Essential Product Designer Skills for Career Success

Product design is more than just creating aesthetically pleasing visuals and user-friendly interfaces. It requires a combination of technical skills and soft skills to produce truly impactful and successful designs. While you need technical skills to bring ideas to life, what many new designers don't realize is that soft skills that can make or break a product designer's success.

To help you succeed in a competitive job market, Senior Product Designer at Nike & Adobe, Jesse Showalter, shares the most important skills for product designers to develop.

Here's what it takes to succeed as a product designer in 2023.

Essential Product Designer Skills

Jesse Showalter: A lot of people think that you need to go to college or design school, have a communications background, or maybe even know development or code. But none of those things are true.

The skills that make a good product designer have nothing to do with design or code — they have a lot more to do with things like empathy and curiosity:

• Are you interested? Are you exploratory?
• Do you empathize with other people's pain points?
• Do you want to find out what's going on underneath the hood?
• Are you a problem solver?
• Do you enjoy waking up and being creative?
• Do you enjoy thinking through problems like how to get somebody to sign up or complete a process, fill out a form, or buy an item or a product?
• How do you help users accomplish their goals in the easiest and most seamless way possible?

Develop your product design skills

Whether you're a new or experienced product designer, honing your craft is a lifelong journey. Develop your product design skills alongside Jesse Showalter in Dribbble's online Certified Product Design Course. Enjoy flexible learning, weekly mentorship, and hiring connections to land your first or next product design job!