Lay of the Land: Enterprise Product Design
How can enterprise product designers remain true to their skills without getting buried in technical complexity and yet show measurable impact?
You have just joined a technology company. User experience often becomes an afterthought for some enterprise companies, and as a result, these companies have taken their under-served users for granted.
One of the reasons you may have joined your organization is to address this issue and show impact. You want to be true to your passion and also stay aligned to represent the voice of these under-served users.
On one hand, there is pressure to show your impact to the organization and the team you joined and on the other hand, you are standing in the middle of some very large mountains full of complex concepts.
You ask yourself the following questions:
What does your professional timeline look like for the next 3 months? 6 months? 9 months? 1 year?
What is being expected of you?
To top it off, you hear from different colleagues that ‘so and so person’ came on board with a deep understanding of these complex concepts within a month or two of their joining. ‘Awesome,’ you say! No pressure…
Working in technology-driven companies can be challenging for a product designer. Not only is the domain itself complex, but I kid you not that there is a ton of land to cover.
So, the main question is: where do you start?
1. Learn the basics that drive the success of your projects
Let us start by learning the basic concepts that drive the projects you are assigned to. You are given resources such as Confluence pages, Blogs, Articles, and YouTube videos. There are a lot of reading materials constantly being thrown at you, but you realize that every single time you think you have finally made some progress, it dawns on you that this is just the tip of the iceberg and there is actually so much more to learn and much more to explore.
2. Understand there are many interdependencies — It is not yet the time to celebrate
Sometimes the concepts that you thought you thoroughly understood, are proven to be much more complex upon deeper exploration. You realize that your understanding has unknowingly has been just a single layer deep! When you ask for validation of your learning, you sometimes discover that there are a bunch of other things that are all interconnected, making you realize the fact that you must fully understand all of them in order to properly paint the whole picture. Perfect, totally makes sense! Right?
3. Anxiety is a part of life — be patient
At the end of the day, you are mentally exhausted. Every single day, there has been an extreme information overload which you haven’t yet had time to properly process. At the end of the week, you come out feeling emotionally drained because you think you haven’t been able to show as much impact as you thought you should be able to. You start to get anxious while asking this question: how big is the land?
4. Keep Calm! And Build a Landscape
Let’s take a step back. First things first! Your product learnings can and should happen in parallel to the projects you are working on. It is pretty critical to realize early in your design journey that it does not matter which colleagues may have had a great understanding within a few months of their joining.
What does matter is:
a) Your project should not suffer due to a lack of technical understanding
b) You should have pride in your abilities and uniqueness that you bring to the table.
Let’s keep the noise out. Put on your grown-up pants and keep calm.
What makes us wonderful designers and good problem solvers in the first place?
We have an intrinsic ability to break things down, ask appropriate questions, process those bits and pieces, and start building things off the data that has been collected in order to get to the crux of the issue, right? Well, then let’s not forget that process! Let us apply it here as well.
How do you accomplish this? I have an answer for you folks!
- Do Your Homework:
To begin, you need to explore the product yourself. Every week, I suggest that you take a small part of the product and start to explore. Take screen shots. Write down your current understanding and questions. Read related articles, blogs, and YouTube videos for that part.
Most importantly: Don’t be in a hurry to move on to a new topic until you fully understand the current one. - Start to Build Out Your Understanding of the Individual Pieces of the Landscape:
Now that you have started to gather these bits and pieces, why not put them together? This is another area where we can leverage our skill sets. You should start building out the individual pieces of the landscape, like a puzzle that’s being put together.
To accomplish this, I would strongly recommend using either Miro or Figma (or any other preferred tool). You can also share your understanding of the landscape with your Ally and use this as a working document to drive your discussions and gather feedback.
This document could also involve other designers and cross-functional team leaders who own a part of the project. By involving these stakeholders, it will establish a relationship for when you may need to reach out to them to do a deep dive later. - Lay of the Land:
Now my friends, as you have started to build the landscape, you should feel comfortable taking frequent steps back to view the landscape from a birds-eye perspective. By doing this, you should start to find yourself fully understanding how every puzzle piece fits together overall and how it connects with other products.
A Parting Thought
(LOL, I hope this is not overly philosophical)
While working on your projects, I recommend only playing the ‘newbie’ card for a maximum of 3 months from the time you join an organization. After this point, you’re definitely one of the team and will certainly be held accountable for the success (or failure) of the team and project efforts.
If you follow my advice from above, you will certainly have less frequent visits to your therapist and should have reduced levels of anxiety!
I hope you have enjoyed reading this article. If you have, give me a shout or claps! 😊
As always, keep learning!
