Product/UX Design
How To Succeed As the Only Product/UX Designer in the Company
6 ideas to help empower your solo design team.
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Many of us start our design journey on a team of one; you may have joined a new startup or a company that’s taking the role of design more seriously. Your manager could be design savvy or maybe not at all. Their focus is on the engineering, product, or marketing side of the company, so you don’t have a lead with practiced design experience. Whatever the case, this leaves you with a heavy responsibility as the sole designer. You are, for better or worse, creating the design philosophy of the company and must engage in both the technical and strategic side of the role. It can be a lot. But it can also propel you forward in your design education and experience.
If you find yourself struggling, or unsure how to navigate this new role, you may find some of the ideas below helpful in making you more empowered and in control as a solo designer. I’ve listed 6 of these, in no particular order.
1. Pretend you’re on a big design team.
It’s so easy to let your digital workspace spiral into chaos. When you’re one person, you tend to organize in your head. You know where things live, how they work, and what they’re for; this type of organization only suffices for the short term. Relevancy of tasks and projects will get away from you and you’ll find yourself with a loose grip on your work.
Workflow automation
Creating a template or automating the starting point of your workflow can drastically increase consistency and reduce that start-of-project disorientation that typically appears. Just be careful not to overdo your automation, as it can hinder creativity rather than bolster it.
Documentation
Documentation is one thing you can never overdo. Whether it’s cataloguing your Figma components or elaborating your design thinking with a write-up, documentation is essential in reducing confusion. People don’t have the same context of your work as you do.
Time allocation
If you find you’re being pulled in different directions from your tasks or cross-departmental work, try allocating blocks of time that are set for certain types of tasks. It’s the same amount of time you’re spending as any other work day, but that restriction will let you focus on one thing rather than 10 things. You’re allowing yourself to forget the other 9 things because you know you’ve allocated time for them later.
2. Use external resources to maintain speed.
There is a certain frustration with being a solo designer. You want every element of your work to shine, but you just don’t have all the disciplines of design ready in your toolbox. You might obsess over the animation of your components, or become unhappy with the UI library you’ve created, so you spend more and more time revisiting these imperfect parts of your work. This in turn slows you down, and when you’re a designer of one, that’s a lot of your valuable time being eaten up.
We’re in a state of design maturity where the wheel doesn’t have to be reinvented. There’s access to so many resources that provide us with a helping hand in those disciplines we struggle with. For the majority of the time, our designs need to be good, not revolutionary. This may be counterintuitive when we think of the creativity that exists in this field, but at the end of the day, you are solving a problem. If something exists that solves that problem, then it’s a good idea to make use of it when you are short on internal resources.
3. Take time to re-evaluate.
It feels like you’re in the deep end, handling new responsibilities you never thought you’d have. Over time, being exposed to so many tasks outside your comfort zone will give you a different perspective on your goals as a designer, and it’s therefore important to take time to evaluate your career roadmap. It doesn’t have to be 10 years from now, but we sometimes lose sight of what’s ahead of us because we are looking down at today’s responsibilities.
You’ve been managing a few contractors and enjoy the process that goes along with that collaboration, maybe a branch towards management is what’s next for you.
You love the end-to-end process of seeing a project or feature go from ideation to deployment. You deeply appreciate the hands-on aspect of that work. Perhaps a future as a staff or lead designer is more fulfilling for you, rather than managing.
Or maybe you’ve been doing some front-end work to support the dev team and appreciate this bridge between design and engineering. So you’re thinking of a hybrid role as a UX engineer.
Knowing which way you lean provides a much-needed direction when it’s so easy to get disoriented.
4. Build a support system outside of work.
As the importance and understanding of product/UX design continue to grow, so do the discussions, meetups, and groups surrounding it. Find an outlet outside of work that allows you to connect with other designers to discuss your struggles, stories, and experiences. You might feel alone because you’re missing like-minded peers to spark those discussions.
If you prefer a more low-key approach to this then join a discord or slack group and lurk through the channels. This can open up new opportunities and ways of thinking that had been hidden from you before. It’s important to be part of a collective for any discipline so that you’re informed of the commonalities and differences you share.
5. Be aware of (if possible) the timeline for future hires.
This can be a little uncertain, but if your company has a clear roadmap for future hires, then it can allow you to prioritize your long-term tasks. If, for example, there will be a second product/UX hire soon, then you might prioritize an onboarding flow to help settle them into their new work environment, and you might spend extra time cleaning up and documenting existing work to reduce onboarding time.
Maybe a new graphic designer is the next hire, then you can start moving away from certain external resources and curate a list of assets that would benefit from having an in-house graphic designer (brand polishing, iconography, illustrations, etc.).
Knowledge of a hiring roadmap may help in adjusting your focus to the more manageable parts of your product’s lifecycle.
6. Prioritize what’s needed and what isn’t.
As an extension of the last point, you must learn to prioritize as a solo designer. I would often make the mistake of pushing for something unnecessary for the scope and size of the team because I wanted it “done right”.
I needed a fully functional component library, but I didn’t understand that the hard part was not creating one, it was maintaining it. If I added or adjusted UI, then I would have to allocate time for the component library updates, otherwise, it would get ahead of me and lose its purpose. A component library is only as good as its maintenance. I instead cobbled one up that worked for my purposes.
I had to research and test with our exact user group before moving forward with design decisions. But it can be difficult and time-consuming to gather participants and conduct meaningful interviews and review sessions, all while maintaining an interviewee incentive budget and putting your design work on hold before receiving definitive answers. I instead used secondary sources within the company. This could be the sales department or the support team. Folks that had direct conversations with our user group every day and understood their personas and pain points. It’s not perfect, but it’s still a reliable, fast, and efficient approach for a solo designer.
Even more ideas
We’ve now looked at some steps that can help improve the quality and confidence of your solo design team. There are still many more areas we can explore, especially in design communication with leadership and other departments.
Designing as a team of one can be revolutionary in building up your knowledge and experience of a wide variety of disciplines, both inside and outside the scope of design.
These beautiful illustrations were done by my very talented friend, Daniela Valdes.
