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Designer-PMs are the next unicorns
The best designers are expert project managers and astute business people.
When I started out as a naive freelance “web designer” 18 years ago, I thought design would be mostly about creating things. But running my own business very quickly dropped me into the deep end, and it didn’t take long to realise it’s wasn’t actually my design work that kept me afloat. The real superpower that determines whether you sink or swim is how well you manage your projects.
I’ve written before about how designers need to be consummate professionals, flawless communicators, T-shaped problem solvers, and savvy business strategists, but even more fundamental than that: modern product designers must be expert project managers.
Designers as project managers
Freelance designers, you’ll know this already. You don’t work on a team with a PM who manages the details for you. It’s always been down to you and you alone to manage your clients and projects with the same attention to detail as you execute your design work. You know through experience that exceptional design work is dead in the water if you don’t have the acute management skills to carry it from idea to delivered solution.
Freelance designers can’t survive without project management skills, but up until now, employees could have skated by without them, because there’s usually been a team member or manager who’s assumed that role.
I believe this is changing. Even before COVID-19 forced everyone to work autonomously at home, the value of the designer-PM was on the rise.
Teams are getting smaller and more agile, while organisations are getting leaner and more flexible. The designer-project-manager hybrid that makes experienced freelancers so valuable is becoming the new expectation for in-house product designers too. Single-faceted designers are a dying breed.
In Abstract’s What is the future of product design in the 2020s?, Marissa Louie (of Expedia, Animoodles) predicts:
“Designer-PMs will be the new designer unicorns.”
The line between product designers and product managers will continue to blur as more…
