A Product Designer is a specialist who, in the most general sense, oversees the design process of a digital product (website, mobile application, E-Commerce platform, etc.).
They're present in the process of creating a digital product from the initial phase to the development and optimization phase.
The scope of competencies, experience, and responsibilities of a Product Designer is vast according to daily practices in UX agencies and job offers. Simply put, Product Designers need to be versatile.
Often their role in organizations is to be a link between the design team, UX/UI designers, developers, programmers, UX researchers, and business owners.
What role does a Product Designer have in digital product creation in a UX agency? What competencies and experience should they have?
Why should companies hire Product Designers? How does a Product Designer differ from a UX/UI Designer? What is this profession all about?
If you're curious about what Product Designer is, how they can be helpful, and why it's worth having them on the team, read our article.
We invite you to read on!
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What is a Product Designer?
A Product Designer is often called, or rather confused with, the following:
- Experience Designer (XD)
- Information Architect (IA)
- Interaction Experience Designer (IXD)
- Experience Architecture Designer (XAD)
- User Interface Designer (UI)
- User Experience Designer (UX).
A Product Designer is a person who needs to have more than a general knowledge of the above specializations. It's a profession that requires versatility.
However, Product Designers like to think about themselves primarily as problem-solving specialists. It's hard not to agree with that.
Indeed, the creation of a website (even an extremely simple landing page) or advanced mobile application is a set of problems that need to be solved.
As efficiently, cost-effectively (regarding finances and time), optimally, and successfully as possible.
The creation of a digital product consists of actions aimed at extracting from chaos a product that is as best, effective, and efficient as possible and realizes the goals of various stakeholders. From end users to business owners.
These issues are well reflected in the definition of Product Design and, indirectly, Product Designers, presented on the Interaction Design Foundation blog in the article "What is Product Design?."
According to it, digital product design is a process in which designers connect users' needs with business goals. Product Designers work on the optimization of users' experiences.
Product Design helps brands achieve business goals primarily by creating products to fulfill long-term business needs.
The profession of a Product Designer involves orchestrating business goals, limitations, and potential residing in technology with users' needs. For many Product Designers, orchestration is the most interesting part of their work.
As you can guess, broad competencies and experiences are essential to solving these diverse design and business problems related to usability and user experience.
From another perspective, a Product Designer is a person who manages the product design process in a team. They're a link between the development-design-research domain and a client.
Moreover, an important distinguisher of a Product Designer is that they're responsible for continuous product development and its improvement.
A Product Designer, a bit like Innovation Designer or Product Manager, is tied to a given product at every stage — also through implementing new solutions.
A Product Designer handles product creation in terms of functions, technology, and user experience.
A Product Designer needs to think simultaneously about the following:
- Users and digital product owners
- Money (budget, profits, costs)
- Competition (current and future)
- Present and future market
- Satisfaction of the user and its cost
- Necessary profit and equally necessary investment.
A Product Designer researches, tests, proposes new functions, and plans updates.
They continuously strive to improve the quality and adequacy of digital products to meet the changing needs of all stakeholders.
It can be said that a Product Designer is an umbrella term that tries to cover all diverse goals and needs.
A Product Designer, above all, should have a holistic approach to a digital product.
A Product Designer needs to look at an application from multiple angles through different filters, such as:
- Business filter
- Functional filter
- Market filter
- Aesthetic filter
- Usability filter
- Market filter
- Marketing and branding filter
- Research filter
- Strategy and competition filter
- Emotional filter
- Technological filter.
Generally speaking, and such perspective includes all the abovementioned filters, Product Designers must transform business goals into functional ones.
Thanks to this, they'll be able to offer a business value related to user experience.
Furthermore, they provide feedback, thanks to which business owners and users of a digital product can achieve goals in the most optimal way.
In summary, Product Designers co-create digital products that should be characterized by aesthetic, functional values, and utility and should be refined in terms of their competitiveness and business justification.
What exactly does a Product Designer do?
Until now, we've been discussing general descriptions indicating in a strongly non-specific way the nature of this profession and specialization.
Now, it's time to specify the description of a Digital Product Designer.
