👋 Hey, it’s Filippos! Welcome to this issue of the Designary newsletter. If you are new here, I write about product design, including frameworks, career advice and advanced technical tips.

If you are new to product design, I also recommend checking out my product design masterclass, a self-paced, end-to-end product design course for beginners and mid-level designers.

Working with stakeholders is hard.

It’s also something that no one prepares you for.

Most bootcamps and courses are great at teaching you the design process, but nothing can really prepare you for the variety and challenging nature of working with different people from different backgrounds, all with different expectations of how design can help them achieve what they want.

Good stakeholder relationships can greatly influence the impact of your work, and also keep you sane.

Bad stakeholder relationships often make your daily work a struggle.

In this piece, we’ll explore the different types of stakeholders and how you can build healthy, effective relationships that enable you to do your best work.

1. What is a stakeholder?

Simply speaking, a stakeholder is anyone that has vested interest in what you are working on, and has some influence in decision making.

In product design, we often think of the primary stakeholders as the people that have some influence on what gets to see the light of day, and how it is designed and implemented.

Common stakeholders are:

• Product leadership (Director, VP): They are influencing the roadmap and may be involved directly in initiatives depending on how strategic/impactful they are for the business.

• Commercial/revenue leads: They influence company objectives and projections, and are very invested in ensuring that the product roadmap is set up to hit these objectives effectively.

• Founders & Senior leadership: Depending on the size of organization, senior leadership may or may not be involved in key product decisions.

• Experts: In specialized industries, domain experts may be needed to consult on niche topics.

• Legal: They influence what you can and can’t say, promise or do, which is heavily dependent on the industry you are in.

• Marketing: They control how your audience first gets in touch with your product, and are interested in how you acquire new customers but also how you market new products and features to them.

• Customer support / success: They have a lot of input on the problems your customers experience.

In some teams, the Product Manager and Engineering Lead might also be considered stakeholders, albeit in most cases they will (and should) be working with you on a day-to-day basis as part of a squad or pod. So for the sake of simplicity, I’m not including them in the list of common stakeholders.

2. Understand different types of stakeholders

Not every stakeholder is the same, and their level of involvement needs to change accordingly.

• Decision makers: These are the people that need to approve an initiative or solution and have very strong interest in what is being built. This is usually a combination of product & commercial leads.

• Consulted: These are people that you need to consult before making a decision. Think legal, risk, brand and so on. They won’t be invested in their day to day, but may have a lot of power in influencing a decision, and usually have the ability to completely block an initiative or a specific solution.

• Informed: That’s a group of people that need visibility on what you are working on, whether that’s temporary as part of an initiative, or a wider group that always needs to be informed. They won’t influence your work as much, but your work might influence theirs so they need to be kept in the loop.

Any individual or group that doesn’t belong in these groups shouldn’t be actively managed by you. You can still choose to give them visibility through company-wide updates, but your effort should go towards people that either have influence or vested interest on your work.

When joining a new team, it’s often a good idea to make a mental map of the above, simply by speaking to different people and understanding team dynamics and approval process.

The practical bit:
Ask yourself and your team the following questions:

• Who are the key decision makers?

• Do we have any domain experts on [area]?

• Whom do I need to consult for my ideas and solutions?

• Are there other people we need to keep informed?

3. Process, rituals and cadence

Once you figure out who your stakeholders are, you need to find a way to involve them in your process while keeping clear boundaries.

This will largely depend on your operating model, but this is an approach that I have found to work time and time again with varying team shapes and sizes:

• Decision makers: Involve them on a regular basis, and as early as possible. For smaller teams I’d recommend a weekly basis. However, make sure to not involve them so frequently that they land up micromanaging decisions on the solution to take. Give yourself and your team enough space to operate, but involve them frequently and early on to make sure there is alignment.

• Consulted: Involve them as and when needed, depending on the nature of what you are working on. Some stakeholders e.g. domain experts will likely need to be involved at the beginning of an initiative, whereas others e.g. marketing, legal may need to be involved at the later stages.

• Informed: Most communication with stakeholders that simply need visibility can be asynchronous and as simple as a Slack message or email. You may choose to involve them in wider sharing sessions once in a while, particularly to give your wider team visibility on what’s being worked on.

