Campfire #39: How to showcase your senior product design skills?
Here are a few essential skills I identified that would make someone a senior product designer.
I wrote this post based on my personal experience, and some of the points made below may or may not apply to you and your journey as a designer. It's also worth mentioning that even though it's written from a Product Designer's perspective, it may also apply to other design fields.
With 12 years of experience as a Product Designer, I worked with a dozen Fortune 500 companies and much more startups. And if there's one sentence that I would use to describe what it means to be a senior product designer – it would be this:
Being a senior is about curiosity and self-education.
But I know you want more than one sentence, so here are a few essential skills I identified that would make someone a senior product designer (from my point of view).
Learnability
I've met many people who have stopped learning, regardless of their job titles or experience. This is not about design principles or color theory we learned in schools or courses but about new tools, frameworks, other fields, and what's happening worldwide.
Discover everything and anything. Aside from tools, discover new processes, workflows, and things that work operationally and financially for your team. In addition, learn about coding, nature, politics, science, and art (not necessarily in this order). Make yourself into a unicorn. Get out of your head and out of your comfort zone.
Find your best learning style and learn more every day. Learn so that you can be inspired and inspire others.
Adaptability
Learning is only useful if you can apply what you've learned in real-world situations. When we start, we must all follow the guidelines and rules established by our instructors or curriculum or by learning from other sources. However, in the real world, everybody you work with and each company has a unique way of doing things.
Be adaptable, and try to apply your knowledge to different scenarios. Don't be too strict. Don't be stingy. Don't get too attached to concepts or processes. Don't be self-centered.
Communication and collaboration
You've learned and adjusted. However, you can only make an idea a reality if you can communicate. Designers have traditionally worked in silos, which has proven inefficiency, particularly in product design.
When communicating and collaborating with your team, use your adaptability skills and be flexible. Stop trying to control and push and start negotiating with your team (and know when to do so). When you need it, ask for help.
Educating others about design
For a long time, designers have been seen as "making things pretty," resulting in an invisible job responsibility for designers to teach stakeholders about what design is, what the hell design thinking is, and why it's good for everyone and all things design related.
If your stakeholders are already familiar with and use design and design thinking — great! It's now up to you to figure out what process works best for your team and become an even bigger advocate for design.
Confidence
Confidence is a vital life skill. Being more confident in yourself and your work will help you progress in your career more proudly.
But what does confidence mean in the context of design?
You understand how to give and receive feedback. You recognize that your work isn't perfect, but that's okay because you know how to improve in future iterations.
Knowing that no one is perfect gives you confidence.
Ultimately, being a Senior Product Designer requires a combination of technical expertise, experience, a user-centered approach, leadership skills, a deep understanding of the design process, and the ability to think strategically.
Soft skills become increasingly important as you advance in your career. Growing and maturing as a person, in addition to your craft, will help you become a better professional.