Personal development
Growing as a product designer, 6 fundamental skills to level up, operate in a high-impact way, and more
We'll discuss:
Personal growth?
The driver = yourself
6 fundamental skills
Operate in a high-impact way
How to plan your personal development plan
Personal note: Hi friends. It’s Budi.. There are 3 upcoming workshops at Crafters. Available in English (yay). I know a lot of you have been requesting for it. Go to joincrafters.com and check them out.
Personal growth?
You're working as a product designer.
You want to make an impact. But you feel stuck.
Perhaps a personal growth plan can be helpful.
It's a plan you make to upgrade your skills. What to focus on this year? Why should I improve this skill? How to improve it? Everyone has a different path to take. You and I have a completely different background and interests. So, your plan on what to grow will be different from mine.
The driver = yourself
No one else cares as much as you about your growth.
You should not rely on your manager to guide you. They need to take care of their own things. This is a common mistake that I see many young designers make. They rely too much on the manager, or they don't have any plans at all.
Take the driver's seat.
Plan. Make a progress. Drip by drip. Little by little.
6 fundamentals skills
Here are six skills that I believe you should develop:
Design craft: The core skill to make a design that feels and looks great.
Product strategy: The strategic foundation to focus on the big impact work.
Decision-making: The ability to focus on critical decisions
Goal setting: The mechanic to set an ambitious goal and stay on track
Collaboration: Harmonizing collective knowledge to make progress together.
Technical literacy: The engineering mindset and knowledge about technology.
Operate in a high-impact way
If you disagree with the skills I mentioned above, it’s fine. That’s only my thesis on how you can operate in a high-impact way. If you feel another skill’s more important, you should go for it.
Remember, the goal is to make a positive impact.
How to plan your personal development
My suggestion is to look at the 6 areas I described above.
Think about those areas as a big umbrella. There are many small topics underneath it.
First, use your feelings. Which part is unfamiliar to you?
Consider learning about it. Write that down on the paper. Pick one area and geek out about it. For example, in 2012, I spent one year focusing only on icon design and then one year learning HTML/CSS.
Find one topic and focus on it. Go really deep. That's the only way you can make real growth. Below, I share a few pieces; use them to prompt your brain.
Design craft
First, design craft. This is the heart of what you do. AI will be your friend and speed you up. AI can help you generate the design. But it's up to you to decide. Is this good? Is this intuitive for our specific users? Is this aligned with our brand direction?
Not only that, design craft is more than just producing the design.
It involves how you plan. When the team asks, "Hey, how much time do you need?" You can get back to them and say, here's the scope. We discussed this a lot in our workshops on Interface Design Planning. Even though it's not sexy, it will help you operate in a high-impact way.
Design exploration is also critical. You should be able to come up with different solutions and layouts. How do you organize your thinking while exploring all these different directions? Next month, I'm holding a new workshop about Effective Design Exploration. We'll learn how to think in low-fidelity.
Product Strategy
When you work, your team will make a new feature or product from scratch. How do you navigate this? This is where the strategic thinking will be critical.
Who's your target audience? What's their problem? How are you different than other solutions on the market? The business stuff. I like the book personalMBA. I also shared a lot about this in the Product Strategy workshop.
As you grow, you'll learn how to make a strategic direction. Why this problem? Why not that? It's a way to help your team move forward. Make a plan to reach the goal.
Goal setting
Where to go? Goals are like the north start. They guide you.
Define what you want. More user satisfaction? Higher engagement? Why?
Consider learning frameworks like OKRs or goal-setting in general. In the beginning, you use this framework to help facilitate the discussion. For now, product designers are rarely the ones who set the goal and decide where to go next. But understanding this will be critical if you have to work with company leadership.
Decision making
Every decision counts. Why put this button here? Can we hide this information? There is technical decision-making for designers. You usually don't have all the data you need when you make decisions.
In practice, you usually set criteria. "This is my goal, this is the criteria. Then what are my options?" Then, you make an analysis. Do some deep thinking. Fun stuff.
Then, you will learn about budgeting your energy because when you have limited time and too many decisions to make, which one should you ignore? Which one should you focus on?
Collaboration
Building software is a team sport. Although you can technically build it yourself if you can code, market, build the brand, and design, collaboration is critical since most of you reading this newsletter are working in a company.
How do you communicate your opinion? What if you disagree? What do you do when the team runs in a circle and can't decide?
It's complicated stuff but critical. If you can help the team move forward, that's a high-impact area. Learning about workshop facilitation is going to be a game changer. You can read something like Design Sprint.
Technical literacy
Designers often neglect this. As a result, they can't make good design decisions. Learn about HTML/CSS/Javascript. That will be a huge aspect of your differentiation. You'll see how engineers will appreciate having you on their team.
You don't have to be good at everything I listed here.
But perhaps you can start play around with them.
Pick one.
Go deep.
Have fun.
Budi
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Thanks Budi for sharing this. Hopefully I can reflect to this one day an mark my progress