Examples of rituals

Choosing the right rituals is about finding something that fits into your existing model without adding much overhead for you or the stakeholders. Here are some examples:

• Stakeholder design reviews (Suggested Weekly): You can hold these on a weekly basis, and involve key Decision Makers. It’s a simple yet effective way to have a regular cadence of engaging Decision Makers and bringing them along in your process.

• Async updates (Weekly & Monthly) : Best for Informed stakeholders and also to summarize progress in a particular initiative. Send out a weekly update on Slack/Teams/Email with the latest updates.

• Expert interviews (Ad hoc): At the beginning of an initiative, make sure to schedule sessions with experts and people in the Consulted pool, to understand what your restrictions are.

• Research playbacks (Ad hoc): You can hold these as and when you have new insight to be shared. I’d suggest inviting every stakeholder in a relevant initiative or team, but making sure Decision Makers attend.

• Design sprints (Ad hoc): Involve at least one non-product Decision Maker to bring them inside your process. Also invite Consulted stakeholders at the beginning of the sprint.

The practical bit:

🔴 No: Invite 10 stakeholders in a design review session, and ask them to share feedback on everything they see.

🟢 Yes: Keep design reviews as tight as possible (try limit to 3-4 people outside the product team), whether it’s on a call or async. If you want to do wider design critiques to make people feel involved, do it less frequently and as a means to give more people in the organization a voice.

4. Avoiding “design by committee”

You can’t, and shouldn’t action everyone’s opinion at all times.

It’s ineffective, and overwhelming.

As a designer, you will need to choose whose opinions to get, and even more importantly, whose opinions to action.

One of the hardest challenges of becoming more senior is having the clarity, critical mindset and intuition to understand what feedback to action, and what not to.

Assuming you have found your ideal working group of people, you will often encounter situations where you have an overwhelming amount of feedback from a number of people, and you are trying to please everyone.

This is what we call “design by committee” and it’s one of the most common errors we see in product organizations.

Here is how to avoid it:

• Don’t create the expectation that you will action everyone’s feedback.

• Be highly critical when it comes to feedback. If you disagree with something, try and have a quick 1:1 conversation to try and get your points across.

• Filter what’s a hard requirement e.g. from an expert or a key decision maker vs. what’s simply an opinion that you may or may not choose to action.

• Remember that you have the most amount of context.

The practical bit:

🔴 No: Send a Figma link to a group of 30 people and ask for feedback from everyone.

🟢 Yes: At the final stages or after launching an initiative, send an async update with either the final design or live product update, tagging relevant departments and explaining your hypothesis and thought process. This will give great visibility to the wider team and make them feel included.

🔴 No: Try and resolve every single bit of feedback.

🟢 Yes: Practice critical thinking — Evaluate feedback with your product trio and separate what’s useful vs. what’s a distraction.

5. Managing and improving people’s feedback

Most stakeholders aren’t great at giving feedback.

Plain and simple.

• They give feedback on the wrong thing

• They give opinion rather than argumentation

• They are heavily biased and don’t recognize their biases

And even if they are good at it, it’s likely that they have their own way of giving feedback that doesn’t match your expectations of the wider team’s expectations.

Unless you train people on how to give feedback, they won’t have any guidance on how to improve.

Here are a few practical tips on getting better feedback from different types of stakeholders:

• Give people adequate context.

• Clearly express what feedback you are looking for.

• If you are getting feedback on the wrong thing, call it out politely and direct the conversation to where it needs to be.

🔴 No: (Stakeholder) “Make it pop more”

(Designer) “Ok, we’ll do our best”

🟢 Yes: (Stakeholder) “Make it pop more”

(Designer) “In all respect, this isn’t very helpful to us as it stands. Pop could mean a number of different things. Could you tell me a bit more on what it is specifically that you are missing? Is this about the visual design, the interaction pattern, or something else?

🔴 No: (Designer) “What do you think? Do you like it?”

🟢 Yes: (Designer) “I’m looking for feedback specifically on this new interaction pattern. It’s something we haven’t used before, but could really help guide the user towards completing the funnel.”

6. Understanding people’s goals and building relationships

If there is one piece of advice that you take away from this article, it’s this:

Stakeholder management boils down to relationships.

You can’t expect a stakeholder to get you without investing in building a relationship that is founded in mutual respect and understanding. They can’t expect that from you either.

There are two foundational principles in building a professional relationship with your key stakeholders.

