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For a while now, Iâve been one of Monterailâs product designers.
I used to have some startup ambitions in the past, an experience and mindset that turned out to be very useful, but the transition from a developer to a product designer was not that easy. I had to learn. I still have to.
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If youâre interested in building web productsâsoftware, applications, startupsâlet me share these lessons with you so you wonât have to learn them on your own.
1. Business comes first
In the product field, caring about the business is as importantâor even more importantâas caring about the design.
If you personally want to design beautiful interfaces, be a UI designer. A product designer should be an idea guy.
Keep in mind, however, that any idea failing to generate value for the clients is worthless. Thatâs why early in the stage of building a web app or a feature, the product designerâs job is to analyze the organizationâs business model and then, later in the process, use it for strategic planning.
Sometimes, generating value means you have to look for tradeoffs.
In order to build a successful product, you have to be able to get your hands dirty. Ask yourself a question: would you intentionally release an imperfect feature? If youâre a perfectionist, youâre probably crying out in rage right now. That was my initial reaction as well. I can feel you. I really do.
But what if this feature is able to generate enough revenue to sustain a business thatâs been running slow lately?
The lesson here is: donât worry. You can always flesh it out later.
Just be patient.
2. Patience: hard, but rewarding
And thatâs how we get to the topic of patience.
Have you ever thought why programming becomes so addictive once you get a hold of it?
My friend has a theory. According to him, programming is all about instant gratification: most of the time, only one line of code will suffice to see âhello worldâ on your screen. With Rails, you can build a working app in 5 minutes.
Itâs so easy to make something that feels real.
With product design, thatâs not the case. Design process takes time. Your ideas have to be understood and accepted by the client; pre-validated against production reality; reworked into mockups and designs; implemented by the developers. Even in Agile companies like ours, the shortest time between the initial idea and production roll out is still measured in weeks.
As a former developer, this was the biggest drawback for me. Sometimes I was really frustrated. Where are the results? Does anything I do matter at all? It all made sense over the long term; the short term, however, is always blurry.
Even after your work becomes public, thereâs no way to immediately validate it. Even if a feature is a boom right after its release, good results need to last a while to confirm the trend.
As hard as it seems, you may have to wait a few months before youâre sure you did a good job.
Thatâs why being right in product design is so much more rewarding. Your first feature being deployed to the end users feels like early Christmas.
3. Youâre not a salesman
A few times before, Iâve written about âyour ideas,â and that âproduct designer is the idea guy.â Sometimes, thatâs trueâbut not always. The job of a product designerâa good product designerâis mainly about listening; probably even more than about being the idea guy.
Mainly, itâs about listening to the clients. After all, itâs their product, and youâre there just to help them bring it to life. This job is not about you having great ideas they canât understand or sell to their customers.
Secondly, itâs about listening to your teamâs input. (Not always easy when you canât see the initial idea in the mockups anymore.)
Not listening was my mistake when I started. I tried to persuade people to my way of thinking as the best solution. The concept was alright; it just wasnât what anybody else wanted.
Note to self: youâre not a salesman.
Youâre the igniter.
4. Make notes & lists
The everyday reality of working in a web software agency like Monterail is that you probably have to work on a few projects at onceâat least thatâs how we do it currently.
If you havenât done it before, let me tell you: switching between projects is hard. Business reality of one product may not be adequate at all when compared to another. And getting a hold of both short and long priorities of each project is not easy as wellâif you want to do it the best you can.
How to manage it all?
I make notes and checklists, because theyâre easy to write, check and catalog. Theyâre cheap. I can make as many of them as I want, and I can ditch them easily; on the other hand, theyâre very helpful reminders. And the short form forces you to save only the most essential information. Thereâs a plethora of mobile software for both notes and todo lists, so everybody can choose what they like.
But perhaps the software is not that important at all. My feeling is that the single most important thing is having a routine and being thorough.
Building a habit of writing everything down ensures that you wonât start from scratch when the idea the client rejected a few months ago suddenly becomes plausible in new business circumstances.
Thatâs everything for nowâŠ
âŠbut Iâm sure more will come up later. (Think long term!)
Iâll try to share the most interesting conclusions on Codetunes regularly, so if youâre keen on product design, stay tuned and let me know what you think. Iâll be more than happy to discuss.
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