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💡 Hey! I’m Aditya Mankare, a product designer at Meta. I was a Human-Computer Interaction major at UMich. The process towards finding a role can be frustrating and confusing, but I hope to unravel the secrets of getting the best roles in Product Design. Ready? Let’s go!
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❓What work would I be doing?
Product Designers are tasked with solving user experience problems. A user experience problem is an issue, subtle or obvious, that prevents a user from fulfilling a need (using Uber to transport from A to B, using Yelp to determine what to eat).
Developing applications take time and resources. When pure intuition drives innovation, some succeed. However, many products can fail, ruin experiences, and ultimately, lose revenue.
What makes designers effective is not their skills with design programs, but their skills at navigating a design process. Product Design seeks to maximize the success of products. There is no magical intuition — it is all in the design process. They use the process to ideate and iterate towards an optimal product with the intended users.
There are three main skills a product designer has:
- Product Thinking: Making products useful for their users as well as the business
- Interaction Design: Making products usable and user-friendly for the users
- Visual Design: Making products aesthetic, visually pleasing, and delightful for the users
How did I get into product design
After interning at various companies as a developer and PM, I realized I wanted to be more hands on with how the product strategy was crafted and how it can directly affect people using the product. Throughout college, I was really passionate about how people behave, make decisions, make choices, and build their habits. I became a geek for human behavior and combining that interest with building products, led me to realize that design is an excellent tool to shape people’s behavior to be more productive and impactful. This led me to study Human-Computer Interaction and work in the exciting world of Product Design.
🖊️ Tips for the field
- Get your fundamentals right: If you are just getting started, make sure to build a good understanding of the design process and how to navigate it. Remember, every framework, technique, and method you learn is a tool and you should leverage the right tool at the right time.
- Value experience over credentials: Start getting experience. Startups and non-profits are great places to start. But if you are an absolute beginner, find a problem in your life and write a case study on how to fix it. Here is a short course on writing a good case study: Intro To Product Design
- Create a design portfolio with case studies: Gather all your work and present it in the form of a website or even a Notion page. Bonus points for crafting your own brand identity for this website. This is what all designers will look at to assess your work and skill level. For juniors, your portfolio is even more important than your resume.
- Master the tools: While doing all these things, make sure to master the right tools for designing. Currently, Figma is the best in the market and mastering it is enough. But as you gain more experience you might consider more advanced prototyping tools.
- Network a lot: The UX/product design industry is still new, and a lot of things are being learned as the tech industry matures. So networking on ADPList, reading articles on Medium, following design Twitter, joining Slack communities and attending UX related events on Meetup etc are great ways to boost your career. Lot of these things are online now after the pandemic so its easier than ever!
- Target design driven companies: Although a lot of companies value design, there’s many that don’t and working there can be a frustrating experience. Mostly because of the hurdles you have to get through to solve a product’s design problems. Or you might end up as a “pixel pusher” (design version of excel monkey). Working at product-centric companies with good design leadership and a good product process are ways to avoid this. Examples of such companies are: Meta, Lyft, Spotify, Airbnb, Apple, etc.
- Keep learning: Design techniques, methods, tools keep evolving every year so you want to keep learning and up skilling yourself. Product design has become super popular over the past few years so learning everyday is the best way to remain competitive.