What it takes to be a Product Designer
A peek into how our industry is defining this new digital role
I analysed 30 different Product Designer roles from some of the most well-respected companies in the world. Why? There’s a common question that keeps popping up in the conversations that I’m having; what is a Product Designer? I think I’m one… but, maybe I’m not…?! Or maybe I am…
It’s actually something that I struggle with explaining to peers in the web industry, but even more so people outside of it, so I took to the research streets to find out what some of the industry-leading companies are expecting of the role.
I sampled job descriptions from companies with teams of all ranges, from startups of under 10 to large companies with over 10,000 employees, to get a better understanding of what this role actually is all about, or at least how we — as an industry — are defining it.
The approach
Firstly, I collated the expected skills and traits from an array of role requirements into a skills matrix. This became a tool to assist with identifying what companies were looking for, which skills were more popular, and which skills held more value to potential employers.
Result: 36 trackable skills.
My next job was to sift through the job descriptions, assigning a rating to each skill with 0, 1, 2 or Bonus:
- 0 if the job description didn’t mention that skill or trait
- 1 if the skill was mentioned briefly, required a basic understanding or, implied inadvertently (blue mark 💙)
- 2 if the skill was referenced with an adjective like Expert, Superior, Highly Skilled, Excellent, etc (green mark 💚)
- Bonus if the skill was mentioned as optional or nice-to-have (yellow mark 💛)
I also organised the skills into categories to get a better understanding of the scope of Product Designers:
- Foundation Design Skills & Disciplines
- Technical & Additional Knowledge
- Personality & Professional Traits
- Leadership & Teamwork
Foundation Design Skills & Disciplines
As expected… You need to know how to design (and design well) from end to end. Interaction/UI Design and Visual Design were mentioned in all 30 of the job descriptions — almost unanimously rating them highly skilled. With UX Design only missing out by one on the full score, with 29 mentions.
The ability to Prototype your designs is expected by 70% of the companies. The type of prototyping varied from company to company, but it was mostly using Principle, InVision, or HTML/Javascript.
Technical & Additional Knowledge
User Research and conducting User Testing came in with an unsurprisingly high amount of mentions; 27/30. Out of those 27 mentions, 23 of them said you need a high level of experience with it.
18 (60%) of companies preferred you to have a Basic Front-end Dev Acumen referencing HTML, CSS and JS knowledge— with only 3 of these companies wanting you to contribute code for production. However, there weren’t any mentions about having a more advanced understanding of frameworks such as React, Vue, Angular, or Ruby On Rails.
One desired skill that jumped out was the ability to design with Conceptual & System Thinking (26 mentions — 87%) while only 14 mentioned working with or contributing to a Design System.
Personality & Professional Traits
The two traits that 100% of companies considered important was excellent Communication/Articulation, and Collaboration. It’s safe to say these are a must-have for all budding Product Designers.
Another popular trait is your Problem Solving ability, with 25 companies pointing it out as required, and 23 of those specifying it as highly important.
29 companies mentioned that your level of Work Standards must be quite impressive.
Something I found personally interesting was that the ability to Continuously Learn & Grow only got mentioned in just under half of the job descriptions at 47%.
Leadership & Teamwork
Coaching and Peer Development wasn’t the most popular trait, but for those 10 companies that mentioned it, 70% felt that is was really important.
Being a Product Designer comes with a certain level of leadership requirement — one being Decision Making and Accountability. 28 job descriptions mentioned it, with 20 of those saying a high level was needed.
Still important, but not as important is both Strategic Planning and general Planning & Organisational skills. Coming in with 21 and 20 mentions respectively.
Top 10 Skills/Traits
In order of popularity and skill importance:
- Interaction / UI Design
- Visual Design
- Communication /Articulation
- Collaboration
- UX Design
- High Work Standards
- Efficient
- Decision Making
- User Research / User Testing
- Customer / User Focus
Little nuggets of interest
- Only one mention of Emotional Intelligence being important (respect to Eventbrite 🤜)
- One company casually dropped you need to know how to be a Product Manager at times as well 🤔
- During my research I only found one Junior Product Designer role pop up — it appears that the title isn’t a popular one, that’s not to say the roles don’t exist though
- The term Empathetic Design or User Empathy only came up once, however is was mostly referenced as “Customer Focus”
- There was no mention of the term “DesignOps”
- There were also no mentions seeking part-time or contract Product Designers. Interestingly, only 5 companies supported remote roles
Overall the job descriptions gave a solid idea of what is expected inside the company, but needless to say, every company’s needs for the role will be different. If we were ever confused about what the Product Designer role entailed (we were), well, we can probably understand why.
The results are in. A Product Designer could very well mean a Senior Level (full stack?!) specialist-generalist-researcher-strategist designer… who’s also on the tools 🌝
I think this amalgamation of roles boils down to one thing — a Product Designer simply has so many more possible outputs in a company than other Designers. They have a hand in almost every aspect from research, ideation, conceptualisation to implementation, and everything in between.
Personally, I’d love to see companies approach their job descriptions with a bit more intent on what the roles could be as well. They’re very much positioned to be “What you will be doing for us” and not “Let’s grow & evolve this role together”.
How do these results stack up against your experience? Leave your comments below or hit me up on Twitter and let’s discuss!
P.S. a huge thanks to Patima for her help with editing and working her magic in helping me translate the data into an easy-to-understand format. Also to the Product of Perth peeps for sparking the discussion that led me down this path of discovery!
