5 Soft Skills Every Product Designer Needs

This article will emphasize the five skills that helped me become a successful product designer. 

There are a few other skills worth mentioning, such as communication skills, collaboration, decision making, critical thinking, and discipline. 

I decided to focus on the most critical soft skills that helped me enormously in my career. 

Empathy

User Empathy

Users come first, no matter what. Therefore, learning how to listen to our users, observe and be objective when going through activities that involve user feedback is the one skill that is a MUST for the job. 

Being empathetic with your users means putting yourself in their shoes and listening to their feedback with an open mind and compassion. A reminder that having user empathy doesn't mean implementing solutions the user might come with but genuinely listening to their thoughts process. I have to say that sometimes, users come up with great solutions. 

Team Empathy

To create functional and unique products, we need to listen to our team members because they are all experts in their domain, and design is part of a big machine that can only work if other things work. 

Empathy for your team members means understanding feedback from another person's perspective and reacting with compassion and understanding. Try to understand their point of view. 

For instance, if developers say that the design is not great, they might mean that it is not compatible with the stack and technology they are currently using. 

Stakeholder management

You will be surprised to hear that some great designs were created but never saw the light of day because stakeholders disapproved. 

A product designer must always keep the business and user in mind. 

Preparing to convince and sell an idea or design to the stakeholders (people who have a stake in the product you are designing) can take some practice but once learned, you will have a much easier time getting your products off the door. 

Communication

Communicate often, with the right people, at the right time.

In the ideation stage, you will want to involve other designers in brainstorming sessions but not the stakeholders. 

In the design stage, you will want to involve the developers to make sure the idea can be technically implemented and business analysts to ensure it satisfies business needs. Stakeholders will be looped in when the two best ideas are drafted. 

Communication leads to great collaboration and excellent products, happy stakeholders and users. 

Resilience

Being a product designer is not all unicorns. Ideas are often discarded, and designs do not see the light of day for various reasons. However, product owners are still creative people, and sometimes when ideas are rejected, a tiny bit of us gets disappointed. 

This is when you have to find your own way to stay inspired and motivated. Never take things personally.

Time Management

Although we are creative and makers, product designers have to find ways to manage their time.

It would help if you allocated time to designing, solving problems, user feedback, meetings, personal development, etc. 

The best strategy I found so far is to have a to-do list, break big projects into smaller tasks, track the time spent on each project or category and do a monthly analysis. 

Public speaking

Learning to talk to any audience is a skill that will come in handy when talking to your team, stakeholders, users and peers. 

There is no easy way to do it. You have to do it and practice over and over again. Eventually will get easier. 

I have been using Skillshare courses to take courses about time management, public speaking and other product design.