Understanding, and caring.

• To build strong relationships with product leadership, you need to show that you understand and care about finding and solving the right problems, delivering on time.

• To build strong relationships with commercial teams, you need to show that you understand and care about your company’s financial performance, and understand the link between your work and its commercial impact.

• To build strong relationships with engineers, you need to show that you understand and care about the feasibility, scalability and performance of the solutions you are designing.

• To build strong relationships with marketers, you need to show that you understand and care about how you communicate your value proposition and what types of people are buying your product.

You can’t possibly give the same amount of attention to all these different areas — and you can’t possibly care the same either — but starting with trying to understand their perspective and showing that you care can make a huge amount of difference.

The best designers I have met act as a connecting bridge between different departments, often offering alignment and shared understanding.

The practical bit:

🔴 No: After not having a single conversation, add 5 people to a session and ask for the input.

🟢 Yes: Set up a monthly chat with one person from each relevant department. Grab a coffee, understand their biggest challenges and share yours too. Discuss how you might work together.

In summary

At its core, good stakeholder management is about clarity, boundaries and genuine relationships.

When you know who is who, bring people in at the right moments, and avoid the trap of trying to please everyone, you create the space to do your best work.

And when you take the time to truly understand people’s goals, pressures and incentives, you turn them from blockers into product/design champions.

The designers who thrive aren’t the ones who say yes to everyone — they’re the ones who communicate with intention, build trust over time, and guide teams toward the right decisions.

Thanks for making it to the end 🙌. What did you think of this post? What have you found useful in managing stakeholders as a designer? I would love to know in the comments.

If you are new to product design, I also recommend checking out my product design masterclass, a self-paced, end-to-end product design course for beginners and mid-level designers.

Prologue

This is the fifth and final part of a series of posts on becoming AI-ready as a Product Designer. The series explores tools, workflows and methods that, as product designers, we should familiarize ourselves with, so that we are ready for a new AI-powered era in product design and development.

• 1: Content & Image Generation

• 2: Research & Analysis

• 3: Building Products & Prototypes

• 4: Wireframing & Design

• 5: Mindset (this post)

Let’s dive into it.

Mindset

The last part in this series is about mindset.

Every technological shift requires a change in how we think.

On one hand, changes in tools and processes present a groundbreaking opportunity for positive change.

On the other hand, these changes often cause fear, anxiety, as well as many unanswered questions on the future of the industry and our roles.

With this last, shorter piece, I’ll dive a bit into what I think should be our approach to learning and leveraging AI while maintaining our health and sanity.

Stay curious and optimistic

If there is one thing you need to do as you prepare for a new AI-enabled world, that is to be as curious as you can:

• Curious to explore what’s new and how it could fit your workflow.

• Curious to understand how people around you are embracing the change.

• Curious to learn, to fail, to adapt.

Whether you are someone new to design, or someone very seasoned, you need to embrace the mindset of a junior.

Think of the curiosity that inspired you when you first started designing.

Think back to the first end-to-end flow that you built, or the first prototype you created.

That’s the kind of curiosity that you want to embrace.

Using AI in your workflows will feel awkward at first. And the results you get may not be exactly what you would expect.

Which is why you need to use your curiosity to fuel your efforts, to try different approaches, different tools, different ways of prompting; until you find the one that works for your use case and team size.

Assume that you know very little, and that the conventions you have followed for years may actually not be as effective anymore.

Everyone is a junior in this, and so are you.

Battle “AI anxiety”

If you feel anxious because you aren’t using AI yet, please know that you are not alone.

Everyone feels the same way.

If statements such as “Someone knowing AI will replace you”, “You need to quit what you are doing today and move to AI” or “[X tool] is dead” are getting to you, please hear me when I say with complete confidence that they are fear mongering clickbait posts that purely aim to drive impressions and engagement.

Yes, tools will change, and our processes will change too.

Yes, I think you should embrace that change in a gradual way.

But change doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s much more nuanced than people make it to be.

Like every big technological revolution, it can feel overwhelming to have all these new tools and areas to explore.

But you have plenty of time to get up to speed, gradually familiarize yourself and ultimately find your way throughout this industry shift.

Most importantly…

…It’s a daily jog, not a sprint

Remember that this is not a race.

It’s not a sprint.

It’s not even a marathon.