A Product Designer primarily deals with the following:
- Designing (they should have the knowledge and skills allowing them to, e.g., create mock-ups, prototypes, personas, and journey maps)
- Researching the needs of end users
- Testing usability
- Coordinating or mediating the work of individual teams — design (UX/UI), development, research, and business teams.
When talking about designing, we're thinking about the broad scope of work and competencies because a Product Designer should be able to design the following:
- Processes — occurring on the side of the user and owner
- Interactions of the users with an interface of a digital product
- Interfaces — both in terms of efficiency, usability, and desirability. We wrote about the problem of balancing these two issues in the article "Design Problem: Usability vs. Desirability."
Design work, including prototyping, modeling, and visualization (e.g., system processes), is one of the pillars of the work that the Product Designer deals with daily.
Research competencies are a vital component of the professional skills of Digital Product Designers.
Product Designers should be able to perform research on their own, especially diagnostic studies of the following:
- Users need
- Habits and experiences of users
- User goals
- Competencies, capabilities, and limitations (e.g., related to age).
Thus, the scope of their knowledge, competencies, and experiences should also include the knowledge and competencies which UX researchers have.
They should be broad enough to enable Product Designers to conduct the research independently or actively and skillfully support the team of UX researchers in the research process.
Product Designers are essential in teams because they (through research, among others):
- Ensure smoothness, consistency, and integrity of operations
- Provide common perspective
- Are a vital link that ties the digital product creation process in terms of time, organization, purpose, and communication.
Product Designers help:
- Determine key goals and means of achieving them
- Transform ideas, ideals, values, and needs into concrete functions, solutions, and processes
- Define functional requirements and find representation for them in the form of drafts, mock-ups, and prototypes
- Discover through research, exploratory research, and iterative testing
- Build an identity and digital brand personality — branding
- Reinforce the digital business.
A Product Designer should be active during the entire process of product creation (from the concept phase to deployment).
In addition, they should have a broad and equally profound knowledge of designing, researching, and developing websites, mobile applications, and software.
Simultaneously, Product Designers can't lose sight of business goals connected to users' goals creating a web of dependencies that condition each other.
In summary, a Product Designer should effectively integrate business goals with design decisions and those regarding product development.
Product Designer vs. UX Designer — key differences
What is the difference between a Product Designer and a UX Designer? Is it about implementing improvements, conducting tests with users, or design thinking?
When thinking about similarities and differences and crossing scopes of work of a Product Designer and UX Designer, it's worth considering a remark made by Anna Kaley.
Kaley is a user experience specialist in the most influential consulting and research company — Nielsen Norman Group.
According to Kaley, when roles related to experience design and usability of digital products overlap with roles connected to product management, the scope of responsibilities blurs.
As a result, it negatively impacts the following:
- Quality of a digital product
- Digital product development process
- The atmosphere within a team and between teams
- The comfort of work and cooperation
- Productivity
- Meeting deadlines.
From the above descriptions, you might get the impression that a Product Designer is something of an all-in-one specialist capable of relieving or replacing an array of other specialists, including the UX Designer with whom they share the most competencies.
Of course, that's not true.
The versatility of a Product Designer is necessary to achieve the main goal, which is to actively participate in the digital product development process.
Which in practice means that a Product Designer performs the work of a dozen people. It's not only undesirable but simply impossible.
A Product Designer should be a partner for all various specialists; hence, the need to have a wide range of competencies and skills.
So what is the difference between the responsibilities and competencies of a UX Designer and a Product Designer?
The answer, in a general sense, is obvious. The scope of duties, responsibilities, and competencies of a UX Designer is much narrower.
A Product Designer has a more holistic perspective, they're present at every stage of digital product development, and they're responsible for its concept, creation, development, and market position.
A UX Designer has narrower tasks — they're focused on user experiences and designing, which is meant to make it as satisfactory as possible and in line with needs, expectations, and experiences.
UX Designers are present in the product's life only to a certain point, and they return to it when optimization comes around.
They're not responsible for its development and competitiveness, and they don't approach its optimization strategically.
They don't focus, or at least not to a large extent, on connecting various needs.
Their primary goal is to find the best and new design solutions to ensure the best experiences for users.
