Characteristics of a Great Designer

Be Intentionally Curious

Albert Einstein said, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” Experts believe curiosity is something all people are born with. Curiosity got us the wheel. Curiosity got us to Mars. Curiosity gave us the Internet. But if curiosity is innate, how are great product designers different from anyone else? Product designers are curious with a purpose. They have an insatiable hunger for new information and experience. They are intentionally curious.

Intentionally curious people are humble enough to recognize they don’t know it all. When you were five years old, you were full of questions and you didn’t care that you didn’t know everything. How could you? Great product designers never lost that. How could you know everything even now? Humility creates a hunger that can only be fed by answers.

Intentionally curious people look at the world (and their place in it) and see big questions: How do things work together? How do these pieces connect? How can I influence things? How can I improve things? You’ll need to develop this intentional curiosity as you become the product designer of you.

Think About the Whole

Building on their intentional curiosity, great product designers not only ask questions, but they also act differently on the answers. They’re thinking about the big picture; the whole as a system. Academics call this big-picture thoughtfulness systems thinking. Systems thinking is a pretty simple concept that’s really hard to turn into reality. Systems thinking is framed around cause and effect. For human beings, cause and effect is about as rudimentary as it comes. “If I do this, then that happens.” It’s so basic that we rarely think about, but it’s part of every decision we make.

Because they think about the whole system, successful product designers recognize the first challenge is not problem solving, rather, it’s problem identification. Once they figured out the root problem, they can then focus on solving it. The result is they do things that may not have an immediate effect today but will have a big impact tomorrow or a year from now. 

Be Empathetic 

Being a great product designer is about understanding and anticipating the wants and needs of your customers. Product designers want to walk in their customers’ shoes to feel what they feel. If you are the product designer of a new tent for backcountry camping, you’ll spend many nights sleeping in the cold, heat, rain, and snow, building empathy for your customer. As the product designer of you, empathy allows you to appreciate the perspectives of others, including employers, friends, family, and your professional network. Once you understand where others are coming from, you’ll have insight into what you can do to create value for them. This is emotional intelligence. 

Get Feedback Early (And Often)

It can be very expensive to build the final version of a product, and very risky, if you’re not totally sure what it should look like, what it should do, and which features will make it a success. That’s why most product designers start by building low-cost prototypes of their product, and then taking the prototypes to their customers to get immediate feedback. You can heed this advice by putting yourself out there before you are perfect. Get yourself in front of your potential customer, ask for feedback and you’ll be a lot closer to understanding what perfect is. 

As a product designer, it’s critical you get early and regular feedback on the path you’re taking from your potential customers (e.g., your future employers). For that feedback to be worth anything, you’ll have to be a great listener when you hear the good, but especially when you hear the bad and the ugly. This is sometimes really hard because it’s often really personal feedback. Guess what? It’s not as hard as spending four years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars studying something you’re pretending both you and the world around you value. Listen early and often and act on what you hear. 

Rely on Evidence, Not Simply Intuition

Great product designers know when to slow down and step back, challenge their assumptions, gather evidence, and make decisions that seem contrary to their intuition. 

Knowing how your intuition works can help you be in control of it and not the other way around. To process all the information around us 24/7, our brain assigns decisions to two tracks—a fast track and a slow track. Our intuition is this fast-track thinking. Our intuition skips a lot of the hard thinking and automatically jumps to a conclusion. It’s less about mulling things over and more about reacting to the world around us. It’s great for when our ancestors were being chased by predators, but it’s not always as reliable when it comes to decision-making at work or at school. Intuition is framed by what we’ve done before and allows us to do it all again without being bogged down by hard thinking. Hard thinking is what it sounds like: slow, but worth it.

Our intuition doesn’t slow down to reflect on our biases. We all have biases because none of us have tried 99 per cent of the jobs in the world; taken 99 per cent of a university’s courses; or travelled to 99 per cent of the countries in the world—let alone walked in the shoes of the people that live there. To avoid the trap of bias, you’ll need to reflect and test your assumptions with real evidence. Real evidence challenges your bias and challenges your intuition.

Be Resilient

Great product designers are natural explorers, and like explorers centuries ago who were driven to find a new path to Asia, they’re undeterred by tremendous risks. While those explorers didn’t always find what they were looking for, their perseverance and resilience changed the history of the world. Product designers think big and don’t get frustrated by the unexpected—they embrace it. This resiliency recognizes that every experience, good or bad, offers a bigger learning opportunity. Product designers aren’t overwhelmed by failure; instead, they find the silver lining and build from it. 

Be Accountable

A product designer cannot blame engineering, manufacturing, or sales if something goes off the rails. A product’s success or failure sits singularly on the product designer. At many times in our careers as product designers, there will be no question that someone else screwed up. It may have been an engineering flaw, maybe manufacturing missed something in the production process or customer service didn’t train their staff. However, product designers know they have no one to blame but themselves, because the buck stops with them. They approved the engineering design, the manufacturing process, and the training plan. Accountability means that the product designers have no one to blame but themselves.

In the life that got you to where you are today, have you ever blamed others for your shortcomings? It’s not your fault you did poorly on that project; your team let you down. It’s not your fault you were late for work; the bus schedule was wrong. This is the opposite of being accountable. If you’re going to be your own product designer, the first step is to take a hard look in the mirror and become accountable for the current and future you.