The best way that you can think about it is like a daily jog that you gradually add to your routine.

• Take it slow.

• Start small, make a bit of progress every week.

• Try out different things and see what works for you.

Familiarize yourself with different tools. Try things out, little by little every day.

The first few days will be difficult, perhaps overwhelming even.

But after a few weeks in doing so, you will start getting clarity on how it fits your workflow. Prompting will feel more natural. You’ll become better at following-up, asking more precise questions, getting more effective results quicker and even from multiple tools at once.

Most importantly, remember that you aren’t aiming to master one tool here; as the tools of today will change rapidly over the next few years.

All you should be trying to do is gradually build your confidence with this new paradigm.

We are all in this together

Whether we are talking about a recent graduate or a seasoned, 10+ year design leader, we are all new to using AI.

And we are all going through this change together.

If you are someone new to design, this might feel scary, but it also presents an unprecedented opportunity for you.

The industry is going through a reset.

Some of the skills and workflows we have spent years in evolving and perfecting aren’t all that relevant anymore.

And even though design thinking is more relevant than ever, the way that we tackle it in a practical way is changing.

Ultimately, in one way or another, we are all starting from scratch.

‘s article below summarizes things very well and reflects a lot of what I’m feeling at the moment.

Proof of Concept

Career reboot

Every April I seem to take an unplanned creative spring break. It’s not a sabbatical or a formal PTO strategy—just a self-imposed ritual to step away from the chaos of work and reconnect with what inspires me. I’ve learned that if you’re not in a full-time IC role, making things—especially design—becomes a form of recovery from meeting fatigue and manag…

Read more

a year ago · 39 likes · 4 comments · David Hoang

Closing statement & looking forward

As a closing statement, let me share that I feel so incredibly energized and inspired with this technological shift.

I can’t wait to explore areas that I couldn’t before, to build microproducts and side hustles, to improve my speed and efficiency as both a leader and practitioner.

Most importantly, I think and truly hope that we will see a new generation of design entrepreneurs forming, generalists that can think, design and build end-to-end. Some of them will apply these skills in high-growth businesses, others will venture out and create their own.

Regardless of the path you choose to follow, I’m certain it will be an exciting one.

Thanks for making it till the end. I really hope you enjoyed this series of posts; it has been one of the most fascinating pieces I have ever written, and I learned and reflected on so many things as I was writing and editing every article. A lot of what has been shared in this series is likely to change in the next years; I’ll do my best to keep up with the changes and update everything as I go.

Hey, this is Filippos 👋 , thanks for being here! This update is about the Product Design Masterclass, a self-paced course on the complete product design process. If you don’t want to receive updates about the course, you can manage your preferences in your account settings.

I'm very excited to announce that I've launched a new unit in my self-paced Product Design Masterclass: Measure.

This unit is all about understanding and using data in our product design process. It was by far the most popular request from existing and new students, and one that I'm deeply passionate about.

What’s covered

- Understanding business data
- Understanding product data
- Picking the right metric to track
- Observing data and charts
- Types of data observations
- Tips and common data patterns
- Real demo of looking at analytics

If you are someone that's struggling with understanding and using data, I highly recommend the course.

Get the masterclass

You can access the course on https://www.designary.com/ , feel free to use code DATA for a 10% off.

Please also note that we support purchasing power parity discounts; if you join from a country with lower income levels, you may automatically get a discount to ensure our prices are fair to you. If for any reason you aren’t seeing the discount, please drop me a message.

Get the masterclass

If you are new to product design, I also recommend checking out my product design masterclass, a self-paced, end-to-end product design course for beginners and mid-level designers.

Prologue

This is the fourth part of a series of posts on becoming AI-ready as a Product Designer. The series explores tools, workflows and methods that, as product designers, we should familiarize ourselves with, so that we are ready for a new AI-powered era in product design and development.

• 1: Content & Image Generation

• 2: Research & Analysis

• 3: Building Products & Prototypes

• 4: Wireframing & Design (this post)

• 5: Mindset

Let’s dive into it.

Wireframing & Designing

Many of you asked me how we can use AI to design on an established product and design system, and it’s something I’ve experimented with a lot over the last few months.

The TL;DR here is that this isn’t powerful enough just yet, but I believe it will be in the next year.

