Thinking and behaving like a successful digital product designer

Calling yourself a digital ‘product designer’ is great but are you sure you’re thinking and behaving in the right way?

When we discuss our job titles within the design community, talk often gets tangled around the idea of what we do as a means of differentiation. Are you well versed in interaction patterns, prototyping tools and visual design? Then you’re a UI Designer. Do you employ user research techniques to build a picture of your users pains and motivations? Then you’re a UX Researcher. Do a bit of both? Then you’re a UI/UX Designer.

I believe what differentiates ‘Product Designers’ is the way we think, behave and, as a result, communicate with our team and our stakeholders throughout the digital product design process. It’s a subtle difference but a crucial one if you’re looking to understand what, I believe, being a product designer actually means. What follows are a handful of traits I’ve encountered in successful product designers throughout my career.

You identify risk and prioritise learning

You know successful digital products are simply the sum of our validated beliefs about where user and business value converge. Except you don’t explain it this way to your team and stakeholders; you use a poker analogy instead:

“Our hand represents the team, proposition and product. You might even like to think of the individual cards as user personas, features or business models.

When we build our product, we’re making a bet that our hand is stronger than our competitors, that we know enough about the cards in our hand to win the user and business value we’re competing for.”

But before we play our hand, you explain, we need to identify some of the assumptions we’ve made about winning: will this particular card actually help us win? What’s the risk of not playing this card? You hammer home that mediocre teams build mediocre products for two reasons: they fail to identify risk in doing something or they fail to identify the risk in not doing something.

You reveal that the thing about being a product development team is that you can cheat at poker - you can peak at your competitors cards, you can look into the future and see what hands your opponents might play, you can talk to the other players about what their motivations are - before you play a single hand. But, you remind them, you can only do this if you adopt a learning mindset.

You know that the great thing about learning is that it’s cheap, cheaper than making a thing that nobody wants.

And so you take just as much glee in killing bad ideas through rigorous learning as you do in allowing good one flourish; you deliver just as much value by stopping as starting.

You work towards outcomes and treasure collaboration

You’re done with waste, impotent pixels and abandoned artboards — with representations of an experience that nobody ever saw or worse, even needed in the first place. You now work in pursuit of outcomes, in delivering real change through repeated evaluation of where value lies. You don’t adhere to a strict workflow or process, only the enduring principles of understand, explore, test, repeat. You know that only purposeful work—achieved through a relentless scrutiny of what and how you get there—will keep mediocrity at bay.

You’re painfully aware of your limits - your experiences, opinions and prejudice - and how they sometimes conspire against you, preventing you from building the best thing all on your own. You need people, their brains, their perspectives to show you your blind spots. You delight in the simmering tension that spills over when cross functional teams collide: creatives, builders, and thinkers all straining to be heard above the din of uncertainty.

No role is sacred, there’s no room for ‘siloists’, for the headphones-on brigade, you say: we’re doing this Lean, with purpose, and with relentless empathy for each other and who we’re building for.

You check often and pivot where necessary

You understand that digital products aren’t built in a vacuum. Competitors pivot, reposition or go bust. Human needs remain complex: sometimes they appear to be almost unknowable. New technologies blossom over night, creating demand and desire where none existed before, changing our expectations of what digital products can do in the process.

Because of this, you know it’s reckless not to take your ideas, propositions and artefacts to your customers as often as you can. You relish the rush of real feedback as you place your prototype in your customers hands: will they tear it to shreds or fall in love? You know better than to despair or celebrate too soon, regardless. Making decisions on a single data source can be a fool’s errand: a nuanced approach to data makes for a nuanced understanding of your user.

You champion quality in product artifacts

Your taste is what elevates your craft and drives your teams to design and build more compelling products. You’re a ‘renaissance man’, pulling your broad interests in writing, technology and engineering together to define a high bar of quality across all deliverables.

You know that good products might make your life easier but great products leave an indelible mark on you — one that you carry into your conversations, routines and lifestyle. Accordingly, you encourage developers to sweat the small stuff: small stuff becomes big stuff, ripples become waves, you say. A number of small atomic components will eventually grow and coalesce to become the exoskeleton of an entire customer experience. Gestalt is not just for art school.

Shout out to Oliver Matthews, Business Development Director at Potato for helping me with the poker metaphor above 🙏