How to start a career in Product Design?
I’ve been asked this question countless times, prompting me to write a post to try and help provide some answers.
Here is a guide for you, designer-wannabe, with a list of resources, concepts, and some steps to get you up to speed on what it is and what it takes to be a Product Designer in 2024.
★ Let’s start with the basics:
What is Product Design?
Product design involves designers merging user needs with business goals, enabling brands to create consistently successful products. This multidisciplinary process spans research, strategy, design, and business, emphasizing collaboration.
The goal of product design is to generate, evolve, and enhance products that address market demands while resolving user needs. This multifaceted field encompasses aspects such as UX and UI design, engineering, product management, and beyond.
Why product design is important?
Product design helps you design better products based on user experiences, feedback, and market potential. By incorporating key user insights into your product roadmap you will:
- Create innovative products
- Improve the user experience
- Increase brand awareness
- Stay competitive in your market
Check a much more in-depth definition here:
What is the role of a Product Designer?
Product designers work to optimize the user experience in the solutions they make for their users — and help their brands by making products sustainable for longer-term business needs.
Here are a set of tasks expected from a Product Designer:
Product Strategy and Vision
- Work closely with the product team to build and validate hypotheses about new opportunities, playing a significant role in shaping the product roadmap and direction.
- Work closely with engineers and product managers to plan long-term product strategies and short-term tactics.
Research and User-testing
- Conduct user research and use insights to help shape future product improvements and opportunities.
- Perform usability testing and gather user feedback to inform design decisions.
Cross-functional collaboration
- Work with product managers and engineers to form an empowered cross-functional product team.
- Facilitate cross-functional workshops such as co-creation, empathy mapping, and journey mapping exercises.
- Foster design thinking and facilitate generative discussions with cross-functional partners, promoting a culture of innovation and collaboration.
- Collaborate closely with product and engineering teams to create easy-to-use and visually appealing experiences that align with business goals.
- Help the team balance product decisions through value, usability, feasibility, and viability. As the product designer, you are the main person responsible for the usability.
Hands-on design work
- Work closely with the product, engineering, and analytics departments to design new solutions through wireframes, mockups, and pixel-perfect designs.
- Synthesise user needs and business objectives and produce testable prototypes to validate hypotheses.
- Ideate and prototype in both high- and low-fidelities.
Processes and Documentation
- Be an active participant in the design team’s continuous effort to consolidate our UI & UX design system.
- Develop and maintain design documentation.
- Participate in regular design reviews.
Product designers play a critical role in identifying and aligning goals that matter, considering both user and business perspectives. Their contributions are instrumental in steering a company towards success and fostering a positive impact on both the business and its users. In essence, the efforts of product designers result in a win-win scenario for all involved parties.
★ What do I do to start?
Okay, now that we’ve covered the basics, here’s a list of the first steps to learn how to be a Product Designer. Fortunately, these days, you don’t necessarily need to enroll in an expensive course or go to a design university; there’s a lot of content out there, and much of the craft comes from repetition as well. So, no excuses to start!
A good way to start is by following these steps:
1. Learn the principles of design
Design principles are guidelines, biases, and design considerations that designers apply with discretion. Professionals from many disciplines — e.g., behavioral science, sociology, physics, and ergonomics — provided the foundation for design principles via their accumulated knowledge and experience.
Resources:
The Design of Everyday Things by Dan Norman (book)
Ten Principles of Good Design according to Dieter Rams (article)
2. Start doing hands-on design work to build a portfolio
In the first days of trying to learn a design tool, opening up Figma or Sketch for the first can easily get overwhelming and scary but learning these tools is extremely necessary. Your portfolio will be more important than your CV to land a job in Product Design. After learning design principles is time to start to put them in action.
For those embarking on the journey of learning to design, my recommendation is to find a simple design you like on Pinterest, Dribble, or Behance and try to reproduce that design in Figma or Sketch. This hands-on approach will accelerate your learning process. Then, after you reach a certain level, venture into more advanced settings, such as creating prototypes or animations. In no time, you’ll be able to craft designs for your portfolio.
