Tips for if I was on my first year as a product designer?

Attend Meet-ups- Engage in the community

Be curious and explore what others are doing in design. Look at their work, the tools they use, their thought processes, and their design processes. You can read blogs, watch YouTube videos, and attend local design meetups to learn more.

Surrounding yourself with like-minded individuals in a community can help you grow, flourish, and discover new things. This type of support can be especially helpful in the early stages of your career as a designer and even later on.

As a remote worker, you may attend virtual meetups, but meeting up in person creates a different sense of community. We have many people to thank in the design community who have paved the way for us, so let's give back to the community and help others whenever possible.

Build Up Storytelling and Rationale Skills Early

Learn to build up your product thinking and rationale skills, get other people to crit your design work, you need to be able to back up your design decisions and explain why you placed a certain component on the screen, why you chose a certain colour, have a understanding of why you chose certain interactions and how they work.

Being able to critique an app and think as a designer why does Spotify have a giant big green play button. This will help your flourish and grow as a designer a lot quicker, there’s going to be a lot of conversations you have to have with your XFN throughout your career on product decisions, getting good at this early will help a lot.

Get familiar with tooling

I would make sure to ground and immerse myself in tooling. Getting proficient in Figma and understanding the basics of design systems and components is important. As you become more senior, you should focus more on leading features, presenting ideas to leadership, and being able to mock things up swiftly without worrying about how to concept it up in Figma.

With a strong tooling background, you can present your work in a more compelling manner and focus on the core, meaty work.

If you’re doing Bootcamps and UX Courses 

Design bootcamps can be a great place to start learning about design. However, the real learning begins when you work on a real product and project. Applying what you learned to a real project is essential. Every project is unique, and working on them can help you understand how to apply your design skills, deal with different constraints, manage stakeholders, and how teams operate. This experience is an excellent way to build confidence.

Designing with real users, on a real product team, helps you develop both soft and hard skills. Try to find a bootcamp that can support you in this, as well as intern positions or volunteer opportunities. Anything that can give you exposure to real-world design experience as early as possible is valuable.

The importance of having a mentor 

When it comes to improving as a designer and building self-confidence, mentorship made all the difference for me.

Having a mentor outside of my company was crucial. When I applied for roles at Meta, showing my work to designers who work there and receiving positive feedback from senior designers was a game-changer.

This feedback wasn't just my design manager being nice to me at Ford or a friend hyping me up. It came from someone who had already achieved the milestone I was working towards, someone who could be candid and honest with me. This completely changed my self-confidence and belief in myself as a designer.

It takes a village to supercharge someone's career to help them really flourish and grow.

Mentors identify gaps in areas for improvement based on their own experiences, including unconscious gaps you may not have considered. They can supercharge your development by pointing out these gaps, allowing you to address them. You can have different mentors to help you improve on various skills.

For example, I received feedback from design interviews and brought it to my mentors, who helped me improve my interaction design skills, portfolio presentation, and whiteboard challenge techniques.

Mentors might enjoy helping you out for free because they love teaching and helping others. Seeing others grow and flourish is a wholesome feeling. You have to put effort and energy into organizing conversations and establishing what you want to get out of it.

A great platform people use is ADPList to find some great mentors.