Before the holidays this year, I was a speaker on a panel of design students interested in the tech world. I thought I’d post the questions and my answers below, in case they’re helpful to anyone else!
What does a day in your job look like?
- Problem solving
- Backlog admin
- Lots of writing and thinking
- Lots of meetings
What skills are most important to your role?
- Empathy and the ability to talk to anyone
- Problem solving
- Systems thinking
- Creative methods to reduce uncertainty
How would you define your design/UX philosophy?
- You shouldn’t notice good design
- Consistency is important
- Make things as simple and logical as you can
What education and experience is most important for students coming into the digital industry looking to aspire for a role like yours?
- Education for product management is still not well-defined
- I believe that any work experience can make you a good PM as long as you learn the skills that PMs need (see next question!)
- For me, working in publishing and WordPress gave me a very strong grounding in being consistent, using systems in design and in my day-to-day life
What are some skills that are valuable as a product manager and how could design knowledge/skills add to the position?
- Systems thinking You have to be able to see the full picture and understand how things relate to each other.
- Research Knowing how to research and learn from other people is paramount in product management. You don’t know what you don’t know but the people who use your products will tell you what you don’t know. That makes them very valuable
- Psychology At a very basic level, you have to understand why your users do what they do. Knowing why helps you uncover new features that you hadn’t ever though of
What advice would you give to your past self when you were first starting in the industry?
- Lean into the stuff you are resistant to
- Don’t worry too much about working in your field because you never know what field you’ll actually want to be in 5, 10 or 20 years from now
- Fight hard for yourself, especially with salary, but make sure you have the goods to back it up
- Make 2 year goals, anything more than that is daunting
- Learn and continually practice being a good listener
What are you learning outside your work?
- Parenting, through experience, reading and podcasts! I’d like to do a better parenting job than almost any other job I do.
What do you look for when hiring?
- Culture fit
- Enthusiasm
- Logical thinking
- Independence
- A willingness and openness to learn
What do you enjoy about UX work specifically (vs graphic design)?
- It’s an experience rather than something you only engage with on a two dimensional level
What does your creative process look like?
- Writing, so much writing!
- Making or finding time to be quiet so that my brain can work
How do you balance stakeholder needs with large design aspirations?
- Have a bigger plan so that you can chip away at the larger aspiration
- Know when it’s just time to focus on just getting it done for the design
Do you have any UX/Product Owner course recommendations or resources?
- Alberta Product Leadership Program
- This blog post has a bunch
How do you deal with difficult conversations?
- With curiosity, ask questions before giving your opinion or getting to angry
- Remember that most people are coming from a good place and you usually have the same goal
What is your experience with burnout?
- I experienced a classic burnout in 2014. To me it was an indicator that I needed to face some truths about my personality, change my job and learn how to take care of myself. I have a long post about this experience on my blog
- Now, I can feel it coming and it is an alert to myself that I need to take some time alone or doing something that fills me up. I try to never get close to an empty tank anymore by proactively making sure I’m taking care of myself in the boring ways everyone always talks about: exercise, sleep and engaging in stuff I love, just because!
Kate Moore Hermes 