How to grow as product designer

Published in

UX Collective

8 min readMar 12, 2020

Lately, I was reflecting on the topic of professional growth. As product designers, we all been in situations like seeking how to improve design decisions, breach a plateau, escape routine, or maybe get excited about your job again. I find that approach for all those problems pretty similar.

Fundamentals of growth.

Let’s start with the fundamentals. For me, personally, growth is not about professional development activities. At least not only them. It is not about the process, either. I consider that growth more like a state of mind where individuals never stop learning. A constant thirst for knowledge. Perhaps that could be the right start to develop the potential to grow. However, nobody canceled practice. In addition to everything written in this article, designers should actively practice design! And if you want to grow, you should do that a lot.

So while you are designing something, ask yourself questions like these:

What problem am I trying to solve?
Am I focusing on the right problem in the first place?
Are there any pieces of the big picture I am missing?
Who do I need to talk with to feel the gap?
How appropriate is my current design decision for a problem or constraints that I have?
Is execution tactic suitable for a problem or constraints that I have?
What should I learn to do all the above better?

Honestly, the list of questions could go on and on. The idea behind that questionnaire is simple, keep checking if you’re producing the best possible outcome and providing actual tangible value.

Nevertheless, be aware of not falling to a common trap — analysis paralysis. Ensure that you are moving toward the goal, and not around. Do not question every single small step. Avoid being paralyzed in front of the wall of future choices, especially when you’re starting a big project. One problem at a time, one step at a time. Decisions should be quick and painless. If it is not, leave it for a while and return to it later with a fresh eye. Or maybe, ask for help. That usually works better.

Even mentors need a mentor.

Honestly, I see mentorship as a very efficient way to grow. Ideally, it would be best if you work at the place where you could be surrounded by people that better designers then you. Especially on an early step of career. That would be a natural way to grow because you’ll emerge in the process with talented people. You’ll have the chance to see different styles and techniques of doing a job, and more importantly, be a part of that. A good boost of motivation. You’ll push your limits to be like them. To be better. Perhaps a little competition never hurts. But personally, I like to compare myself with myself. It is crucial to see that I’m better than I was a week, a month, a year before. The idea is to become a better version of myself.

So who is a mentor? Let’s see a definition of the word from the Cambridge dictionary:

A mentor is a person with experience in a job who supports and advises someone with less experience to help them develop in their work.

Flashback alert! :) When I learned to play bass guitar back in my teenage years. My inspiration was friends who played much better than me. They had their own band, crappy rehearsal room, crappy musical instruments, etc. But for me, everything was perfect, they were my role models at the time. I wanted to play like them. In fact, I just started to learn, so I obviously couldn’t play guitar at all. That how big was a gap between us. No surprises, they didn’t want to spend time tutoring me at all. Regardless of all that, I visited all of their rehearsals. I used every opportunity during and after. Waited for breaks between songs and sets to ask questions, learn exercises, practice, etc. After about a year of doing that, I noticed that the gap between us at the professional level was a tiny bit less but still huge. However, when I looked back on myself at the beginning, the difference was very impressive. I went so far from the starting point because I had mentors who helped me to avoid common mistakes, learn at a fast pace, polish knowledge in practice, etc. I wanted to be like them, so I worked twice as hard. Perhaps the gap between us could be much less if they weren’t growing as well.

When I started as a junior UX designer, I was fortunate to have a similar situation and be surrounded by rock stars level designers. I used the same approach to learn from them. Likely for me, they were open to teaching me, so I grew fast. The baseline is simple, try to be in places where the concentration of knowledge and experience is really high, so it could rub on you naturally.

What if finding a mentor is impossible or very hard? Finding a mentor is indeed not an easy task. Should you ask every single designer if they want to be a mentor for you? I don’t think so. Most of the time that should happen naturally. But you definitely don’t need to give up on that. Perhaps with the help of the internet, it becomes much easier to find unconventional ways to get mentorship. Following designers on Twitter, reading articles on Medium, etc. Do not give up, improvise.

Read the right books.

Books could teach you a lot. Read books and read a lot. Easy way to learn from top professionals in the industry. Get a sneak peek of how processes work in different companies, industries, and environments. Gain insights into how constraints and challenges could drive design decisions and shape processes, how teams ensure that problems appropriately identified, etc. Here the list of some of my favorite books to start from:

UX is a bridge between business and engineering

Fill the gap between business and engineering

It is vital to understand that the design team solves business problems. Speaking of interactions between disciplines inside the company, you can think of design as a bridge between business and engineering. Learn about business in general and how the company you are working in operate. What is the strategy, and what role plays the design in it? You should know where the revenue is coming from. How the product or project you’re working on contributes toward that. Learn about the engineering aspects as well. That will help you to do a design that feasible to implement. Knowing all that will help you speak the same language with product owners and developers. You’ll be able to see a bigger picture of how strategic objectives through the prism of disciplines and processes get shipped as complete product or service.

List of books below could help to dig in the right direction:

Go the extra mile

You don’t need to wait until an exciting task or project emerges on the horizon. Think about how you can exceed expectations on your current assignment. What that 10–20% above usual 100% you can do that will make a difference. Explore alternative options to solve the problem. Talk to stakeholders and actual users to get more details. Do frequent usability tests of design artifacts. Explore more and go the extra mile to make sure the delivery of exceptional quality product design. Ask yourself questions from the beginning of the article to ensure that you’re still on track. But be careful of trying too hard and go too crazy trying to add all possible extra steps. One step at a time, ensure that extra effort adding tangible value and improving outcomes.

Align with strategic objectives

Spend some time to learn the strategical objectives of your company. Awareness and understanding of the company strategy will give you the power to see a bigger picture and make better decisions in the long run. You’ll notice improvements in the quality of communication with stakeholders by addressing strategical objectives and actual pain points of business.

One thing that you definitely should try is starting a design initiative. Talk to people to know what is the biggest problem or challenge that business currently experience, but doesn’t have resources to address. Initiate a small self project that you can do in your free time between tasks or projects. That could be research, proof of concept, document, inventory, etc. Only one important thing — this project should address that specific business pain. That’s how you can almost guarantee immediate buy-in of stakeholders to spend their time to help you. Perhaps, your self project could grow into something big and exciting. That could potentially give a boost to your career.

Growth is not a magical thing that only the chosen ones have. That a state of mind. Hard work. The endless exploration of perfection in design craftsmanship. Searching for frameworks and workflows that work personally for you.

Never stop learning. Do not give up. And keep creating beautiful designs.