We often blame designers when we see a poorly designed digital product. But in this chapter, I will explain why that is not always true. And I'm not talking about UI and visual design. I'm talking about the user experience of using a product.
When you work at a product-based company, you'll primarily interact with three types of people: Designers, Engineers, and Product Managers. The unfortunate part is that learning how to work with engineers and PMs is something you can never learn from online courses, boot camps, or design schools. It's imperative to understand how to work with them because it's very hard for you to do your job without them. Building a product is a team effort.
If you want to become a successful product designer, your design skills will not be enough. You need to work with great product managers and engineers as well. You can be an unsuccessful designer even with great design skills.
Because if you don't have experience designing and shipping great products, your design skills won't be enough to open more opportunities for you as you grow in your career. The industry wants designers who have completed the entire loop of building a product.
Unfortunately, many designers don't get to learn and experience this because they end up working in immature product companies for a very long time. And when they want better opportunities, they can't access them because they don't end up developing those skills in poor companies.
This is similar to the world of F1 Racing. Every team has two drivers, and if the team has to win, the drivers need to do their best at driving. But the drivers can't win races unless their team builds them a world class car.
You can be the best F1 driver in the world. But you can only be the best if you have the best car to drive in, or else those driving skills don't matter, and success is out of the picture.
Before I go into more detail about what a product manager does, let's understand the relationship between a product manager and a product designer.
The relationship between a product manager and a product designer is very similar to that between a husband and a wife. To run a family, the husband and wife must equally participate and contribute.
Considering a typical middle-class family, the husband is usually the bread earner, and the wife is the homemaker. Each of them has dedicated responsibilities. But they have shared responsibilities as well. Let's take a few examples.
The husband is in charge of earning for the family, taking care of financial needs, and ensuring that the family's basic needs are met. A wife is in charge of cooking, taking care of the house, taking care of children, etc.
Decision-making is a major part of their responsibilities. Both the husband and wife make certain independent decisions as they own a specific set of responsibilities. But often, a collaborative decision has to be taken where both opinions matter—for example, deciding which school to admit their child to, which locality to buy a house in, and what pet to adopt.
The key takeaway is that running a family is a team effort where important decisions have to be taken to have a good result. We all know what happens when decisions are not respected, or decisions are not made. It affects the whole dynamics of the family, and oftentimes, it's the children who suffer.
Anytime either of the parents makes a decision, they must consider its effects on the entire family.
The same applies to the world of Product Design. If you're working in a company where design is really valued, your opinions are considered, and you get to make design decisions, then consider yourself extremely lucky. Because today, there are only a handful of companies where design is given the value and importance it deserves.
If you're working in a company where your skills are not valued, it's time to rethink your career choices before it's too late. As I mentioned before, if you don't ship great products, it's hard to become a successful designer, no matter how awesome your design skills are.
In the previous chapter, I mentioned that product designers need to have product thinking skills and think beyond an interface. This means that you need to understand the language PMs speak and they need to understand the language you speak.
Imagine being married to someone who speaks a totally different language. Leading a life, making decisions, and communicating become almost impossible.
It's just like that. However, as I mentioned before, learning to work with PMs is a skill that can be gained only when you actually work with them. However there are many things you can learn when it comes speaking the product language even before you get a job. I've covered that in Module 3 of this guide.
A product manager is one who owns a product or a part of a product. In a food delivery app, each part of the app, such as the cart, browsing experience, checkout experience, customer support, feedback, etc., is handled by individual product managers.
They are responsible for the growth of the product/feature. But this again depends on the maturity and the size of the company.
They decide the projects that need to be worked on and their priorities. They define the roadmap. They handle resource allocation. They collaborate very closely with designers to design experiences, with engineers to understand the technical capabilities, and with the leadership team to understand the company's goals.
They also make a lot of decisions by analysing data and the performance of the product/feature.
They wear multiple hats, so they must understand everyone's language. Being a product manager is no joke. It's one of the hardest professions ever. Consider yourself lucky if you get to work with really talented PMs.
But just like how the industry is filled with poor product designers, there are many PMs who don't understand the language of design, tech, and product.
Most of the designers who start out in their careers end up working with poor PMs because they work in immature companies that hire poor talent.
One of the biggest misconceptions of this profession is that designers need to follow the instructions of product managers because they are their bosses.
This is absolutely untrue. They are not your bosses. They are your teammates, which means you, as a designer, have a very big say in how the experience and product should function and grow. Of course, both of you are in charge of making a certain set of decisions. But, if they are making your decisions for you, then that's not a PM you should work with.
I've done a lot consultancy and freelance work in the past and have worked with many incompetent PMs ever. The worst environment you can be in is a company where you are not able to do your best because of your PM. It could be because they don't understand design. Maybe they don't know how to make good product decisions. There are many reasons which I will elaborate later on in this chapter.
One of the most important tasks of a PM is to make decisions and they need to be good decisions. They have the final say in how a product should be. But remember, you can still make a decision and they can approve your decision.
Here is an example. When applying for a master's degree, you would choose the university you would want to study in. But your parents have the final say and approve your decision as they need to look at finances, safety etc. But in hindsight, that decision was yours. It was them who approved it. They didn't go against your decision.
So if PMs and product designers are making product decisions, is there a fine line between what designers handle and what they handle?
Assume that you work for a fin-tech company where users of your app can invest in stocks and mutual funds. You're tasked with designing the first-time user experience for your user.
