Never Design Alone
If you're like me, you might relish the solitude of spending hours pushing pixels around in Figma. You yearn for that magical flow state, where the world fades away, leaving only you and the problem you're solving.
It took me some time to come to terms with a very important fact: product design isn’t a solitary activity.
Anyone aspiring to become a top-tier designer should be working to (1) minimize the amount of time they spend pushing pixels alone and (2) maximize the amount of time they spend collaborating productively.
Let me explain why.
You Don’t Have A Choice
As a product designer, working alone isn’t an option. You need to collaborate daily with your product manager and engineers. Regular feedback from fellow designers is crucial, and product leadership should always be in the loop about your team’s progress.
Research and support should be involved at the outset of a project to help you get a better read on the customer’s perspective and the problems they are facing.
Content, marketing, sales and other teams all have a stake in what you are working on and how it’s going to eventually find its way into users hands.
The bottom line is that you have no choice but to embrace collaboration and let it supercharge your work.
More Reasons Why Should Designers Be Collaborating?
You’re out of time
As your design career progresses, you’ll find your “heads down” time diminishing. Increased responsibilities and a packed calendar mean you need faster ways to reach workable design solutions.
Collaboration helps generate multiple solutions simultaneously and quickly assess their viability and feasibility.
You’ll find it easier to get unstuck
We all sometimes fall prey to getting “stuck” on a particular project. We encounter that sense of resistance and want to throw up our hands and give up when the problem is too complicated or our heart just isn’t in it.
Collaboration can help with this because it immediately brings in new perspective that breath life into the problem space and also fills the air with a renewed sense of ownership.
Collaboration is a core competency for designers
Having the ability to quickly guide a small group of people through understanding and solving problems is a skill that every designer must possess in order to succeed and progress in their career. Confidence comes with practice, so designers should take advantage of every opportunity to lead a group of people through solving a problem together.
How Collaboration Can Help You Overcome Overwhelming Complexity
Some projects are so complex that they shake your confidence.
If you feel you lack information or are overwhelmed by the complexity, it’s time to involve others.
Invite a few experts to hop on a call or into a room to help.
The collaboration format can vary, but be clear about your goals and choose activities that will help move things forward. Co-creating a user flow on a whiteboard or in FigJam is a great way to visualize complex issues and maintain focus. If carefully planning an activity isn’t possible, simply ask experts questions and visualize your notes on a whiteboard or in FigJam.
Remember to just be curious, ask good questions, and show appreciation for your collaborators' time.
How Collaboration Can Help Motivate You
There are times during a project where things start to slow down. For me, it’s that last 20% of a project when most of the work is done and I’m starting to dream of the next big challenge instead of buttoning up my current project.
Sometimes momentum slows down for no discernible reason at all, or perhaps because of things going on in our personal lives.
Whatever the cause may be there’s an easy solution to this problem: bring others into the design process.
Sharing your work in a peer review or inviting others to help you on some piece of a project will immediately change your relationship to the work.
The very moment I get the sense that I’m slowing down or getting stuck, I find an opportunity to share it with someone, anyone. This immediately creates new conversations and ideas to play with and breathes life into the work.
We are our habits.
Forming a habit around collaboration-first design is something that will supercharge your work as a product designer and make you stand out amongst your peers.