The Secret Trait of All Successful Product Designers

The secret is self-awareness. (and it’s also helpful if you’re not a product designer)

I’ve managed and mentored hundreds of designers in design firms, startups, large companies, and most recently at Facebook. There are hard skills that successful product designers have—product thinking, craft/visual design, interaction design, plus the equally-important soft skills around intentionality, communication, and collaboration. Yet, across the board, every successful designer has self-awareness. And when young, talented designers lack self-awareness, I see their careers stagnate over time. 

Self-awareness is a conscious knowledge of one’s own character, feelings, motives, and desires.

Let’s break it down into actionable parts. 

1. What You Want

Do you know what you want and why it really matters to you? When you’re in school, there are easy externalities to want— good grades, loyal friends, social status, to get into a good college. As we start to adult, we may get trapped into wanting the conventional path that we see modeled around us— a corporate job, a promotion, a partner, a house, kids, that dream vacation.

What do you really want as a product designer? And how will you feel once you’ve gotten that thing? Will there be a moment of celebration and enjoyment, or is it simply another checkbox to be ticked off? I’ve commonly heard these work desires from designers: 

  • Master a skill (e.g. prototyping, writing)

  • Become a mentor/ team lead / manager

  • Be externally recognized for my contributions (e.g. bonus, raise, promotion)

  • Go back to school (e.g. MBA or another field entirely)

  • Start a side-hustle or my own business

Some of are bigger and some are smaller. Think about it in terms of corresponding to time. What do you want in 3–6 months? What do you want in a year? 5 years? 10 years? The most important thing is to understand why you want it. That individual knowledge, and being able to make the day-to-day nitty gritty of the dream tangible will start to give you self-awareness. The reason YOU want something is completely different from someone else’s reason. 

2. Self Assessment

If you work at a corporation, figure out if there is a rating system of required skills at each performance level. If not, take a look at industry examples. (e.g. component skills for product designers, 12 competencies of UX design, product design competency matrix) 

  • How would you assess yourself on each skill? Are there any differences between your self-assessment and how your manager or peers would assess you?

  • Strengths. What do you do particularly well? What activities get you into a flow state? If you had to pick one thing, what is your design superpower? What do others come to you for advice on?

  • Growth areas. What are you working on? What do you continually get feedback about? What don’t you like about your design skills? What is hard for you to do?

The most successful designers keep working on their strengths and growing what they’re good at. Everyone has continual and familiar growth areas— perhaps they’re terrible at organization, can be prickly communicators, or hate sharing their accomplishments. Often these growth areas are a shadow side of a superpower. Each of these can be mitigated to reach a minimum level needed to match the job expectations. Self-awareness means amplifying what you’re good at and getting to good-enough for the things you don’t enjoy. 

3. Feedback is a Gift

We can identify our dreams and self-assess all we want, yet we don’t exist in a solo hermit world. As we work with others, there is continual feedback, whether part of a formal review, or informally as we share work and collaborate with a team. As a creator, feedback is excruciating. We’ve spent a lot of time making a thing. We’re proud of our thing and hope that others will like it too. And perhaps it’s even worst when the feedback isn’t about something we made, but quite personally about us. 

Consider that feedback is a gift. Someone else has spent the effort to share the gift. The only polite response to a gift is “thank you.” Afterwards, you can consider how you feel about it and what action you choose to take. 

  • The gift might be something you’ve always wanted. You will happily use it in your daily life.

  • The gift might be unexpected. Something you’ve never thought was needed. You might need to sit with it for a while and see if you want to try it on, or use it in some fashion.

  • The gift might be terrible. You’re definitely going to return it, re-gift it, or donate it to charity. You never want to think about it again.

Taking action on the feedback is your choice. Even if it’s feedback from your manager, you still have choice on how you want to creatively incorporate the feedback into your day-to-day work. 

Finally, you may be in a culture where giving feedback is prolific and colleagues feel that feedback is welcome in this open & trusting atmosphere. However, if you’re not, consider actively asking for feedback from the people you work with frequently, and from people who you may have more conflict with. Don’t forget to say “thank you!”

4. Impact on Others

You’re pretty self-aware. You know what you want. You have a good sense of where you stand. You try to respond to feedback. Yet the master level of self-awareness is being continually aware of your impact on others. 

  • Casual interactions. How do you show up each day when you interact with others? You may be light and chatty. You may be busy & distracted re-hashing that fight with your mom. When you pass someone in the hall with a casual catch-up, what’s your impact on them?

  • Meetings. How are you in a more formal situation? What if the vibe changes through the course of a meeting? How do you present? How do you ask or answer questions? How do you react to feedback? What shows on your face & body language? Are you defensive? If you tend to have RBF like I do, then it’s probably good to let new colleagues know that you’re not actually mad at them.

  • Over time. As you work with colleagues over months and years, you build trust and accumulate debt based on each interaction. What is the impact of how you show up and interact with people over time? What impact do you want to have over time? How might you intentionally choose to change behavior when someone has a pre-existing notion of you?

Learnings & Take-away

How self-aware do you think you are across the 4 dimensions? What’s one thing that you will do differently going forward? 

Do you have any feedback for this article? Please comment or get in touch. 



Tutti Taygerly