“What is the best skill for a product designer?”

The interviewer looked at me patiently. I was in a Zoom interview with the design hiring manager. Having read my fill of Medium UX articles and job descriptions, I felt conditioned to say empathy. She gave me a look and responded, “ “You know, there’s no right answer. I just want to gauge how you think.”

How I wish I could retake my answer.

The best skill to have as a product designer is not empathy. It’s not communication. It’s not flexibility. These are skills that I believe come with the job itself. 

The best skill for a product designer is product thinking

Product thinking is learning how to think in terms of a business. It’s asking the hard questions.

• Besides a nice interface, what makes people actually want to use our product?
• How does this product stand out compared to all the competitors?
• What is the true problem here and does this solve it?

Product thinking not only creates better cohesion with product managers and engineers, but it also validates and puts into context the value of great UX. The user experience of any tool should be seamless, acting as a funnel to the value the business provides. To give a better insight of product thinking, let's focus on an area which lacks it.

What’s an area which lacks product thinking? 

App redesigns. 

A Google search of “Facebook UI redesign” led me to the below.  While this is a great graphic design, as a product, I have no idea if business needs are being met.  If a business's needs are not being met, there’s really no use for it, save for personal side projects.

Questions already coming into mind:

• Where does this drive user engagement?
• Does this coincide with branding / marketing needs?
• What activity or persona is this trying to engage?

The greater one’s product thinking, the better we can defend our design decisions and have less work to do!  As product designers, we want happy customers AND happy businesses. 

It’s acknowledged that great products are rooted in thorough user research, iterative design, and empathy. Working with Bungee, my first B2B company, threw a wrench in this thinking.

1. It was harder to source our users because of byzantine corporate structure

1. Given the secretive nature of our product, finding industry personas willing to openly discuss posed to be difficult.

Some strategies and tactics I used to incorporate product feedback:

Guerrilla Research

A combination of cold Linkedin messaging and plain word of mouth. On Linkedin, we narrowed our end user to specific persona and industry titles and began cold-blasting tailored emails and inbox requests.

To [manager or analyst in Competitive Analytics],

We couldn’t help but notice your industry expertise in Z on LinkedIn. We’re an emerging startup based out of UC Berkeley and would appreciate your insights in the fields of X given your Y years of experience. Do you have time for a 15 minute phone call to ask for your advice?

Bungee Team

This turned out to be a valuable effort for both lead generation for sales and market research. While this method does result in interviews, I would not count highly on the results. The insights are more likely to be scattered given the diverse nature of job responsibilities even under the same job title. However, it still provides value to understand your product’s potential impact and to reveal blindspots and hidden opportunities.

In one campaign, we aimed to identify brand managers responsible for monitoring brand image, description, and pricing. Brand management proved to be a relatively broad title in itself and interviews revealed some brand managers to be responsible for the advertising and click through rate of brand pictures rather than the actual content integrity. This helped us understand how the role differed per organization and industry.

Look at the market and move

In B2C user research, there can exist a wealth of data to support direct user research findings, not so with B2B. Given time constraints and the need to iterate, be comfortable with ambiguity — to echo an adage for product managers. Supplement user assumptions with market research by subscribing to competitors’s newsletters, attending their webinars, and attending conferences.

Create your own feedback loop based on your product delivered rather than grasping for scattered feedback points across various platforms. Personally, this proved to be the biggest stumbling block from me. I was definitely a victim of ‘analysis paralysis’ and waiting to understand market feedback more.

Find your internal advocates

Given the nature of B2B products, it’s important to know how your product will champion the internal user to the decision maker and cross-functional teams. Identifying the proper role not only enables potential buy-in down the road, but also a wealth of current pain points and use cases. In this environment, user feedback, sales, and design should all work in conjunction to provide a better open and honest relationship and a developed product that answers needs.

In short, diversify your user research sources and be open minded where they come from. Market research comes from a variety of sources, so listen closely to persona’s that both fit your ‘ideal’ description and also those who don’t. Valuing their feedback only helps you further hone in on that golden product — market fit.