Beyond craft — essential collaboration skills for product designers

Excellent designers do quality work and elevate the team to reach a high level of performance

This is part 3 of assessing your product design skills. In the first two articles we introduced a framework to evaluate yourself against and we’ve broken down the craft skill into granular themes.

Designers collaborate on low-fidelity sketches to explore a variety of options quickly

Now we’ll get into the details of collaboration by assessing how you are:

• Working with others — bringing them along on the journey
• Showing your work — showing progress and documentation
• Getting work done — estimating your capacity

Design is a team sport. An excellent designer is powerless if they can’t communicate what they’ve done and if they can’t work well with others to execute on the design. Good designers are great at craft, great designers have mastered craft and have built great relationships with their teams.

1. Working with others

Great collaboration and communication skills are key throughout your journey as a designer. When you first start out, your area of influence within the product and team is usually small. Most likely you’ll be working on a smaller feature with oversight from a senior designer. As your skills and influence grows you’ll work on larger ecosystems and collaborate with stakeholders outside of design more frequently.

Good designers are great at craft, great designers have mastered craft and have built great relationships with their teams.

1. Feedback — are you proactive in seeking out feedback and helping others develop by giving them feedback effectively? How well are you able to critique others work and set a safe environment?
2. Influence — how quickly can you build your influence on a new team? Can you establish yourself well in an environment that might not be as design focused? Are you able to influence your peers, manage up and potentially change the course of executive decisions for the better?
3. Negotiation — how can you effectively push back on requirements or demands without coming off as confrontational?
4. Cross functional collaboration — how well do you work well with others? Do you build on ideas of others? Do you make them feel included? How have you elevated other designers? How have you improved how the team has worked in the past? Do you work well with other designers, engineers, data scientists, product managers, and executives?
5. Conflict — what’s your perception of conflict? Are you conflict averse? Do you try to hide or mitigate it? Do you use it as a force for growth? Do you see it as positive? How do you navigate conflict to maximize it’s positive attributes while minimizing the negative?

These skills are universal to getting work done in general and if you’ve worked on teams before be it in college or in other roles that are non-design related, you’ll have a solid foundation to build on.

2. Showing your work

Show your work early and often. Don’t shy away from revealing what’s behind your design curtain if your work is rough, unpolished and you may think it “ugly”. That’s totally fine. Better to learn you’re on the right track early then present a perfect solution to the wrong problem.

1. Frequency — how frequently do you show your work to others? Can you show something every day to your stakeholders and ask for input? Do you hide your work trying to make it perfect (but losing time in getting feedback along the way)?
2. Presentation — how well can you present and explain your work? Are you confident or nervous when speaking in front of a group? Do other designers understand your work? How about engineers, product managers, and executive stakeholders?

Wanna learn more?

You can continue reading an updated and refreshed version of this article on Holloway — Collaboration Skills for Product Designers.

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