Tools and tips for being a self-organized product designer
A product designer is a professional that oversees the design process from end to end. The career requires good organizational skills within our design process.
I have worked for four years as a Product Designer in different B2B and B2C projects, with multiple team members within Kanban or Scrum frameworks, working toward distinct goals. All those changes demand us to be flexible and very aware of our organizational skills in our daily life.
In this publication, I would like to give you some personal advice on tools and tips to be a self-organized designer within different working environments.
1. Be flexible and communicate with the team.
You are a team player, and just like yourself, each team member has their best way of performing their job. Some developers prefer that you explain your designs through a meeting when doing the handoff. Some will go for a thorough documentation of its features. Some product managers will want to be part of your user testing, and some will focus only on your results.
All of that depends on how your team works, and you can only know that by having good communication with them by asking how the process works better for them.
That does not mean that you have to run over your process, but be flexible and communicate with your team to find a common way that works for everybody.
Remember that finding the best process for the team takes time and lots of feedback. Each feedback session and a Retrospective meeting will refine your design process.
2. Transparently document your process to the team.
Being transparent about my design process is something that helps me to force myself to be more organized. I like having a shared link so that the team can access my most updated project files. For example, they can find, just in one single Figma Jam file, the last updated research results, links to relevant Hotjar recordings, and other essential documents of the design process. That can be very helpful, but if the information is not organized or updated, it will not work.
In my personal experience, creating this updated file has helped me organize my thought throughout the process and saved me some meeting time that used to clarify information that the team didn’t have access to.
3. Chose a platform to document your process
For the design documentation, we need to organize studies, forms, pictures, sometimes videos, links, etc. That can become a whole mess when you do that incorrectly. Many platforms can help you document your design process.
- Notion
Notion is a free platform where you can create various templates to organize your process. I use it a lot to create to-do lists, reading lists, save links, doing some takeaways. I had colleagues that also used Notion for their heuristics and accessibility audits.
- Figma jam
There is no doubt that Figma is incredibly useful in our daily life as designers. Besides having a friendly interface, Figma jam has a blank board where you can create your template to organize your files.
I have a Figma Jam file with all my professional files updated where I can see my Resumé, portfolio links, Cover letter templates, etc. And as I quoted before, you can do the same with your team.
- Miro
As Figma jam, Miro has templates that can help you create templates, such as customer journey maps, user flows, wireframes libraries, or creating a board from scratch. You can also use it for meetings and team interactions as Retrospective meetings. I used Miro to organize introductory Design content for friends that wanted to start their design careers.
- Dropbox
I like to write and organize analysis and study results documents using Dropbox. The platform works as a mix of Google Drive with Medium, where you can write down multiple files and coordinate them inside folders.
- Medium
You have probably seen companies that created Medium accounts to share their knowledge with the public. That is very interesting and contributes a lot to the design community. But did you know that Medium can be a private platform too? I like using Medium personally and with the team. You can do your study takeaways here and save them without sharing them publicly. You can also create a company account, and each one of your design team members can share their knowledge and contribute to the team on one platform. If the texts were not published, then you can find them on your Storie as a draft. It is pretty nice to have that all centralized as one team brain.
Bonus tip: Daily meetings and Daily slack track
I know a lot of teams use daily meetings as a way of keeping track of each other’s activities and blockers. But I have worked with teams where the daily meetings weren’t very efficient, so they became three times a week meetings or even less.
We liked using Slack to keep track of the team’s activities and be transparent with our daily tasks. Whenever we didn’t have meetings, we would communicate our activities and blockers by typing them on our Slack channel. That was a collaborative job, so all team members had to participate.
How you organize your work by yourself and with your team, remember that tools are here to help you and not to limit it. Each person has their way of self-organize. Those are my advice, but if you have more tips or tools you like and use, please feel free to comment and share them with me. I would love to know.
