Product Strategy for Designers

Femke van Schoonhoven's design career started at a very small startup, her first look at what building products actually involves. She went on to Uber, working on driver experiences and Uber Eats, spent a year at the Canadian fintech Wealthsimple, and is now a design lead at Gusto. Alongside the day job she built a second track: a blog, then an email newsletter, then YouTube videos, then one-on-one mentoring, and most recently a course on product strategy for designers. Her approach to the side work isn't extra hours. Designers have a creative tank that a full-time job drains, so she put side projects wherever she had the most energy.

The course came from a pattern in her own growth. Junior designers spend nearly all their time on craft: pushing pixels, executing briefs, running the design process. As you move to mid and senior levels you get faster at the craft, and companies start expecting more influence on product and strategy, but most designers are never taught how. Communication is the core of it. Designers are closest to users, so they're best placed to bring the user's voice into product conversations that otherwise run on assumptions. They also need to tell the story behind a decision: why it matters, and how it affects the user and the business. Done clearly, that's what earns product leaders' trust.

Asked where design should report, she says design, and notes she has only ever reported into design herself. She also accepts that a ten-person company may not need a head of design yet, and sees that as an opening: in a smaller company, you may be the one who builds the design culture you want to see. Her advice for new designers is to keep creating and keep sharing, whether that's case studies, work in progress on Instagram or Dribbble, or designs posted for feedback in a Slack community. Getting out of your silo is how you learn from the rest of the industry.