (user experience) and UI (user interface) and design the product from wireframes and mockups all the way to finishing visual touches.”

The expansion

As a recruitment consultancy, our office in San Francisco has noticed a higher demand for product designers in 2016 as the digital realm continues to expand.

When the new definition of the role unfolded, it was primarily focused on consumer driven products and services. However, the B2B market started expecting and demanding the same level of efficient and fluid user interface and experience as well as those for the B2C market.

“User experience has become a common expectation, even for business software. The advent of well designed consumer experiences such as the iPhone, Facebook, and Netflix has set a precedence for people through everyday use. It used to be an expectancy that the software used at work would suck, but now we understand that it doesn’t actually have to be that way,” says Ben Domanico, Design Director at @Prosperworks.

Because of this new trend, B2B products and services have started placing more emphasis on their user interface and experience in order to meet those demands. This has resulted in aesthetically pleasing and intuitive applications and websites for both businesses and consumers.

Anna adds, “Traditionally it was not considered important for enterprise companies to have a seamless user interface. However, as companies like Box emerged, it became clear that strong design was impacting the success of enterprise companies as well.”

As a result of B2B companies placing more emphasis on product design, the need for talented product designers continues to increase.

Anna continues, “At the end of the day the user, whether it is a marketing specialist using an automation platform or a teenager using a mobile app, has to interact with the product and will evaluate the ease of that experience.”

The competition

Another factor in the increase in demand for product designers is the upsurge in competition for good design. Someone with only digital marketing or graphic design experience can no longer get by in this role.

“We are creating a logical demand for more brains that focus on taking amazing technology and purposing it for the needs of the people who use it,” says Ben.

Now there are degrees of study and boot camps in order to really understand all that is entailed. In order for product and services to stand out among the competition, the user experience and interface needs to be affluent. In a recent study by HubSpot, “76% of consumers say the most important factor in a website’s design is the ease of website navigation.”

The platforms

The finishing aspect of the growth in product designers is the prevalence of mobile applications. With tech companies focusing on their mobile interface, many start-ups not only have a product designer for their website, but also their mobile application, which entails a different user experience.

Ben adds that, “Web-based technology has greatly advanced and matured over the past decade. What we can now do though a browser of mobile device is complex, sometimes both technically and conceptually. Designers build systems, interactions, and visual languages out of complexity. So as software advances, the need to translate that into a tool many people can use grows.”

Anna continues by simply stating that “the more apps that are on the market means a higher demand for designers to design them.”

The search

So how do you find these product unicorns? We encourage hiring managers to look beyond portfolios. Here’s why: “Most hiring managers rely on portfolios to identify talent, however many top designers neglect to update their portfolios especially when they aren’t actively looking for a job,” says Anna.

Some approaches to uncover hidden design talent include “looking at current or past work experience at companies which are known for having strong design culture and getting creative with ways to see their work, such as: a PDF of work samples or downloading an app they created,” suggests Anna.