How to become a great Product Designer and develop your career Successfully

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Product design can be a challenging role but also, it's a highly rewarding career. Ranks as the number one most-sought profession and one of the highest-paid roles in the design industry today. No wonder, so many specialists from this field want to venture into this career path and know how to become product designers to grow in their careers.

There are many potential paths you can take in discovering how to become a great product designer. But before you begin, you need to ask yourself "what are the qualifications I need to have to become a product designer?"

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Theoretically thinking, to get the position you need to:

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• Know the responsibilities of product designers and what strategies they use to cope and tackle them.
• Understand the product design process and create a model you use to effectively solve design problems.
• Build a portfolio that contains your work and shows how you find a solution to problems related to the field.

In this article, we are going to focus on these three key points to figure out what you need to do to be crowned as a great product designer.

so before we move on to how to become a product designer, we need to clearly understand who the product designers are and what this complex job even entails.

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The importance of the role; Product designer

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Basically, a product designer focuses on creating a product that solves the problems of their users taking into consideration both customer needs and business objectives.

To produce a coherent and delightful user experience, product designers invest enough time to understand their customers and define what problems their customers have, and only then do they create user-centric design solutions.
Furthermore, the product designers work in a team. Which includes product managers, developers, marketers, and other product designers.

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The responsibilities of a product designer include;

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• Working with a cross-functional team and partners
• Defining problems and goals.
• Exploring different ways to solve problems.
• Conducting market research.
• Conducting user research.
• Producing high-quality UX and UI design.
• Conduct tests and evaluate designs.
• Developing the design system.

To manage those responsibilities a product designer should:

• Learn the product area (niche) they specialise in well
• Understand company vision, mission and plans for the product
• Understand user's needs, the market wants, and company goals
• Understand the roles and functions, of all the departments that work on developing a product
• Have a good team spirit and a great communication skills
• Master the tools needed to fulfil all requirements
• Having known the main responsibilities of a product designer, it's time to learn the product design methods they use to successfully carry out their duties.

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Product design methods you need to master

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Below, is a list of methods a product designer needs to master to create an effective design that provides an exceptional user experience and helps to actualise company goals and objectives.

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Brainstorming

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This is a process of generating ideas within a group or community. It allows the team to interact and come up with various design solutions, and receive constructive feedback from different teams before selecting the right one for the job
Tools: Miro Google Sheets, Excel, lean and paper.

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Customer Journey Map

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A product designer creates a customer journey map to visually represent the routes or paths a customer is meant to follow when interacting with a product. It enables the designers to understand the needs and emotions of the user at every path of their customer journey to produce an appropriate design solution.
Tools: Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD

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User Interview

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This is a research method that helps product designers to define the target audience or collect information about the existing target audience. The product designer conducts a User Interview to understand the user's emotions, motivations, and pain points to be able to create the right concept for the product.

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User flow

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User flow focuses on how the users complete different actions or tasks within the product. User flows are diagrams that illustrate the possible paths the user navigates through when using the product until they complete an action.
Tools: Sketch, Figma

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Sketches

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Sketches aid product designers to be able to visualise the interface of a product and also quickly evaluating the concept with users or team members
Tools: pen, marker and paper

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Wireframes

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Wireframes serve as a low fidelity representation of a future design. It shows the main structure and element of each page and helps designers evaluate different ideas during discussions with a team.
Tools: Sketch or Figma.

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Prototypes

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A prototype is basically for testing and gathering feedback from users. It is designed to understand if the main product would meet the needs of the users and business goals.
Tools: Figma, Adobe XD, Protopie

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Usability Testing

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This method of testing enables you to analyse and evaluate the usability and ease of use of the product. During Usability testing, users are asked to perform certain tasks using a prototype and also give their feedback about their experiences while using the product. Generally, It helps to see if the product satisfies customers' expectations.
Tools: Optimizely, Crazy Egg

Enlisted above are some methods product designers use to solve design problems and cope with their duties. Having known all these, let's move over to the next; "Understand the product design process well"

Know your product design process

During your job interview, the hiring manager or recruiter may probably ask you to discuss your product design process. Your ability to clearly explain the steps you take when designing a product will show your employer how you explore design problems, design innovative solutions, produce an impact in new problem spaces, and understand business objectives.

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Here are the main steps in a product design process

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Research

Working on a new project always begins with conducting thorough research that includes user interviews, creating mood boards, competitor analysis, visual research, etc. It helps gather enough information to define users' problems and develop a method for solving them.

Strategy/Methods

This process focuses on collecting information obtained from the research phase, brainstorming them and then generating a portrait for the user and a business vector of the product
To visualize the strategy and method required to develop such a product designer creates user personas, customer journey maps, user flows, and wireframes which yield design solutions.

Prototype

This is a very significant process used when designing a product. A prototype is created in other to validate the product and know what the actual product would look like

Test

During this process, prototypes are given to users to operate or perform some tasks. Feedback is also gotten from the users after they must have performed their task using the prototype. This process helps to understand what works well and what area needs improvement

Implement

After testing a prototype, the product designer together with the developers works on the implementation of the idea. The product designer at this stage has to keep track of the product to know if the final product matches the developed concept.

Measure and refine

Developing a product is an unending process. Even when it is on the market, a product designer keeps tracks of the product performance and makes improvements where necessary. He thinks about product growth users satisfaction and continue developing ideas that can help business development and also solve user problems.
However, to get an in-depth understanding of this topic read the "Product Design Process" article I posted.

Create a portfolio

Lastly, to become a great product designer you would create a well-written resume and a cover letter and portfolio to prove to your client that you are the right candidate for the job.

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Takeaways

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To become a great product designer, one must put in so much efforts and learning, understand the methods that helps product designers cope with their responsibilities, master your product design process well and create an eye catching- talent filled portfolio.
Having known all these, you should be able to land yourself your dream job and make a difference in the company.

I hope to see you in the next lesson.