How should the experience be after the user is onboarded for the very first time?
The process of asking the right questions and making the right decisions starts here.
• What do you want users who finished onboarding to do? Browse, deposit money or something else?
• What should you make users do so that it meets your business goals?
• What has been the behavior of newly onboarded users in the past 60 days? How many of them have become active users?
• What do you show on every screen? What should the empty state look like?
• Does the marketing team have a say in this as they are the ones running marketing campaigns?
• What should you do if you're running a promotion or offer for a selected geography or cohort of users? How does that experience look like?
• What should the UX copy be? How and what should you communicate to users?
• Are there any legal and compliance aspects to consider?
• If it's a complex onboarding, given that it's a fin-tech product, should you let users inside the app without finishing KYC?
• What sort of A/B tests need to be performed?
• What's the timeline for this project? Are there enough engineers to build this experience? When should the back-end work start for this project?
The PMs and designers work together to get answers to these questions. They sit down with the stakeholders to get this information. Typically the responsibility of getting most answers to these questions lies with them.
Let's assume there is a concept of an onboarding perk to motivate users to get started using the app. The leadership and PMs take this decision.
The way the onboarding perk works and the amount of bonus users get as a part of the perk is decided by them, as this involves understanding how much money the company is planning to set aside, market conditions, and what competitors are doing.
Product designers are not equipped to make these decisions.
A product manager then comes up with answers and makes decisions for most of the questions. Of course, not all decisions need to be taken a right at the beginning. Some can take their time.
Once the core details are figured out, the designer takes over and defines the whole experience for the new user. The various states, the user flows, the edge cases, etc.
The most important thing to know here is that, in order for you to define the experience for users, you need to get a lot of information and answers from your PMs. Because if they don't do a good job of getting answers and making decisions, you can't design a good experience for your users.
A lot of people often ask me how I was able to grow quite fast in my career. The biggest reason is that I got to work at companies where design was given immense value. As a result, I was able to contribute to the product and company I worked at.
I was able to work with some of the best PMs and engineers. I was able to learn 100x more than what an average designer would learn.
You'll never ship great products until you work at a great company that values design because that's what is called experience.
Not the number of years you work as a designer. Not the number of tools you know. You can be a designer with six years of work experience but may not have enough knowledge to build a product. The industry is filled with plenty of incapable designers, and that number is only increasing.
Other than product companies, we also have design agencies and service-based companies. I have a dedicated chapter on this, but let me explain a few things briefly.
You see, for a product-based company to grow, it needs to generate revenue directly from the product it owns. This means that the effort of all the employees in that company is directed towards making that product the best it can ever be. And that includes designers as well.
But design agencies and service-based companies make revenue by acquiring more clients. They design products for their clients. It's very rare to see a client care a lot about design because if they did, they would have set up an in-house design team. Design becomes a transaction and is not given the value and respect it deserves.
Quantity end ups getting more importance than quality. And that is never good.
Just look at banking apps, airline apps and government apps. These apps are designed by people at agencies and service-based companies. Most of the apps are poorly designed products.
What you usually have in these companies are PROJECT managers and not PRODUCT managers. Project managers are just facilitators. They are more like the middleman. They don't make key product decisions. They typically handle communication between the agency and the client.
In design agencies and service-based companies, it's often a one-way communication when you work with clients. You just have to follow the instructions given by the client because they are paying you to do the work. This leads to poor collaboration and no growth. But, of course, there are always exceptions.
This also comes with fewer iterations, sub-optimal solutions, poor decisions, and tight deadlines, ultimately leading to a poorly designed product.
Does that mean that you should never work in design agencies and service-based companies?
When you're starting out your career, there is a high chance you may not get into a good product company. It's quite rare unless you're talented and have put in the time and effort to learn the craft. It's a lot easier to get into design agencies and service-based companies because they are often looking for executioners and not really product thinkers.
So when you're starting out, it's okay if you don't get into a product-based company, but in the long run, working in a good product-based company can guarantee a successful career. So make sure that within 1-2 years you transition into a product-based company where you will learn a lot more and understand how to work with multiple teams working towards improving their product.
You can even start your career by working in an immature product-based company. But again, give yourself 1-2 years to move into a much better one.
Here is a quick question for you.
Name 5-6 of the best designers that you would want to be like in the future. How many of them are from product-based companies, and how many are from agencies/service-based companies?
Now let's talk about what makes a really poor PM.
• They don't understand design. They don't understand what a good experience should be like. This is probably the #1 factor that differentiates a good PM from an incompetent PM. So when you look at a poorly designed product, remember that it may not always be the designer's fault.
• They don't know how to make product-level decisions. They often blindly copy other products without further investigation or logic.
• They don't know how to give constructive feedback, and most of their feedback is personal and not actionable. Often times they don't have a strong logic to back up their feedback.
• They don't consider your ideas and solutions with an open mind.
• They are really poor communicators. They don't know how to put their point across.
• They take a lot of time to make product decisions and gather answers to questions.
• They don't care about building great experiences. They have an 'anything decent will do' attitude.
The harsh reality is that unless you're a talented designer, you won't get into mature companies, which means you won't get the opportunity to work with amazing PMs and learn amazing things and ship amazing things. You're always going to be doing sub-optimal work that is not good enough, and that can be a big dent in your design career.
So if you feel that you're PMs aren't good enough and they are hampering your growth, it's time to consider making a switch to a better company.