What Competencies A Product Designer Needs- And How To Develop Them

Of course, strong design skills are needed – the ability to create stylish and beautiful interfaces, but they cannot be dispensed with.

A product designer must be a team player and a reliable partner. This is often more important than the skills of visual design and prototyping – the project’s success largely depends on the personal qualities of the designer.

The second necessary competence is communicating with colleagues: be open and report problems promptly. If the designer wants to work on international projects, then knowledge of the English language can also be included here.
The following quality is empathy. It is essential for a designer to be attentive to users and their needs, to put themselves in the place of another person.

And, of course, you need to learn, be flexible, and adapt to different situations constantly. The profession is developing very quickly – there are new requirements and tools.

1. Team: The designer has the right to choose where he will work – in the product or design team. Each option has its advantages.
2. You always know what your colleagues are working on when you sit with designers. This allows you to be inspired and upgraded and apply the best practices borrowed from colleagues in your product. If you sit with the product team, you quickly immerse yourself in the product, but professional stagnation is possible.
3. Development of soft and hard skills: The company allows the designer to develop the direct and indirect skills needed for everyday work while learning is integrated into the workflow.
4. Design review and feedback: Once every two weeks, product designers of the company’s essential products meet for a few hours. They tell each other about their work and get feedback from colleagues. This is an integral part of the process – looking at your work through the eyes of other specialists who are far from your product is helpful.

Should A Designer Be A Bit Of A Developer?

Since the days of web design, there has been an opinion that a technically trained designer is more competent than an unprepared one. Probably, at that time, it was so. But today, there are many technologies and platforms: the web, Android, iOS, AR, and VR are gradually being added to them. Even an engineer cannot work equally well on all platforms simultaneously.

I don’t think a product designer needs to be an engineer. But it is essential to understand the capabilities and limitations of different platforms to be able to communicate with developers and discuss technical solutions. Understand how difficult it is to implement a particular idea.