6 hard skills of a successful product designer
What does it take to be a great Product Designer? Successful Product Designers have a healthy mix of hard and soft skills, ranging from UX Research to excellent collaboration with stakeholders. A large breadth of competencies is required to build a product and work cross-functionally with other disciplines to ensure the full vision is realized.
While soft skills are equally as important, this article will focus on the hard skills necessary to master. To learn about soft skills, you may read my article here.
1. Design Thinking
The concept of design thinking has been around for decades. In fact, Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO, notes the engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859) as one of the first design thinkers. The term was thought to be coined in 1959, as John E. Arnold wrote about 4 key areas of design thinking in his book ‘Creative Engineering.’ However, it was IDEO co-founder David Kelley who expanded upon and socialized the idea of design thinking into business and innovation.
A solid and efficient design process is a vital part of product development. Stakeholders will look to you, as the Product Designer, to be the expert in this area. You should know where to start the process, depending on the ask of the project, and you should know how to execute this stage…