9 game-changing reads to fuel your product design craft
Zalando product design community members share the design and self-development books that influenced them the most in their profession.
Most of us have a book, or several, that changed the game for us in our product design, content design, or user research career. Perhaps it was even the impetus to make our passion a profession in the first place, demystifying processes and highlighting core philosophies. Some of our most influential books may not be directly related to design, but they helped us become better designers or researchers by shifting our mindset, encouraging self-development, or cultivating soft skills essential to our work.
Many of the most adept product design professionals read, and they read regularly. In our ever-evolving field, it helps to stay up to date with the latest trends, theories, and practices. Moreover, the more frameworks we learn to bring our best selves to such a dynamic, far-reaching, and fast-paced industry, the better.
It’s no wonder that one of the most popular community initiatives at Zalando Product Design is our Book Spotlight, where community members are invited to present and discuss a book of their choice — covering any topic from entrepreneurship to philosophy to inspiring autobiographies to the most poetic of novels.
“It’s a great initiative,” shares Book Spotlight organiser, Product Designer Mary Michel Rizk. “Firstly, it encourages people to read, which is less common nowadays. Secondly, when someone shares a book they love, it reveals a lot about their personality and how they think. It’s an amazing way to get to know my colleagues in an informal context. Thirdly, our club is such a safe space for sharing ideas.”
What better time to dive into a new book than summer? Read on to discover some of the books that have influenced our community members the most in their product design careers, full of illuminating insights to fuel your craft and shape your professional perspective.
So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport
Recommended by Product Designer, Mary Michel Rizk
The title of the book is less about showing people what we are good at so that no one can ignore us, and more about the commitment to ourselves to grow our expertise as designers. I recommended it to my colleagues because it discusses how we approach life and processes. It encourages a mindset shift to understand that progress shouldn’t feel like pressure, but a challenge to keep going at getting better. I learnt three main lessons from this book.
Firstly, we all start from zero and that’s okay. When we enter the field, we are not the most knowledgeable, and it’s humble and brave to accept that. Secondly, there is no magic or epiphany about creating great ideas or becoming an expert at what we do. It’s simply through practice, discipline, self-commitment, consistency, and hard work that we build our skills. The third and most important lesson is that confidence is not something we are born with; it’s a skill built over time as we proactively cultivate it.
The most humbling point in the book is that the most important validation comes from ourselves as we learn and build confidence. The effort we put in behind the scenes will inevitably be visible in our work. I also understood that the best way to progress in my role is to build my skill set horizontally, after which vertical progression happens naturally. Ultimately, it is taking care of the small things that makes our dreams a reality.
Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe
Recommended by Principal User Researcher, Lorie Whitaker
Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back dismantles the myth of UX research as a pure “labour of love.” User Researchers are often conditioned to see themselves as champions of the user, tirelessly advocating for better experiences without demanding fair compensation or healthy work practices. Jaffe argues this mentality fuels burnout and undermines the value we bring.
Like many User Researchers, I entered the field driven by a desire to positively impact products and user experiences. But as my career progressed, I witnessed countless colleagues from former organisations succumb to burnout. Jaffe’s book offered a crucial lens to understand these challenges. The empathy demands of listening to user problems, the context-switching requirements of juggling multiple projects, and the pressure to wear many hats all contribute to emotional exhaustion. Work Won’t Love You Back served as a wake-up call, reminding me that passion shouldn’t come at the expense of fair treatment and compensation.
Design Beyond Devices by Cheryl Platz
Recommended by Product Design Manager, Vedanti Joshi
The book’s overview emphasises designing for the entirety of your customer’s sensory experience, not just their interaction with specific devices. It reads, “Your customer has five senses and a small universe of devices. Why aren’t you designing for all of them? Go beyond screens, keyboards, and touchscreens by letting your customer’s humanity drive the experience — not a specific device or input type.”
Design Beyond Devices teaches techniques for creating fluid, adaptive experiences that work across multiple inputs, outputs, and devices. This approach becomes especially crucial in today’s ecosystem of diverse devices. Designing for only one device is like searching for needles in a haystack. The book has helped me understand how to identify the right triggers for our customers — when they occur, with what, and how customers interact with them. It also delves into potential distractions and the customer’s environment. Considering these factors, we can determine the most suitable device medium for any given moment, whether it be gesture, voice, touch, haptics, or visuals.
Additionally, when we add a layer of context –such as in payments — understanding the behavioural insights of customers becomes vital. It influences their decision-making processes and highlights the importance of cultural and heritage factors. Recognising whether habits have formed over time or are influenced by recent interactions with technology or people around them allows us to create experiences that are less generalised and more personalised to each customer.
Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
Recommended by Product Design Manager, Vedanti Joshi
Invisible Women highlights the gender data gap and its impact on women’s experiences across various aspects of life, including design. It reveals how neglecting women’s needs and perspectives results in biassed and often suboptimal designs. For me, coupled with Design Beyond Devices, this book has pushed me to strive for inclusivity in understanding and representing our diverse datasets accurately.
In our design process, in the Zalando Payments team, we now actively seek out outliers, which are often overlooked due to the lower share in the data set. Outliers can indicate significant deviations from the norm. These include seasonal spending spikes or high-value transactions for specific customer segments, unusual switches in payment methods, and mismatches between shipping and billing addresses. Investigating these outliers, rather than dismissing them, can reveal business-critical trends and unique user experiences. By monitoring these data anomalies, we can adapt our product to better serve diverse user needs and enhance security measures. This approach has taught me that outliers, while sometimes skewing the current dataset, can enhance the robustness of our experiences and help us be in sync with emerging trends.
