Читать книгу EMPOWERED - Marty Cagan - Страница 48

Product designers have an especially difficult job. There are many design‐related skills, and while the product designer does not need to be an expert in all of them, she does need to have a considerably broad range of knowledge and skills:

 Service design

 Interaction design

 Visual design

 Industrial design (for physical devices)

 Prototyping

 User research

Most successful product designers are very strong in at least prototyping and interaction design, and they know enough about service design, visual design, and user research to leverage the relevant techniques and people where necessary.

As a design manager, your product designers often come from different backgrounds, so much of your coaching time will be spent helping the product designer address the gaps.

The other important responsibility to keep in mind for design managers is that they are the frontline for ensuring a holistic view of design. This means that, while there may be many product teams—each with a skilled product designer—the design managers need to ensure that the experience works as a whole, across teams.

Design managers ensure a holistic view by reviewing designs at the weekly one‐on‐ones and by holding design sessions with the broader group of product designers, especially to discuss difficult design problems.

One challenge when moving to empowered product teams is that most product managers and engineers coming from feature teams have never worked with a professional product designer, so they don't even know yet what they are missing. As a result, design leaders often need to raise the bar and educate product managers and tech leads about what strong product design is and how product designers contribute to successful products.