A quick guide to shifting from Senior to Lead Product Designer

The role of a Lead Product Designer is a significant milestone in a designer’s career, marking a shift from an individual contributor to a leadership role with greater responsibility, impact, and influence on the product and the team.

In this article, I’d like to share my learnings from the past 2 years, furthermore some of the key values, learnings, skills, and tips for transitioning into the role of a Lead Product Designer, and the importance of how to clearly communicate your goals.

The 4 core values

To become a great leader, there are four main values I would like to mention that can make a difference in not only impacting your team and peers but also the projects and how you influence others who collaborate with you.
These core values should be tailored to your mission and mindset regarding the kind of message you want to leave and the image you want to transmit to others.

1. Collaboration

A Lead Product Designer must be able to work collaboratively with cross-functional teams, including product managers, developers, and stakeholders. Collaboration creates an environment where everyone feels heard and valued.

2. Empathy

A Lead Product Designer must understand the needs and perspectives of users, team members, and stakeholders. Empathy leads to designing better products that meet users’ needs and builds trust with the team and stakeholders.

3. Communication

Effective communication is crucial to ensure that everyone is on the same page, understands the goals and objectives, and can give and receive feedback. Communication also creates a transparent and open work culture.

4. Leadership

As a Lead Product Designer, you will lead the team and drive the product’s design direction. You must inspire and motivate team members to perform their best, lead by example, and create a positive, safe, and friendly work environment.

Stepping ahead the Lead role

It might sound a lot, and in fact, it's! The transition from Senior Product Designer to Lead Product Designer requires developing a broader set of skills that go beyond design, but having a defined mission of your goals and having effective support from your manager, you will master all of them.

Business awareness
A Lead Product Designer needs to understand the business objectives and metrics well to make design decisions that align with the company’s goals.

💡Complementary reading:
• Business Thinking Design Doing
• Why designers should be shaping business strategy

Project Management
Here’s a topic you don’t have to master, considering that the PM will be one of your best friends in this role, in fact, having a glance at project management skills is suitable for managing projects, timelines, and resources efficiently, especially when dealing with multiple stakeholders.

Coaching and Mentorship
As a Lead Product Designer, you will be responsible for the growth and development of team members. Providing feedback, coaching, and mentorship helps team members reach their full potential.
Make sure you also have coaching and mentorship sessions with higher or the same level so you can leverage better your outcome.

Being a designer of any level requires us to revisit our roots and foundation.

Strategic Thinking
One of the most important and hard skills to master when shifting to a Lead Product Designer role. As you are now at a level of high influence and impact, there is a need to be able to think strategically and develop a long-term vision for the product. Strategic thinking helps to anticipate challenges and plan for future growth. Make sure to always align your goals, ideas, and decisions with the Product Manager and your upper-level management.

User Research
Make sure you are aligned with the Research team on every decision. Being part of conducting user research, and using data to inform design decisions is crucial for designing user-centered products, and it will give solid pain points from the users that you can play in your favour when deciding the design strategy.

Design Thinking
Having a deep understanding of design thinking principles and how to apply them to solve complex problems is critical for successful product design.

💡 Key books to master Design Thinking Skills
• The Design Sprint — Jake Knapp
• Quick Guide to Design Thinking — Ida Engholm

Communication and Presentation Skills
The ability to communicate design decisions, ideas, and vision clearly to stakeholders and team members is essential for a Lead Product Designer.
Personal Growth. Make sure to show and share the overall process of your thinking and what you want to achieve at the end.
Highlight the user Pain-points, Business goals, vision, and OKRs.

To continue personal growth as a Lead Product Designer, the following tips are helpful

Seek for Feedback:

Seeking feedback from team members, stakeholders, and mentors is essential to understand areas for improvement.

Here are some examples of how to provide and request effective feedback from your peers:

Learn from Others

Learning from successful Lead Product Designers by reading books, attending conferences, and connecting with them can provide valuable insights and inspiration.

💡 Be part of Design communities, meetups, and workshops, there’s no better way to learn faster from the experts.

Set Goals

Setting personal and professional goals helps to stay focused on personal growth and development.

Using the OKRs goal setting framework for your personal goals.

Take on New Challenges

Taking on new challenges and responsibilities helps to continue learning and developing skills.
Being a great leader requires great communication and setting clear goals. Effective communication helps to build trust and respect among team members and stakeholders, leading to a more collaborative work environment. Clear goals help to align everyone towards a shared vision and create a sense of purpose.

