Learnings on the Product Designer roles and missions
Here are the key takeaways from our fourth Product Stories meetup about the roles and missions of a Product Designer. You can watch the full video or read through the main takeaways, or both!
After an enlightening chat with Dan Cederholm, co-founder at Dribbble (takeaways below), we were thrilled to close 2018 with another meet up about Product Design, hosted at Zenly.
We happily welcomed Laure Boutmy, Designer (Side), Gokce Taskan, Design Director (dailymotion), and Benjamin Soukiassian, Product Manager (Dreem).
They took the stage to share their experiences and thoughts on the role and missions of the Product Designer from day one, her/his relationship with other teammates and the design team’s evolution during company growth.
Here are some of the juiciest takeaways:
Of course, none of these are cold, hard, facts. Just several viewpoints:
What’s really behind the title Product Designer?
From Communication designer to User Interface, Web, Interaction, Service, Digital Product or even Product Designer, the “title” is ever evolving.
As Gokce says, “Product Designer isn’t necessarily the correct one, it’s the current one. It’s the best title to describe what we’re doing at the moment.”
Product design is associated with the global product experience and the main role of a Product designer to protect it. Both emotional and functional sides. But who knows, it might change before we know it!
When to hire a Product Designer?
Hiring at the right time is crucial. The sooner is definitely the better, but scaling with the product is also as important. A great example is Joe Gebbia, Airbnb co-founder, who’s a designer.
Is product design externalization a good or bad idea?
Do it if you know exactly what problem you want to solve and how. It’ll help you brief the freelancer or the agency and align yourselves on expectations. If not, it can be tricky, and risky, to externalize product design.
Product design goes through iterations, with several teams (i.e. Product, Marketing, Support…) and it’s almost impossible to do that efficiently with external to your team’s daily interactions. Moreover, feedback cycles tend to be too long with agencies, costing you to lose iteration momentum and reactivity.
“Companies should manage product design internally because it’s the central part of the project you’re dealing with on a daily basis. No freelancers or agencies can be as qualified as your team is.” Luc Chaissac, Muxu.Muxu
The first hiring…
… needs to be an experienced designer who’s going to guide the (co)founder(s) and the team. She/He needs to have a wide-ranging skill set, be able to get the global product picture and evolve with the team and the product.
The most important are soft skills. Is their behavior (can they collaborate with different teams?), their attitude (can they criticize their own work?), their approach (e.g. how are they analyzing the problem to be solved), not necessarily the experience nor the skills.
Hiring process best practices
Define a problem you want the designer to solve and prepare lots of questions to ask when you get their solution. It’s the best way to understand how she/he came up with this solution (e.g. conscious thoughts, process…) and assess the above soft skills.
You could also choose to ask a designer to explain a piece of her/his portfolio in a very clear way. As Gokce said:
Being able to do things — like designing product — is great, but being able to explain them is even more valuable.
When to grow the designers’ team?
The sooner the better (again)! Designers working in a team can bounce ideas off each other and move forward more quickly.
It’s also key to strike the right balance between designers and developers. The more developers you hire in a team, the more assets you have to produce, the more product designers you need.
Design system, yay or nay?
As Benjamin said, it’s a huge investment upfront but it definitely worth it. In the long run, it helps your team build faster.
Laure and Gokce agreed but insisted that we always underestimate the time it takes to build and maintain it. In their opinion, a design system isn’t a topic small companies address and it’s only possible if there’s a buy-in from the Engineering team (e.g. AirBnB Design System team features the best developers in the company).
Product manager, Product designer, and user trio
Product managers and designers must work side by side because both inputs help to define and prioritize the right problems.
They also both need to be close to their users to make the right decisions: whether it’s through user testing and research or data. Their role is really to ensure everyone in the company understands the end-user and makes the right decisions for them, no matter how broad the persona.
How to manage the long and short term product vision and decision-making?
It’s helpful and important to get your team out of their daily routine and iterations to focus on the next big goals and product challenges.
- At Dreem, the product team goes on retreats twice a year to lay the foundations of where they are and where they’re headed.
- At Dailymotion, they often organize workshops to focus on a big feature or product decision with all relevant stakeholders (designers, developers, etc).
Why does design look the same in every company nowadays?
Reproducing the core logic of a successfully designed product is useful because they become patterns that users recognize and understand. Gokce put it best:
“We need copies of products. Not in the sense of copying features but in the sense of copying visuals. You don’t need to always re-invent the wheel, instead, you should focus on creating value within your product, not with the details of the typography”
What are the relevant KPIs and OKRs to track?
Design KPIs should be the same as the company’s KPIs. Everyone is working towards the same goals and the most important is not whether product design is reaching their KPIs but whether they’re aligned with the rest of the company’s objectives.
Got more questions for our speakers? Don’t hesitate to tweet them:
Many thanks to Zenly for hosting us a second time in their dope offices and offering food & drink (and goodies)! 🤩🙌 We also wanted to thank our design partners Muxu.Muxu for their work on our visual identity. 🤗
Big thank you to all of those came out too! Be sure to follow us on Twitter and join our community to stay in the loop about the next meet-ups 👋.
