Great designers. How curiosity leads to understanding products better

#47: Jumping from good to great and staying relevant in the blurry future

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Great designers. How curiosity leads to understanding products better

A few weeks ago, I spoke to a product manager who works at a relatively big tech company. In the past, they had on their team a designer who excelled at craft, was great at visual and interaction design, but didn’t fully understand what the product was really about or how it worked. It’s a fairly complex product, or rather a set of many subproducts, to be more precise. Although this designer was able to create outstanding prototypes, they lacked two qualities that distinguish good and great designers: business acumen and product sense. Eventually, they were replaced with someone who truly understood the product they worked on at a glance.

In today’s article, I’m sharing my tips on how to learn those skills and become a genuinely great designer. This piece is full of recommendations on what to read and whom to follow. I’m disclosing tactics that worked for me and many other designers and enabled incredible growth.

The advice is split into three pieces, or steps if you will:

1. Diving deep into the current domain.

2. Breaking out of the design bubble.

3. Self-paced learning product management.

There’s one additional reason why this is so important to not only jump from good to great, but also to stay relevant. I explain why at the end of the article, but you can already suspect why this sounds very serious (yes, it’s AI!).

Step 1: Diving deep into the current domain

Three years ago, when I changed jobs, I also transitioned into a new domain. During an interview, a hiring manager asked me if I enjoy learning new things. I told them, “Absolutely! I’m a rather curious person.” I was transitioning from vendor management and human resources to remote sensing, space, and natural disaster response, so I had a lot to learn. Instead of panicking, out of curiosity, I subconsciously followed these four steps:

• Test your product from top to bottom.

• Find domain experts and follow some.

• Identify your competitors and start watching them.

• Buy a few expert books.

Test your product from top to bottom

I spent the first couple of days in my new job testing the tool I was supposed to work on. My goal was to learn how it worked and also conduct an expert usability audit to identify potential areas for improvement. It required me to ask numerous questions of the product team members about functionalities I didn’t understand at first glance, and the same may happen to you if the product you are supposed to work on is relatively complex.

Find domain experts and follow some

Whatever the domain is, LinkedIn is so broad that you’ll easily find experts who post their knowledge regularly. Look for people working in similar organizations, book authors, and independent consultants. If they post interesting content, it means they are as into the domain as you should be, so it’s worth following them along.

Identify your competitors and start watching them

Find competitors to your current company and observe their actions. Test their products if possible, which sometimes may be a pickle. It will allow you not only to identify gaps in the market that your company’s product offering could fill but also to deepen your domain knowledge.

Buy a few expert books

Buy one or two books written by domain experts with good reviews, and start following the authors if you enjoyed reading. Such books should broaden your domain vocabulary, explain domain-specific terms, and guide you on where to look for more knowledge.

Caution: it will take some time

Even if you repeat what I did and check all four elements from the list, you won’t become a domain expert instantly. Give yourself time and make small steps. Start by trying to understand how your product works by testing it yourself, speaking with the team responsible for its development so far, and reviewing the documentation. Add domain knowledge from external sources such as books, webinars, and social media posts written by domain experts. Only if you are curious enough, everything should start clicking within a couple of months.

Step 2: Breaking out of the design bubble

The first thing one should do to understand the product better and learn about the business is to get closer to their product manager. In the past, I tended to believe that QA engineers are the best friends of product designers. While I still value those relationships, now I spend more time with my PM. As I began to think about design on a more strategic level, I became less focused on delivery and was able to present the real value of design.

If you don’t already work in a product trio model, start by genuinely showing interest in what your product manager does daily. Ask them to schedule a weekly call so you can both spend some time together. Build a bond, and after some time, you’ll understand the nuts and bolts of product metrics, feature prioritization, and making tough decisions.

What’s even more important, you’ll end up having more influence on what you build together. Depending on the people you are surrounded by in your organization, especially your product manager, you should see a positive impact on your relationship, scope of work, and overall satisfaction within the first few months. You’ll become a true partner to discuss product discovery, strategy, and priorities rather than being a mercenary waiting for your PM to gather all requirements so you can draw a few rectangles in your favorite design tool and post a link to your designs in your favorite project management platform.

Step 3: Self-paced learning product management

Learning the basics of product management at your own pace would be highly recommended to supplement bonding with your PM. You won’t do it to change careers (but if you start enjoying it, no one will stop you), but to deepen your product and business knowledge. Below, I have listed a few fantastic resources for learning, and most of them are free:

Courses

• Product Management basics course from Pendo.io (FREE)

• Product-Led course from Pendio.io (FREE)

Newsletters

• Product Compass by

  Paweł Huryn
  (FREE/Premium)

• Untrapping Product Teams by

  David Pereira
  (FREE/Premium)

• Lenny's Newsletter by

  Lenny Rachitsky
  (FREE/Premium)

Books

• "Build" by Tony Fadell

• "The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick

• "Learn More Faster" by Michael Margolis (FREE)

Videos

Here’s a brilliant playlist of product management evergreen lectures and explainers, put together by

Paweł Huryn

.

Go for a meetup

The last thing you can do is attend a product management meetup in your neighborhood. You’ll not only witness nice and useful presentations (hopefully), but also spend a few hours with fellow product people discussing experiences, techniques, and approaches to various aspects of our work.

One more reason

When it comes to discussing the future of the product design function, we are currently in a moment of constant change and uncertainty. Of course, the main reason for that is AI, which gets better and better every day. Companies release new, groundbreaking models every few weeks. We can already see a major shift in the design processes across the board, where prototyping with AI comes before creating (or rather polishing) designs in Figma.

While some try to predict it, no one has a crystal ball that can tell how the future will unfold in a couple of years. We can’t be sure what exactly constitutes the design function over the next 5-10 years. However, if someone doesn’t see that design has already become more strategic than tactical, outcomes-focused rather than delivery-focused, they are either stupid or blind.

I am one hundred percent confident that learning how to leverage strategic thinking, business acumen, and product sense into high-performing digital solutions is the best way to prepare ourselves for the future, in which AI disrupts the design function and design process as we know it today.

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