To summarize, moving from a senior product designer to a lead product designer requires a change in attitude, aptitudes, and principles.
To thrive in this new position, it’s crucial to acquire the needed knowledge, expertise, and ethics, and remain committed to personal development. Excellent communication is vital for becoming an exceptional leader.
All the best!

If this article was helpful to you, don’t hesitate to reach out for any questions or feedback 🙂

If you want to dive deeper into the topic, here are some great articles from my “Design leadership” bucket list:

Feel free to schedule a session with me on ADP.List I’m thrilled to share my experience and support other designers to achieve their goals.

💡 Take a look at my WIP Product Designer Starter Kit to access my sources of inspiration, including leaders, podcasts, articles, and books that help me work and improve as a product designer.

Published by Haran Amorim

Tags: design, empathy, human-centred, leadership, product-design, sprint, ux

Imagine you arose a great product idea which has the best of intentions, which on your perspective could easily be implemented and help people’s lives become easier. However, that magnificent idea doesn’t really match your users’ needs as first thought.
Creating new products that we actually don’t need has been very often in the last years, I’d risk saying that it still is a very often circumstance in our capitalist life (Hello, freaking startups ideas).

In the book “The best interface is no interface”, the author Golden Krishna, brings us a couple of stupid ideas that the market creates for users, that actually are pretty nonsense products or solutions that actually turn our lives a bit more complex instead of help, just to reflect the idea of being an innovator company.
The author gives us an example of the bloody hell concept of having an App to simply unlock a car — My BMW remote app.

I wonder why the concept of having a stupid app that does bit more functions of unlocking your car (in 13 long steps by the way) could be better than a typical and classic way to unlocking a car just pressing a button.

Perhaps the idea was way more focused on the sense of having an innovator app than the actual real user needs.

“less is more” — a phrase from the Robert Browning poem “Andrea del Sarto” back in 1885. It reflects that your user needs can be actually as simple as you first thought. So how can we prove that?

Human-centered design (HCD) is a problem-solving approach by involving the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process, to ensure solutions are tailored and suit consumer need.

There are obviously some steps we UX designers should follow in order to identify the user's needs based on the HCD. In this article, I’ve compiled some of the fundamental principles of HCD.

1. Focus upon the people needs

Whatever is your design or product, have always in mind the people who will use or interact with your product. Keep in mind that your product may affect people’s lives and help them reach their goals.
In the brainstorming phase, where you imagine all the possible ways you could solve the consumer’s issues and need. — work with hypothesis until you have a realistic and human-centered solution.
Do lots of research, interviews, empathy maps, customer journey maps, and anything else that can help you to identify the main pain point.

Hint: JTBD framework may help at this stage.

When _____ , I want to _____ , so I can _____ .

This framework provides an excellent way to identify important user journeys and map them to potential solutions.

Image for post — Illustration by Sofy Dubinska

2. Finding the main problem

Not all problems worth solving. Dividing between Fundamental and Symptoms of a problem. Fundamental problems are the best way to find a solution, once you hit the problem by the root.
To identify the core of a problem should be an inalienable part of the design process.
Conducting research interviews may give you the main core problem among a relaxed chat, so please, lead a good research interview, listening and empathy are the keys to success.

3. Think about the problem as a system itself.

A system is composed of a considered amount of process and steps. Don’t focus on only a part of the user journey, think about the big picture — what you really want to achieve with your experience, what is the final result you care about and what problem you want to solve with your product, besides other smalls problems.
Have in mind that users should have good user experience at all touchpoints, both digital and physical.

4. Prototype your ideas and potential solutions

No matter how long you came up with an idea or solution, you should always test it with real people. Talking to real people will give you any potential hint and, will help you understand what part of your product requires attention or improvements.
Do tests with real users with real problems is crucial to identify a real user need. Talking to a close friend or any parent will only delay your research analysis, and it won’t be representative.

Conclusion:

In sum, the human-centered design brings light to people that have the problem and the underlying reason for it, rather than on the problem itself. This concept helps designers properly emphasize the real issue on the user’s face and come up with a solution that they are more likely to embrace.

By now you should understand why taking a human-centered approach is crucial for product success, be that digital or non-digital.
Having this mindset on each product will eventually help you to build long-lasting, innovative products, that solve the target audiences needs and pain points.

At last, always have in mind: You are not the user.

This article was first published on my Medium. To see more articles related to this topic, please check my Medium Page or reach me for a nice talk 🙂

Published by Haran Amorim in iOS, mobile

Tags: design, empathy, human-centred, product design, sprint, ux

The foundation of a Lead Product Designer