
What Leads to Success in a Product Design Team?
At Bloc I help my students, many of whom have never used programs like Sketch or Illustrator, understand what product design means. I’ve also been passionate in including friends and loved ones in the conversation as the terms product designer, visual designer, UI designer, and web designer have continuously created confusion. So, from a process perspective, getting to the root of what is important in product design, I’d have to say it’s both collaboration and versatility.
When I first started in this industry I held the title Web Designer I. The title was both generic and in ways, limited in describing what it was I eventually wanted to do. To start, I wanted to become better. I knew the work I was doing wasn’t quite what I wanted. This was far before I had even heard the term “user experience”. I then embarked on my own education, moved to Chicago and attended a bootcamp program. Even then, it was only the beginning to my own research and information gathering on process, working with others, and truly understanding what sort of design organizations I would want to eventually be part of.
When students ask me, what are all these positions? How do you really know what position is what you’re looking for? And how might I decide if a job is right for me? I give them some advice coming from experience. To start, you want to make sure you find a collaborative team and on a more personal level, you want to be familiar with what people on your team do. You need to find out if you will be able to cross collaborate with your team and discuss problems. It is extremely important. To me, it seems that product design has become a popularized term because of the way in which it informs the way a design department will work. If you are merely a UX designer and lack strong visual design skills, it tends to create some friction between the UX and UI designer. If you know both and are on a team with other product designers, all the responsibility doesn’t also fall to one individual. It usually allows for more cross collaboration as well, rather than forcing people to remain in designated roles and being afraid to step on toes.
Product design in my experience requires a designer to be familiar in all areas of design including UX, UX research, visual design, UI design, and frontend development. In many companies, unfortunately due to time and deadlines, UX is still an area that is being neglected. Even then, it is not understood that having one individual make all of the decisions when it comes to user experience is far less beneficial than discussion or research based decision making on a team. So, as I continue my career I’ve found it extremely therapeutic to be part of a company that instills in junior designers how combining the skills relating to product design can make for a better designer. If you don’t start off learning all parts of the product design process, you might find yourself pigeoned holed later on and that the end user is suffering. A disconnected team can directly be pointed to the level at which team members understand how each moving part of product design works together. So, in short being able to reach over to a visual designer and say “What about this?” is just as important as being able to reach over to a UX designer and say “Have we thought about this?” In fact, we should be able to wear those hats continuously, checking ourselves, as well as supporting our team members throughout.

