In this post I talk about the impact of a product designer, on a product team. This is taken directly from my personal experience and I’m not using any AIs to make the post (maybe I should 😁 )
Understanding the big why
The role of product manager is usually fairly lonely. Jack of all trades, master of none, connected to all units, but part of none, you are in a unique position that enables you to get glimpses of the right direction for your product.
You do that by studying the market, running interviews, reflecting on the available data, talking to your colleagues around the coffee machine, …
Sometimes, if you are lucky, you’ll get a companion: a team lead, a scrum master, an interested developer, a QA engineer… If you are really luck though, you get an ally: The product designer.
I’m not downplaying the other companions here, they are a very big help and will always bring something extra to the work. But none of them is as close to you when it comes to understanding the big “why?”.
Draw it to me like a 3 years old
I’ve been working in my current workplace for 1 year now.
Before working there, I had never seen a product designer at work. Sure when I needed some graphical assets, a colleague skilled in UI would produce something nice but that was it. All my designs were Miro made, with my “exceptional” drawing and information organization skills. The developers would silently suffer what I produced, add their own touch to it and the customer would help us improve it with their feedback.
Overlapping interests
When I started to work at my current workplace I met Camille, the product designer in my team. It didn’t take long before we both realized that we would need to interact … a lot.
It became blatant when planning the first round of interviews. We both thought it part of our respective role to organize and run the interviews.
- It is critical for a product manager to deeply understand the customers personas, their pains, their delighters, their goals, to be able to find the right problems to solve.
- It is critical for a product designer to deeply understand the customers personas, their pains, their delighters, their goals, to be able to design the right solutions.
So naturally, Camille was the one running the research in the team before I came, and I was running the research process in my previous team.
We sat down, aligned and established the first version of how research was to be run in the team.
Information sharing on sterioids
One of the strongest skills of a product designer is information organization. That means that in our team, Camille is responsible for the visual content of anything we produce.
It includes thinking, prototyping and refining the User Experience of any product we work on but not only. Our product designer is also responsible of:
- Presentation slides
- Internal marketing visuals (and also partly external)
- Memo reports
- …
While these tasks are not the most challenging for a product designer, it sets a really high standard for the team. It also ignites design-centricity inside the product team as well as outside, getting colleagues to pay more attention to the user experience they provide.
Product management impact
Having a product designer in my team has changed the way I work quite a lot.
Slide decks: For example when I need to present something to stakeholders, I make a slideset, made of mostly blank slides, containing rectangles of what information I would want to pass. Camille will take that as an input and make the deck the best possible to improve our chances of the message coming across.
Marketing efforts: we put on a file or miro board for whom is it, what purpose, what ideas we have and then Camille will make the right visual for it.
Interviews: Regularly, we will decide together what we want to get out of customer interviews for this cycle, and whom internally we should interview as well. From there, Camille will design the question set, and run the interviews while I and one of the developers usually take notes and ask extra questions.
As Camille explained it in our recent retrospective, he feels that he is in between 2 worlds: one of business requirements, of higher level understanding of where we are going and why, and one of going to the nitty gritty details of what a mouse over does on each component and what function it has when you click. And while it’s the PM’s role to make sure everyone is aligned on the problems to be solved, the impact we want to have and the requirements, the designer is in a very good place to reinforce that understanding with their own daily interactions with all the team members.
When should you have a product designer in your team
As said earlier, before my current workplace, I used to organize the research and do most of the visuals by myself. It kinda worked out, and, with the users’ feedback, we eventually reached something usable. It just took a lot more time to get to a usable solution.
We are living in the world of the red queen race, where, if you don’t find the right problems to solve, you become irrelevant. Same story with the solutions. You cannot afford a long time to find a good solution, a usable, feasible, business viable, valuable and ethical solution.
So as early as possible, invest in product design.
In our team, we have had a full time product designer as early as there were 2 software engineers (and the product manager was part time then). I don’t have enough experience to tell you if it was the right time, but at least right now it’s so that Camille has a bit of slack and so do I.
Some entreprises have design as a service, same for research as a service, but I have not had such experience before. At least I can tell that having a product designer dedicated to the team has felt right so far, and I don’t think it would be doable with less time and involvment.
The PM/Product Designer duo allows, not only to find right problems to tackle, but also deliver relevant solutions generating business value, nurturing premium user experience and fostering customer-centricity.
Read more about product design
Here is an article that describes at length who is a product designer and what do they do: Link to article