Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series.
We’ve heard from Oded and Colin who had some product experience from the context of account management type roles. We’ve heard from Zaz who switched to product from engineering. Today, we are going to talk with Laura Klein who made the switch from interaction design and user research to product.
Laura is currently the Director of Product and UX at One Jackson. She also blogs at Users Know. Her path to product mirrors mine pretty closely and of all the people we’ve talked to, her switch was probably the most natural. A good interaction designer or user researcher is going to ask a lot of the same questions and have very similar goals as a good product person. Let’s hear from Laura.
What were you doing before you took your product role?
Laura: I’ve been an interaction designer and user researcher for a long time. For the last couple of years, I was working as a UX designer and consultant for early stage startups. I did research and design for small, new companies, but I also tried to help them learn to do those things for themselves, so they could have great UX without having to hire a full time designer or an expensive contractor.
Why did you make the move into product?
Laura: It seemed like the natural next step for me.
As an interaction designer, I spent a huge amount of time thinking about product questions. What sort of person is using my product? What are they trying to accomplish? What features do they need to make that possible? What can we do to make their lives easier?
Those are all questions that product owners should be asking, and I was already asking them.
Also when I joined One Jackson, it was a very small team. We’re still a very small team! There just weren’t enough engineers to justify splitting the design and product into two full time jobs. So, I ended up doing both design and product. It’s been great.
How is your new role different from your past roles?
The biggest difference is that there’s more follow through, for lack of a better word. I’m not only making most of the design decisions, I’m also prioritizing them and making sure that they get built.
In a way, I love that. Since I’m setting the priorities, it’s much easier for me to design just what’s needed for the next couple of sprints. I almost never design anything that ends up not being implemented, because I’m designing just in front of what the engineers are building. It’s very Lean UX. It’s also occasionally terrifying when I realize that they’re catching up to me.
What do you wish you knew about product before you took the role?
I wish I’d known that it would be such an obvious fit, so I could have done it sooner! The few things I found frustrating about being a designer – having to convince people to prioritize good user experience, not always getting to see my designs implemented – are pretty much fixed by moving into product.
Of course, I’m in a great position where I get to be both designer and product owner. We’ll see how I feel if I have to give up some of the interaction design. I’d love to know if I’ll get to keep designing, even when I have a bigger team!
Teresa’s concluding thoughts: There’s a big emphasis on user experience and design right now. But for those of us who have worked as designers on products that go nowhere, it doesn’t take long to start asking some of the same questions that Laura asked. Are we building what users really want?
In my view, product and design, whether literally the same team or not, should be working together. While we may each have our specialties, both product and design should represent the needs of the user and ensure that the product meets those needs. At smaller companies, you’ll often find generalists like Laura who can seamlessly cross these boundaries. That’s a good thing. We should spend less time drawing boundaries between our disciplines and more time working together on great products.
This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series.
