PWiC Silicon Valley : Conversation over Coffee with Sabika Nazim
On Saturday January 25th, the PWiC Silicon Valley team held their first mentoring session of 2020 in Coffebar, Menlo Park. The event featured product designer Sabika Nazim as the mentor. We had 11 attendees for this session with experience ranging from product designers, project managers to customer success.
About the Mentor
Sabika is an accomplished design leader and entrepreneur with over 18 years of experience leading product and design. Under her leadership, teams have helped shape and deliver critically acclaimed, creative, highly functional, and engaging products. Before joining Quantcast, Sabika was the Head of Product Design at Dynamic Signal, a leading enterprise startup in the mobile intranet and communication space. Sabika has also co-founded two startups, Convo & Scrybe, that were recognized for the thoughtfulness and uniqueness of their product design. In her free time, Sabika volunteers for The Citizens Foundation. TCF is a non-profit organization that helps educate underprivileged children in Pakistan.
Event Highlights
We had an engaging round table Q&A session with Sabika and she had very valuable advice to share around the role of product design and useful tips on how to be successful as a designer. Here are some of the highlighted questions from the event :
Q: What is the difference between UX Design, Product Design (PD), and Product Management (PM)?
Sabika : UX design and product design are often used interchangeably. UX design advocates more for the user experience and how the end user will interact with the product. As a product designer you are also thinking of the business needs. Product designers work to make sure the right compromises and balances are made between all the different contributors/stakeholders. Product managers on the other hand, figure out what the business outcomes are, how to work with engineering to ship the product, and work with designers to make sure the proposed designs are technically feasible. Product managers support product designers, and both work together on the user research phase.
Q: What are some resources you recommend on product design and design critiquing? How can I get started in Product design?
Sabika : Medium articles are great for examples of critiquing products. Follow Jake Knapp on Medium, he came up with design sprints. Julie Zhuo’s “The Year of the Looking Glass” is also available on Medium. She wrote The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You. But you don’t need to know the big names to get started… look at your favorite products and Google the designers who worked on these products — there’s probably critique on it somewhere on the internet.
The Design of Everyday Things is a really good one — it was written in the 70s, but it is still very relevant because it draws attention back to the basics and it has both analytical and creative thinking.
There are a lot of opportunities in places like the Bay Area for UX bootcamps that help set you up with the right tools and techniques. Coursera and Udemy may help too. There is a cost to these things, but not as expensive as going to design school. Some people are able to learn product design on their own, by teaching themselves. Their work may not be as refined but they have potential — and more mature designers can see this talent when they review candidates. You just have to be receptive to learning, acquiring new tools, and polishing your skills.
Q: Do you have any tips for newcomers? What are interview design challenges like? How do internships or shadowing work?
Sabika: When interviewing candidates — it is more important for me to look for how good of a problem solver you are. Can you break down the problem into smaller, doable tasks. How well do you work with stakeholders and are you asking the right questions to find out who the stakeholders are ? During interviews, you can be asked to critique a design and give new suggestions or recommendations — but you must explain your basis. Sometimes there is a printed exercise given and the candidate must complete and present it. I personally look for how good your time management is during your presentation. Remember: you are what you ship. You can’t perfect the user experience, there are business timelines and you need to be able to iterate.
For shadowing and internships, customer success or account management is a really good place to start — especially for those transitioning towards product design roles. You understand the customer’s perspective in these areas. My team is big on user research and user discovery — so shadowing means you attend research meetings to understand jargon, have homework to do on whatever is being discussed… Shadowing doesn’t mean you’re involved with people in their creative process. You’re involved by attending the meetings, participating in group discussions, asking the right questions, etc.
Q: How do you factor simplicity into a design, but still provide power to the customer with configurability?
Sabika: This is something I am working on today and it’s a very common question that we face every day. It comes down to a strategy question — what complexity do you want to expose and what do you want to hide? Customers may want everything, because they may think at some rare point in time they may need some complex option. So in the research phase, think about what your other customers also want; what do people need that will allow them to effectively get their job done? Focus on the problem and the outcome both.
Q: You mentioned that as a designer, you are what you ship. How does this thinking translate when you are working on future looking products that are in research phase ? Does this require two types of designers or can the same designer do both ?
Sabika: As a good designer, you need to future proof what you’re trying to accomplish. Designer should anticipate what design and experience would be like 2–5 years down the line anyway. But thinking too far ahead may actually create roadblocks in the current design process. You as the manager need to delegate — for instance, 60% of time is dedicated to shipping designs, and the remaining 40% is dedicated to thinking ahead. It is possible that you need two different teams — one separate team for concept designing that is responsible only for design thinking, and not for shipping.
Overall we had a very engaging and insightful conversation with Sabika and we had requests to conduct more sessions related to product design in the future.
Future Events:
Watch out this space for future events: https://pwic.org/events
Thank you for reading!
About the Author
Kanza Khan is the Growth Lead for PWiC Silicon Valley. She has a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, San Diego. Studying Signal and Image Processing during undergraduate studies led Kanza to develop a keen interest in Machine Learning and Computer Vision, which she specialized in during graduate school. As a software engineer early in her career, Kanza aspires to work in applied research in industry. She loves developing creative solutions for challenging problems, especially ones where she can productize her love for ML/Vision research.
