If I Were a Junior Product Designer Again
Then I'd carefully read and implement these five tips into my career in 2025!
I’ve been talking to a lot of junior designers lately. After one of these chats, I reflected on how my career evolved. Interestingly, I couldn’t say I was much different from today’s junior designers. What’s different today compared to a decade ago is the environment. The job market has changed for the worse, and design tools have bloomed.
When we first fall in love with design, we are driven by the same things. It’s either a desire to make nice-looking things or an obsessive dream to change the world. While both incentives are super valid, we might be blind to other aspects of this job. These things enable us to actually change the world and not let others slap a pixel-pusher sticker on us. The sooner we realize there’s more than what our users see, the heavier we push the gas pedal on our career.
So, what timeless advice would I give to a 10-year-younger version of myself and all the junior product designers out there to accelerate in 2025?
1. Plan your career
If you just began your UX and product design career, you don’t know how much you don’t know. You might even think you already know so much that you are an expert in the field. Which, for sure, is far from being true.
So, how do you find out what you don’t know and plan to learn those things? Most companies with high design maturity developed their own career ladders – structured frameworks that outline the progression of job roles from entry-level positions to higher-level management or executive roles. In short, career ladders give clear guidance on what skills an employee requires to get a promotion. While they differ slightly from company to company, they provide an overall sense of the difference between junior, regular, senior, and staff product designers.
Don’t simply assume that you will become a regular product designer in the next 12 months. What you need is a structured plan for learning new stuff. Look at a few examples of career ladders and spend a healthy amount of time planning your next steps.
Try to answer these questions in a 6 to 12-month horizon:
What core skills are usually required to jump on the next career ladder level and become a regular (also called mid) product designer?
Where can I look for knowledge or training to gain those competencies?
Does my current workplace support my career growth?
Then, if possible, discuss with your manager a plan for your career growth for the next 6 to 12 months. Work together to set up a few measurable goals that will help demonstrate your growth. Seek guidance on training. Most companies offer some training budget, but if your company doesn’t, look for free or low-cost material on YouTube and design communities. Good people are always ready to share their knowledge for free.
2. Understand the core principles of UX design
My first couple of months as a designer were like, "I put this button here, and I used this color because I liked it this way." Arguably, this is not the best way to defend design rationale during a meeting with stakeholders.
Why do people click? How do you not make people think? What makes people stick to products? (But in a good way, not making people addicted like Meta and TikTok do). Once you learn the core principles of UX design and the psychology behind human behavior, you will become an unstoppable beast ready to tackle any design challenge.
Learn principles like Occam’s Razor (among competing hypotheses, choose the one with the fewest assumptions), Peak-End Rule (people judge an experience by its peak and end feelings rather than the total average of every moment experience), Von Restroff Effect (when among similar objects, the differing one stands out remembered), Jakob’s Law (users spend most of their time on other sites), and Law of Proximity (objects near each other are grouped). Understand what the cognitive load is and how modern technology overwhelms us. Read about cognitive biases that drive human behavior in fast thinking and how they influence decision-making while using technology.
3. Open yourself to feedback
Too many designers attach themselves emotionally to their work, making it extremely difficult to leverage feedback. They treat what they design as an extension of their souls, so no part of it can be criticized.
When I started out, I was exactly like this. Even the most honest and constructive feedback was hard to swallow. I didn’t know how to handle it.
If you want to grow professionally as a product designer and create better products, you must expose yourself to continuous feedback from your peers, senior colleagues, managers, stakeholders, customers, and users. Not all of it will be quality and useful, but hopefully, it will mainly come from your colleagues who share the same goal of improving the product.
How do you make this switch? First, you must understand that you are not your work. Once you separate your self-worth from your work, it will become clear that feedback on design is not equal to personal failure. Embrace a mindset where feedback is seen as an opportunity for improvement rather than a reflection on self-worth. It’s essential to take this step as soon as possible in your junior years and leverage the feedback to enable your growth.
4. Find a mentor
In a couple of my first jobs, I didn’t have any other designer on the team. At that time, I didn’t realize it wasn’t ideal. My colleagues were engineers who taught me technical stuff and the entire software development process. Luckily, it wasn’t a complete waste. Thanks to this experience, I can now talk to engineers using their own language.
But not everyone should follow my path. Instead, if possible, seek a job where you would not be left alone. Find a place where there’s at least one senior designer that you can observe and learn from. Your colleague will become your mentor, teaching you best practices and industry knowledge and providing continuous feedback.
Senior designers require less oversight and can work on more ambiguous projects, independently making crucial (and hopefully data-informed) decisions. They can drive the entire project from scratch to a living piece of code in production, finding out what’s needed along the way. These are the skills you will learn while working together with senior designers.
I’m aware that the job market right now is tough. If you already have a job at a startup or agency where you are a sole designer and you’ve got zero chances to switch to an organization with higher design maturity and a bigger team, there’s always something you can do: find a mentor from outside of your job. Look for free mentorship options in online communities like ADPList, Re:create, or Get Merit. These websites are full of senior, staff, and director-level designers ready to discuss your career planning and portfolio.
5. Learn business acumen
As I mentioned in the introduction to this episode, in our junior years, we tend to be very excited about the visual side of things. But do we truly understand why we were hired?
Making pretty things could be one of the items in the job description. But they are not the ultimate goal. They are one of the components required to create cool products with great user experience. To better understand the product as a whole, you must first learn business acumen.
Our work as product designers has to be aligned with the company’s strategic objectives. We contribute to the company's success (or failure). Once you understand basic business metrics like ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue), CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), Churn rate, CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), and MAU (Monthly Active Users), you’ll be able to make data-informed decisions and better articulate the value of your work when talking to stakeholders. Developing business skills is the best way to position yourself as a valuable asset within your organization.
Bonus: Learn how to leverage AI
Okay, we all know that the AI revolution is real and might already be switching to the third (or fourth) gear. And what’s more important (and scary!) is that there’s no way to reduce the gear in this gearbox!
So what can you do? Learn and adapt. Embrace a mindset where AI is a friend. Designers have already been using AI agents to summarize their workshop notes or to speed up research tasks in the planning and analysis phases.
I don’t believe that AI will replace us. Instead, it will make us more capable and stronger designers.
Fundament returns in January!
This is the last episode of Fundament in 2024.
In the meantime, we wish you happy holidays and a happy new year. Enjoy quality time with loved ones, and get some rest—you deserve it! We’ll return on Thursday, 9 January, with episode #31.
See you in 2025!
Cover photo by Bora Yeniay