What is Product Design? Everything you need to know about it.

What is Product Design?

The product design process is how designers combine customer demands with commercial objectives to help businesses create consistently successful products. Product designers aim to enhance user experience in the solutions they build, ensuring products are durable and support long-term business goals and brand value.

The Role of a Product Designer

Since product design originated from industrial design, it has a longer history than UX design. Yet, the responsibilities and skillset of a modern product designer are still often misunderstood—even among designers themselves.

A product designer is much like a full-stack designer: a multidisciplinary ‘jack of all trades’ who works on UX, UI, some coding, project management, and, crucially, problem-solving. Product design management involves creating solutions to challenges that arise during development.

Key Responsibilities

  • Organize teams to facilitate solutions
  • Establish various test plans
  • Generate wireframes and conduct A/B testing
  • Support developers during product launch
  • Collaborate with marketing teams for brand alignment

Product designers are essentially the guardians of the product, ensuring it’s cost-effective, relevant, efficient, and satisfying for all stakeholders.

Essential Skills of a Product Designer

To thrive in product design management, these talents and experiences are helpful:

  • Education: Bachelor’s degree or certification in a relevant field (nice to have)
  • Research: Experience in research and collaboration with user researchers
  • Tools: Proficient in Sketch, Adobe XD, Figma, or other industry-standard tools
  • Experience: 3+ years in the field, especially in UX and UI design
  • Communication: Excellent visual and verbal communication skills
  • Design Thinking: Solid grasp of applying design thinking in projects
  • Portfolio: Experience designing for both desktop and mobile devices
  • Mindset: User-centered mentality
  • Design Systems: Experience contributing to a design system (a plus)
  • Wireframing & Prototyping: Essential abilities
  • Collaboration: Experience working with engineers and cross-functional teams
  • Complex Applications: Knowledge of challenging or advanced applications

With these skills, product designers can approach projects from multiple perspectives and drive success.

Product Design Management in Action

Product design management leads to development of products that are not only simple and enjoyable (or at least satisfactory) to use, but also optimized for consistent marketplace performance. Product designers help define:

  • Product objectives
  • Product roadmaps (high-level plans or 6–12-month forecasts)
  • Feature deployment and market positioning

Note: UX design is a subset of product design. While UX designers focus on the full lifecycle of purchasing and using a product (including branding), product designers also consider ongoing business strategies and long-term market impact.

They utilize domain expertise to forecast the effects of design decisions and ensure teams stay aligned with overarching business goals, particularly over the mid-to-long term. This includes optimizing benefits and avoiding the pitfalls and risks associated with execution.

Product designers frequently advise teams and stakeholders on:

  • ROI (return on investment)
  • Interface detail (e.g., component placement)
  • Product value and attractiveness (for competitiveness)

They also work closely with development and marketing to ensure ideas are practical and to play a generalist role (conducting UX research, building personas, and more).

Elements of the Product Design Process

Here are the typical stages of a robust product design process:

  1. Creating a vision for the product
  2. Product investigation
  3. User analysis
  4. Ideation
  5. Design
  6. Validation and testing
  7. Post-launch activities

Having this structured process helps teams maintain focus and stick to deadlines.

Why Consider a Career in Product Design?

1. Demand Is Increasing

Product design was ranked one of the most promising careers in the U.S. by LinkedIn in 2019. Job openings have grown by 86% year over year, making now a great time to jump in!

2. Room to Grow and Evolve

This multifaceted role offers chances to gain a broad array of skills, opening doors to careers in graphic design, business strategy, or even higher product design roles. There’s always something new to learn and new directions to pursue.

3. A Blend of Creativity and Analytics

Product design in tech combines art and science—spanning design, business, engineering, and research. Each day offers variety and challenges, ensuring you’ll never be bored.

4. Competitive Salary

Growth isn’t just limited to your skills—product design can be financially rewarding. Entry-level roles start around $30,000 per year, while experienced designers can earn up to $150,000 annually. According to LinkedIn, the median base pay is $121,500.