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Recommended by Product Design Manager João Ramos
How to Win Friends and Influence People was the first non-fiction book I ever read, at a time when I was transitioning from engineering to design and focusing more on my relationships at work. After reading the book, I became more mindful of my stakeholder’s expectations, motivations, and perceptions. I used that to my advantage in my communication. In a way, it’s as if my professional relationships were no longer purely transactional, but rather richer, more joyful experiences where I intentionally tried to ensure I could get someone else’s buy-in or approval by adapting my tone and voice to them.
Difficult Conversations by Bruce Patton, Douglas Stone, and Sheila Heen
Recommended by Senior Product Designer, Edward Pakpahan
I didn’t intend to learn product design skills from Difficult Conversations. But a big part of being a Product Designer is to collaborate and empathise with customers, stakeholders, and teammates, and that always starts with a conversation. There are three main ways the book has influenced me, which I have applied at work, and also in my personal life.
1. Empathy towards my customers, stakeholders, and teammates.
The book has helped me understand that, in some situations, the goal of a conversation isn’t about proving a point or winning an argument. Instead, it’s about understanding the other person’s perspective and working together collaboratively towards a solution. There are often two opposing views, especially during alignment meetings. This approach has made me a better collaborator and has improved my ability to navigate disagreements.
2. The importance of focusing on why
The book teaches the importance of understanding the ‘why’: the underlying reason, or people’s motivations or needs. As a Product Designer, this has helped me uncover the ‘why’ behind user feedback and stakeholders’ comments or suggestions. It helps me to gather my thoughts, not only focusing on what they said or suggested but the reason behind it, so that I can try to find a better solution.
3. Opinions are exactly that, opinions
The book also helped me to move away from an either/or mindset. This mindset is a good recipe for failure during collaboration or ideation sessions. Instead, I try to focus on both/and. All opinions are valid and have merit, and let’s try to find ways where we can combine or integrate both ideas or opinions. This improves collaboration and helps me to be open-minded. Often, when I’m open-minded, it encourages the other collaborators to be open-minded too.
Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
Recommended by Senior Product Designer, Maya Schwartz
I discovered Make Time when working full-time as a lead designer in an agency, working towards my master’s in design and doing my best to survive. I listened to an interview with the book’s authors on the Design Better podcast and the issue they tackled immediately resonated with me. I purchased Make Time and it really clicked for me. The book is about finding the right ways to make time for your top priorities, with a huge emphasis on what matters this week and finding the techniques that fit you. The tools include finding the right time in the day, what defaults you set for yourself, what music you listen to, your coffee drinking habits, and many others.
The most important takeaway is that when you try something, remember to reflect on how well it worked for you. As designers, we do it often, understanding what’s most important in a screen, exploring and trying different iterations, and checking after a week to see how it performed. Make Time was a great reminder to do this for me, to be honest about what I want to achieve (or as this book calls it, highlight) and create the best time, when you’re most focused and energised. Even now, if on a Friday I feel like I didn’t progress enough on my priorities, I go back to the book and the tools it taught me and try again.
Your Oxygen Mask First by Kevin N. Lawrence
Recommended by Director of Product Design, Gloria Rupprecht
I highly recommend Your Oxygen Mask First for everyone, especially those in leadership positions or high-workload situations. It gives you hands-on tools for managing a healthy work-life balance, using your energy the most productively, training your resilience, and also strengthening your people-management skills. It’s encouraging without making you feel bad about current behaviours and it really tries to tickle the most out of you.
Exposing the Magic of Design by Jon Kolko
Recommended by Principal Product Designer, Yishi Yang
My undergraduate degree was in Computer Science. For my master’s I wanted to study design, which requires an entirely different mindset. I was curious about how design works because there is a stereotype that the designer is like a magician. You give them a problem, they work on it, and suddenly there’s an aha moment and they come up with a brilliant idea that can sometimes bring about exponential opportunities and growth. Serendipity would have it that I met the author, Jon Kolko, at a conference. He seemed like a cool guy so I decided to read his book. The title definitely caught my attention.
The first part of the book covers the theory of design, specifically design synthesis, which is key for a designer to be able to come up with a brilliant solution. The second part of the book is more practical. It introduces many methods and frameworks that can aid designers in day-to-day practices.
I found the part about abductive reasoning fascinating. This special form of reasoning allows designers to generate a lot of solutions and then validate them by prototyping. There is a distillation process from data to information, knowledge to wisdom. Kolko breaks this process down in detail, highlighting how one might organise the information and apply different perspectives to surface knowledge. It is reminiscent of the famous film Powers of Ten.
In the film, the perspective zooms out from a picnic blanket scene to space and then zooms back into the molecules of a person’s hand. Applying this to product design, you might see a toothbrush, for example. Then you might think about the different demographics that use a toothbrush. Then if you zoom into the brush itself, you see the material used for the bristles. Then you zoom out and see the manufacturing process, and so on. By changing perspectives, and mapping out information at those different zoom levels, you get from information to knowledge, and even wisdom.
Learning about these theories, methods, and processes helped me to understand that design is not magic. Now that I am a designer, it also encourages me to be kinder to myself. If I ever find myself asking if I’m going in the right direction or getting all the right information, I find reassurance in a rational understanding of the process. There is not always going to be an aha moment, and my solution might not always be the best, but mapping out different perspectives is the best way forward.
What are your game-changing reads?
Would you like to share a book or two that changed the game for you in your career? Please leave a comment!
Next, six members of our product design community share how failure led to breakthrough moments in their design careers.
