Product Designer Roles and Responsibility

These are some of the important roles and responsibilities of a Product Designer:

1. User Research

A Product Designer on daily basis has to work on consuming or researching user data. Product Designers use software’s like Hotjar etc. to understand the things like user demographics that would allow them to understand their user personas before they get into the product design strategy. Researching about the user helps product designers to understand who are they trying to communicate to and who are they trying to serve, therefore, it brings a lot of value in their work.

2. Creating User Personas

The role of Product Designers is also to create and understand user personas. In larger companies, product designers might already have user personas documents that are ready for them to learn and study but in smaller companies or in startups product designers would need to come up with the user persona and try to document them.

3. Creating User Journey Maps

Another responsibility of a Product Designer is creating and understanding user journey maps. User journey map is where product designers try to picture themselves as the user so they can picture the stages that a user goes through from the moment they find out about the product to the time they buy it or use it.

4. Developing Storyboards and wireframes

The next responsibility of a Product Designer is to develop Storyboards. Storyboards is a frame by frame composition of what your products going to look like from a user interface point of view. Storyboards includes what are the relationships between one interface to another and it gives us a blueprint of the product itself in a low fidelity wireframe version.

5. Designing and Building Prototypes

Product Designers on a daily basis also work on designing and building prototypes. Product Designer design and build prototypes to showcase their idea to get people and stakeholders and team members to understand their idea and the best way to do it is to demo a prototype.

6. Conducting User Interviews and Testing

Once the prototyping is done, oftentimes Product Designers would like to test it before going into a development production cycle and the best way to do that is really to test your product get some feedback. So Product Designers would run User Testing, User Interviews, A/B Testing etc. that would allow them to understand whether their design works or not.

7. Developing Design Systems

The role of Product Designers is also to develop design systems. Design Systems are required as the company or the brand grows and it becomes really important for product designers to have a library of reusable design components to make the workflow a lot more efficient. Design Systems helps designers to be consistent when they work with a team of other designers.

8. Collaborating with other teams

The final role or responsibility of Product Designers is to collaborate with engineers, with the marketing team and other designers to bring out the best in the product. Collaboration becomes a very important skill when working on a larger product because there will be a lot of input from different stakeholders and different perspectives making collaboration a very important part of the workflow.

Product Designer – With the growing importance of design everywhere, and with more and more companies working on strategies to develop products, and doing market research to solve users’ problems, Product design becomes a very crucial part of any product’s lifecycle.

Product design is a set of processes that collectively is about imagining a product and then bringing it into reality by designing it and iterating until the desired prototype is formed.

In this article, we will discuss What is a Product Designer, What is Product Design, Product Designer skills and what are the roles and responsibilities of a Product Designer.