🛠️ Resources:
Tools:
Intro to Figma by Jesse Showalter (video)
Intro to Sketch by Jess Showalter (video)
Building a portfolio:
What Companies Look in a Design Portfolio by The Futur (video)
Complete guide to build a Portfolio from Flux Academy (video)
How to Make Your First Portfolio by Rebecca Peterson-Hall (video)
3. Join design communities to network and learn more
Networking is and will always be a great way to learn from other people who are or were in the same situation as you. You can exchange resources and experiences that sometimes will shorten the path that otherwise would require mistakes and dead ends to learn. I have learned so much from my designer peers, and I continue to do so regardless of their experience and role; there’s always something you haven’t seen or didn’t know that is worth learning.
Start by finding local communities you can attend in person or design events organized locally. I always prefer face-to-face networking, but online, there’s a huge amount of places you can join! I’ll leave a few links down below
🛠️ Resources:
Linkedin groups:
Interaction Design Foundation (group)
User Experience Design UX (group)
User Experience and Design Thinkers (group)
Articles to read:
Networking in UX (article)
4. Seek mentorship from experienced product designers
In the ever-changing field of design, seeking mentorship from experienced product designers is an essential step toward personal and professional growth. This kind of connection can provide you with insights and guidance, allowing you to navigate the complexities of the industry with more confidence. Mentorship not only accelerates skill development but also fosters a supportive network, enabling designers to learn from real-world challenges and successes.
When you are starting out, it might be a bit overwhelming to know where to find yourself a mentor. If you are already following some design communities, that’s a start, but there are also lots of websites dedicated to helping you find a mentor. I’m listing some that I know down below, but the only one I used myself, as a mentor, was the first one, ADP List, and I can highly recommend it.
🛠️ Resources:
Mentorship sites:
ADP List
Merit
Design Lab
5. Keep always updating your skills
That doesn’t necessarily mean always doing hands-on work to keep your skills up to date, but rather staying updated with what’s happening in the industry — new trends or features released by design tools that can improve your workflow and optimize your work.
What I do to be up to date is to follow some designers and/or publications about design, on social media, or even in channels like this one (Medium) and get their updates. Knowing what’s happening is a good differentiator since you are more likely to be informed about new tools or key features earlier than others, giving you a chance to try them beforehand.
There are also great tools to aggregate these channels in one view and I’m referring to Muzli’s Inspiration which takes your New Tab on Google Chrome and replaces it with a showcase of publication news that you can select. Personally, this is my favorite way of keeping myself updated passively. The only downside is that it is only available in Chrome.
🛠️ Resources:
Publications:
Smashing Magazine (site)
Profiles to follow:
UX Magazine (Linkedin)
UX Collective (Linkedin)
Tools:
Muzli Inspiration Chrome Extension (extension)
6. Apply for internships to gain real-world experience
Even though theory is important, nothing compares to learning by doing. Design is a highly visual field, and there’s a lot of experience through crafting that you only learn by trial and error.
Internships can provide a unique opportunity for sparring with other designers and immersing yourself in real-world projects, honing your craft through the iterative process. Working on real projects with actual clients, who have different opinions and cultural differences, not only helps refine a designer’s capabilities but also cultivates a resilient and adaptive mindset, essential for navigating a design career.
🛠️ Resources:
Where to find Internships:
Glassdoor
Linkedin Jobs
In essence, the journey to becoming a successful product designer involves a combination of theoretical knowledge, hands-on experience, and continuous learning.
Starting out can be overwhelming but once you master the basics, everything starts to make sense. Try to stay focused on mastering one step at a time, at your own pace, and I promise, with enough effort and dedication you will become a great designer.
Please let me know in the comments if this was a helpful guide and/or if you have any suggestions on how to grow and improve this guide. I wish you good luck on your journey to becoming a Product Designer.
Remember, consistent practice and lifelong learning are key to success in product design.
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