I was lucky enough to join Whispir (an Australian-based tech company) as an associate product designer not long after I completed my study of UX design at General Assembly. It is my first job in the field.

To my surprise, I got the confirmation from my manager after just three months of working and was promoted to mid-level product designer straight after my probation. So I wanted to share my experiences in the hope that others would find them helpful.

1. Built up my confidence level through every task

During my first 3 months at Whispir, I kept finding myself unsure about my judgement. Whenever I was trying to articulate a thought process, explain a research finding, or even decide on a task for the usability test. I didn’t trust my judgement deep in my heart.

As a beginner, I kept telling everyone that this is my first job, which gave me an excuse that it was okay to be unconfident, and it was okay to rely on my manager to make any decision for me.

I can’t remember what triggered the change, but as I progress, instead of waiting for my manager to answer my doubt during weekly 1:1, I did as much research as I can to learn from the best practice. During the 1:1 with my manager, I worked hard to demonstrate the WIP (Work in Progress) and project outcome backed by proper explanation. Slowly I was able to articulate with confidence over time, which I believe is an important trait to have as a product designer.

2. Proactive learning and continuously up-skill

Keep learning is always a good attitude to have no matter what industry you are in. As a product designer, it’s important to build up domain knowledge and learn about the business. However, this takes time.

One skill I realised that I can quickly master is the Figma skill. It’s a must-have for product designers in today’s digital industry. As technology keeps involving, the ability to follow the latest update enables us to work more efficiently.

Recently, Figma introduced component properties as one of the major features. I did not just learn about this new feature but proactively initiated the task of updating most of our existing components and upskilled my team members with demonstration.

3. Find the purpose of every task from both business and design points of view

We often hear that the difference between a junior and senior designer is that a junior designer is expected to complete the given task, whereas the senior designer will proactively try to find the root problem to solve. (Also refer to Kriss Patel’s article about 12 mistakes juniors designer need to avoid for a better career in UX.)

I have to admit that there is nothing wrong with junior meeting expectations, especially when you do not understand the business/industry enough or have not yet developed a solid skill set. However, if you are a junior and only think about fulfilling the expectation, it’s hard to grow yourself.

When I was still a junior product designer, I was lucky to be involved in the discussion of how to implement the components from the Design
System in Figma into code. One of the proposed solutions from a stakeholder was to use third-party software to define the theme and create the JSON output that can be applied to the front-end framework.

I wasn’t convinced by the solution, as it only helped eliminate the error from the development side. Ultimately what we are trying to solve with the Design System is not only to create consistency of the UI elements but also how to improve the whole design and development process, and to be able to maintain UI elements between Figma and the front-end framework.

Once I was clear about and understood the root problem, I was able to propose an alternative solution using Design Token (thanksLukas Oppermann for all your great articles), which has passed the POC (prove of concept) stage and I’m leading the implementation now.

Thanks for reading and I hope you find this article helpful ~