My Product Design Internship Experience at Culinary Agents
The program was intense, but also invaluable!
I had a really brilliant time during my time as an intern at Culinary Agents. The program was well-structured so that in a short period I had the opportunity to experience different projects, including marketing brochure work, website improvement, product design, which enriched my learning and broadened my horizons! From this program, I now understand more deeply how to build products from scratch with a team and gained new design skills. Therefore, I’m thrilled to share my experience and what I learned at Culinary Agents. :)
Typography matters
A good design always starts with good typography, which was the first lesson I had learned. Using typographic elements to guide the design can help elevate the quality of entire project. My first challenge was to design a brochure for a marketing campaign to inform people of how to get started in the hospitality industry, which would be printed and distributed at a networking event as well as to students in culinary schools. With my mentor’s guidance, I learned to use leading and kerning to adjust the copy, ultimately enhancing the readability. To improve my typography skills, I did a series of trainings with my mentor as a side project during the internship. Now, I’m more confident using structural tools in my design and other graphical compositions to deliver messages.
Understanding business and product strategy is critical for product designers
At Culinary Agents, I learned that in-house product designers are required to understand nuances of the business. We had weekly meetings where the product manager shared analyses of the current market, talk about effects of released features, update progresses of product projects, and explain business strategies for future direction, etc. I not only learned the goals and needs from the business perspective, bolstering my sense of business, but also realized how to perform product management from the viewpoint of a product manager. Even though I may not be able to conduct a detailed analysis for the current market yet, I think these types of meetings are still favorable for product designers to better understand the business strategy.
Good communication is super important
Designing products requires considerable collaborations of product teams. At Culinary Agents, we streamline the whole procedure from identifying the business and product goal to launching a product so that the communication between teams can be effective and effortless. I have to say that the product teams at Culinary Agent holds frequent conversations between teams, which are really supportive and productive when trying to solve problems together.
As a product design intern participating in the whole design process, there were two critical things that I learned from this process —
Building products for a real business is totally different from “student projects”
From the project I worked on, I just realized that it was an entirely different world! I internalized the user-centered method and understood the design process that I learned from my school pretty well, but I still missed one big thing–this was a real business product, not an “ideal” student project. There would be time restraints and cost limitations in a real business, especially in such a startup environment. That was the big lesson I had learned. Therefore, after we understand the needs of users, we still need to prioritize them based on the business’s requirements. To gain a better understanding of the business goal, we used a technique — User Story Mapping — to communicate the scope of the product. Through this technique, we defined what should be in our MVP, and it guided me through the whole design exploration process. Going back to see my original plan and design of the product, it turns out it was really a “mission impossible” to complete in a short period of time.
Bridging the gap with engineers is the designers’ responsibility
Once the design is ready, it is time to make the product life. However, in my case, there was still a huge gap before going live. Therefore, I had to spec my design as more details as possible, including interactions, variable states, validation logic, etc. It was quite time-consuming, yet the more details of the design I could spec, the better engineers could implement the product. Furthermore, it was really helpful once I started to think about the “pure logic” (i.e., how the system works, behind the product, some design black holes or missed user cases can be found and solved ahead of engineers beginning to code). Plus, discussing with engineers would be much more straightforward once we designers have thought the entire system logic through, helping to save time and efforts in communication.
There is still a lot that I haven’t mentioned. I have grown during my time at the program. Now I am able to think of what can be feasible in a real business environment. At Culinary Agents, you can sharpen your skills with the proper guidance and explore what you want to be. Additionally, people here are friendly. You will hear laughs every day and have various snacks and tasty coffee! I’m very happy and feel lucky to have the opportunity to intern here! All the things I learned and the people I met here are my precious treasures, helping to jumpstart my career!
The original article was published on Culinary Agents culinaryagents.com.
