Starting your career as a product designer? 40+ resources that might help you

Published in

Bootcamp

4 min readJan 3, 2021

2019/2020 was one of the most interesting time for me without a doubt. After almost 4 years in an agency, I quit my job as a UX/UI designer, flew abroad, and worked half a year in a campervan. When I came back, I decided to take a new position as a product designer.

I didn’t realise how huge is the gap between working as a freelancer/in the agency vs working on a product. I would like to share with you what were the differences and what helped me to catch up with that gap.

Product

The first and the most obvious topic was to study deeper what are the responsibilities of a product designer.

User research

User research has become a daily routine for me, therefore I focus on how to prepare and conduct the research, and how to share outcomes with the team.

Priorities

Imagine you have dozens of insightful feedbacks from your user research. Which of them are worth pushing, and which one to put aside tho?

User vs business goals

There is another topic I deal with every single day. Find the right balance between users’ expectations, business goals, and technical constraints.

📺 User goals vs Business goals? Which one should win? I wish I could see this video earlier. Now I understand that you cannot always fight it.
But as Jakub Nielsen explains 📺 in this video you need to focus on long-term customer loyalty and that is supported by a good product experience.
🎧 Customer vs. Business Needs and priorities
✍️ Finding the UX Tipping Point

Product for humans

Sometimes, we have a tendency to forget that we design for real humans. Fortunately, regular user testings keep reminding me that.

📺 Creating Magic — Products for Humans not Robots: Your goal is to create an MWP — Minimal Wow Product and delight your customers.
📺 Humans, not Users: Why UX is a Problem

UX writing

I’ve always known copy is important, but when almost each of our testers pointed out that our copy isn’t still clear enough, I realised that I have to learn more about that.

Localization

Localization was something new for me. It comes hand in hand with the copy and it’s crucial when your product launches in different markets.

Product vs Marketing

I’m lucky to be also a part of the marketing team. Because of that I’m able to perceive our product from another perspective. It’s interesting to see how different is the approach to common goals from marketing vs product point of view.

Product Management

I’ve got involved with other teams and got familiar more with their problems that are eventually affecting the product. Therefore I’ve started to look for ways how to optimize internal processes.

🎧 The 10 Dysfunctions of Product Management: I assume that a lot of companies struggle with similar issues. We certainly do. This talk offers one of the best overviews with a really “simple” solution.
🎧 Why You Must Fall in Love with Problems
🎧 Design Better Podcast: I personally recommend season 3 and 4.

Communication

Long story short — communication is really a key and I had to focus more on how to advocate my design rationales.

Useful books

Just a few words…

There will always be problems to deal with. Always something new to learn. Luckily, there are thousands of resources online that will help you to keep track — podcasts, videos, webinars, articles, Instagram, Twitter, and more.

Hope this article will help you 💪