10 Learnings From My 10 Years in Tech as a Product Designer

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January 2014.

A cold winter in Kielce, my hometown in the south of Poland.

It’s the fourth semester of my CS master’s, and I’m about to start my first gig as a Designer at one of the local agencies.

For the next five months, I’ll be designing websites, illustrations, icons, and motion graphics for the web. I’ll quickly discover that changing contexts quickly and jumping from one project to another after a week or two is not really my thing.

Luckily, I’m starting to build my online presence quite early, and I’m getting an invitation to Dribbble as one of the first designers in my country. This is going to open the door to another local firm, but this one will be more of a software development organization.

I’ll quickly learn what online software is and how it’s built. I’ll hear SaaS for the first time and see how mobile apps are made.

I’ll also have to learn how to work in a design team of one.

In the next ten years, I will change jobs and titles several times, graduate, get married, relocate, mentor tens of designers, build a design team from scratch, become a father, evolve into an educator, start writing an awesome newsletter, and become a father again.

These ten years in tech, working in various small and big companies, startups, and Big Four enterprises, will teach me a ton about being a better designer, better colleague, and better human being.

Here are the ten things I wish I had known in January 2014.

1. You are not the user

It sounds like a cliche, but it was not so obvious in my early days, and I know it’s still not that obvious for many young designers.

Some of us choose this career because we are creative, a bit artistic in a way, and love to create beautiful things. We are the first ones to see and judge what we make. It has to please our eyes and other senses.

Before we realize it is a completely wrong attitude, it may take some time. The key is to disconnect yourself from your work and get into the shoes of other people who are eventually going to use what you make.

This way, you will not only open yourself to receiving any kind of feedback and grow as a designer but also build better things people actually like and know how to use.

2. Communication is the first thing to break

It’s a pattern I have observed in every company I ever worked for. If something is going to break, it will be communication.

Due to the complexity of working in a fast-paced remote environment, it’s almost impossible to keep everyone in the loop, take notes on every meeting, not discuss important details over the water dispenser, and forget to pass them on to the rest of the team later.

This doesn’t mean that it will be broken on purpose; it’s just the way it is. You can’t blame people for not including you in one of the conversations. It’s just bad luck if it influences your work.

3. Don’t be the smartest folk in the room

You can think of this piece of advice from two perspectives.

Firstly, when you are involved in hiring, surround yourself with wiser people than you, and they will let you grow. Don’t be afraid to hire more experienced, more successful, and more talented folks than yourself. They are not your enemies.

Secondly, if you, as an IC, have reached a brick wall and feel like there’s no more space to grow, it may be time to leave the organization and find something more challenging.

4. Your ideas are only as good as you can articulate them

Even the best ideas die because they are not understood.

Presentation, storytelling, and persuasion are the three soft skills that, when mastered, make a designer an unstoppable machine. Before realizing this, I struggled a lot when trying to explain what was on my mind.

Being a designer helps immensely. As the saying goes, an image is worth a thousand words, so don’t underestimate the power of visual aids.

5. Don’t (just) listen to the users. Observe them

If you have been involved in UX for some time, you are probably familiar with this famous quote from Jakob Nielsen.

What’s important to remember is what people say and do are two different things. However, I believe that watching what users do and talking to them is equally important. These two activities will give you a much clearer picture of the state of UX in the product you are developing.

6. Tools don’t matter

Adobe Photoshop CS2 was the first design tool I used when I was 15. Many versions of this popular photo manipulation software were released before Sketch became popular. After a few years, Figma was released and quite quickly dominated the market.

What’s next? Nobody knows, but it’s certain that Figma won’t be the number one design tool forever. At some point, we will see something else.

At the end of the day, it does not matter what you use to make your work's artifacts. Tools come and go. They are just better versions of their predecessors, coming to the market with more useful features. What matters is not mastering a tool but general design skills.

7. Design is beyond pixels

This point is strictly correlated with the previous one. Design tools don’t matter as much as you may think. Pixels, too.

Don’t get me wrong. Being able to make UI both usable and beautiful is a rare and valuable skill. My point is that making things beautiful should not be the number one priority.

Designers often fall into this trap and forget to take all the other important steps they should be ticking off before jumping into Figma and playing with components. Deep research to understand the problem to its core should be as important as making your designs appealing.

8. You have to be proactive and advocate for best practices if you want to grow

If you don’t want to be stuck at the mid or senior level in your career, remember to show how much passion you have for this job. I assume you are passionate about design and didn’t choose this job because of the nice dollar, didn’t you?

I’ve seen it in many organizations and heard about it a lot. Designers constantly need to prove their value. After a few years in this field, you know enough to teach others. To be a mentor. To advocate for the value of design and best practices. Especially to show non-designers like executives how good design can influence business.

9. Learn the business early

If your work as a designer does not impact business, you are making art. So, learn the business as quickly as possible and use your expertise to improve it. You were not hired to make just a few nice-looking images using Figma. The earlier you realize this, the better.

Whenever you join a new organization, try to understand the main lines of business. Become friends with engineering team members and salespeople. If they are good at their jobs, they have an insane amount of client insights to share. Use this as leverage to make your job more effective.

10. If the problem you are solving is really complex, write about it

Earlier, I wrote that an image is worth more than a thousand words. And I still believe it’s true. However, sometimes, to understand the problem deeply and be able to propose a working solution, a thousand words may be needed.

Every time you encounter a complex problem, open a new Word document and write. Write down what you already know and what you need to learn.

Writing helps organize thoughts, break down problems into smaller, easier-to-understand pieces, and indicate what’s already in place and what’s still unclear.

Don’t forget that you don’t write only for yourself! Other team members working on the same problem may benefit from your documentation.

Here’s to ten more years in tech

Does this mean that now I know everything?

Of course not. I must have been stupid to think this way.

UX and product design are vast fields.

And, because of the fast-paced world and evolving technology, they also evolve.

There’s always something new to learn and grow.

Here’s to my next ten years as a product designer!

I hope our jobs are still relevant when I open this article in a decade!

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