Product Designers aim at continuous development, improvement, and finding new ways to fulfill needs, diagnose changes in them, and discover new ones.
They focus on active participation in the process of creating a concept and defining a Value Proposition.
They follow trends and market changes and look for the best answer to them in the form of new functions, solutions, services, processes, and aesthetics.
If you compare a UX Designer to a Product Designer, then the former, unlike the latter, is more:
- Focused on solving the current problem than thinking ahead
- Monodisciplinary
- Focused on narrowly understood problems.
At the same time, UX Designers are free from having to think about running a project, synchronizing work, and working out the optimal language of communication.
They're also less obliged to think in terms of the business about a digital product.
It results from daily activities — UX Designers have far fewer reasons, opportunities, and common tasks to perform with the teams responsible for the business part of the project.
Thus, they're much less aware of business nuances, market conditions, or economic necessities.
Product Designers also fulfill the role of leaders — they motivate, indicate goals and methods, and are also much more focused on organization and project management.
Product Designers have day-to-day contact with all teams working on the project and actively participate in the work of each team.
For example, the paths of UX Designers and developers cross much less frequently than the paths of Product Designers and developers.
In practice, this means that Product Designers more often, more profoundly, and actively take part in the following:
- Forming the concept of a product
- Defining a product in terms of functions and business
- Participating in key decision-making processes.
What competencies should a Product Designer have?
Product Designer is a multidisciplinary profession in which it's necessary to have equally broad and deep competencies from various fields.
Often, UX agencies expect candidates for this position to have very high hard skills, the knowledge of the following:
- Tools for creating prototypes (e.g., InVision, Figma, Sketch)
- Tools for project management (e.g., Jira, Clockify, ClickUp)
- Programming languages (Python)
- Methods, research techniques, and research tools (e.g., UserZoom, Usability Hub)
- Foreign languages
- Agile project management methods (Scrum).
However, the following soft skills are not less desirable:
- Communication competencies
- Ability to conduct workshops
- Problem-solving capabilities
- Creativity, flexibility, openness, curiosity, inquisitiveness
- Ability to think analytically and synthetically
- Empathy
- Ability to think strategically
- Aesthetic sense
- Task-oriented approach — focus on a goal, result.
In the collection of the most common responsibilities and duties of a Product Designer, you will find the following:
- Product management
- User, market, and competition research (Benchmarking)
- Product, prototype, mock-up testing
- Following market trends
- Indicating market strategies
- Designing wireframes
- Defining opportunities to increase market share, increase profits, increase the number of users
- Presenting ideas, ideals, and concepts to UX designers, developers, UX researchers, or to all crucial stakeholders.
What is a Product Designer? Summary
- What is a Product Designer? It's a multidisciplinary profession in which it's necessary to take a holistic perspective.
- Simply put, Product Designers need to be versatile.
- A Product Designer oversees the digital product design process, and they're present during its creation, from the initial stage to development and optimization.
- Digital product design is a process in which designers connect users' needs with business goals.
- Product Designers optimize users' experiences and simultaneously help brands achieve business goals, mainly through creating products focused on fulfilling long-term business needs.
- A Product Designer is a person who manages the product design process in a team. They're a link between the development-design-research domain and a client.
- A Product Designer researches, tests, proposes new functions, and plans updates — they continuously strive to improve the quality and adequacy of a digital product to the changing needs of all stakeholders.
- Product Designers ensure smoothness, consistency, and integrity of operations, provide a common perspective, and tie together the process of creating a digital product in terms of time, organization, purpose, and communication.
- A Product Designer needs to be a partner for various specialists. That's why they need to have broad competencies and skills.
- Compared to a UX Designer, a Product Designer has a more holistic perspective and is present at each stage of digital product development. They're responsible for its concept, creation, development, and market position.
- A UX Designer is focused on user experiences and designing, which is meant to make it as satisfactory as possible and in line with needs, expectations, and experiences.
- Product Designers aim at continuous development, improvement, and finding new ways to fulfill needs, diagnose changes in them, and discover new ones.
- Product Designers follow market trends and search for the best answer to them.
- Product Designers also fulfill the role of leaders — they motivate, indicate goals and methods, and are also much more focused on organization and project management.