There are a few solutions in the market that are quite interesting, the most prominent one being UX Pilot, and another one being Figma’s built-in “First Draft” feature.

Using UX Pilot within Figma allows you to quickly wireframe ideas, or even attempt to design high fidelity mockups based on a generic design system or your own.

Wireframing

For basic wireframing, UX Pilot did an ok job.

If you are:

• A junior or mid-level designer that could benefit from different ideas on information hierarchy and layout

• An engineer or product generalist that needs ideas on layout

Then I think incorporating AI in your workflow could potentially be beneficial.

I asked the plugin to generate screens for a wealth management app for high net-worth individuals. Please note that I specified what should be on the screens and what the possible actions are.

🤖 Prompt: Let’s create a wireframe for a wealth management app for high net-worth individuals.

The user should see:

- Their bank accounts
- Their stocks and shares accounts
- Their property valuation

They should be able to:

- Move money between these accounts
- Add assets
- View their portfolio's predicted growth

The result wasn’t bad. It’s also something that a good midweight designer should be able to come up with in few minutes. Having said that, I could see it being useful for an entry level designer trying to get a few ideas on different layouts and information hierarchy.

I tried a similar prompt with Figma AI; the result was quite similar, but Figma opts for a lower fidelity, Balsamiq style wireframe vs. UXPilot that uses more standard UI components.

High-fidelity design

However, for high-fidelity design, even though there are workflows that allow you to use your custom design system, I found them to be fiddly and not work as expected.

I asked UX Pilot to use an existing design system and generate a high-fidelity design for a healthcare app. The result was ok, but it didn’t really use much from the design system other than some basic colours.

I then tried a similar prompt with Figma AI. What I liked about it was the style selector, which I think works quite well as an interaction pattern especially for people that are starting from scratch and looking at different visual styles for their product.

Figma currently doesn’t allow you to leverage your custom design system with AI, but hopefully that’s something that will be launching soon; That, I think could be a game-changer.

Summary

In summary, wireframing and designing with AI kind of works, but isn’t powerful.

At the moment of writing this post, I don’t think wireframing or designing with AI is a truly powerful workflow beyond very specific use cases.

Having said that, there are some interesting companies in the space such as UX Pilot, which I’m sure in the next year will progress significantly in the space.

I also strongly believe that Figma will release a proper AI-driven design workflow very soon, that leverages custom design systems. I’m hoping we’ll see a preview of this in this year’s Config, but this is purely an assumption.

Verdict: Not there yet, but watch this area 👀

Hope you enjoyed this month’s article, I had a blast writing it. If you’d like to see more in-depth content on any of the above areas, I’d love to know in the comments. As always, if you found this insightful, consider restacking.

If you are new to product design, I also recommend checking out my product design masterclass, a self-paced, end-to-end product design course for beginners and mid-level designers.

If you are new to product design, I also recommend checking out my product design masterclass, a self-paced, end-to-end product design course for beginners and mid-level designers.

Prologue

This is the third part of a series of posts on becoming AI-ready as a Product Designer. The series explores tools, workflows and methods that, as product designers, we should familiarize ourselves with, so that we are ready for a new AI-powered era in product design and development.

• 1: Content & Image Generation

• 2: Research & Analysis

• 3: Building Products & Prototypes (this post)

• 4: Wireframing & Design

• 5: Mindset

Let’s dive into it.

Prototyping & building

(Method: Building)

This is my favorite part.

If there is a must-read in the series, it’s this post.

There is an unprecedented opportunity for designers (and anyone really) to build their own ideas and products by leveraging AI coding tools.

What’s working well:

• You can create really well functioning products from chains of prompts.

• You can build prototypes very quickly.

What’s not working well yet:

• Going from refined design to prototype is still not solved. There are a few Figma integrations at the moment but none achieves a high-level of accuracy consistently.

• Using a custom design system. Most coding tools use a predefined front-end framework such as ShadCn or Tailwind, but don’t allow you to integrate a custom design system or codebase. This is one of the areas that I personally think will be extremely disruptive in the next year, but right now it hasn’t been solved.

What that in mind, my recommendation is for every designer to spend a bit of time every week to play around with AI Agents and build a small product.

Available tools

In summary, the most designer-friendly tools in the market at the moment are:

• v0 by Vercel — https://v0.dev/

• Lovable — https://lovable.dev/

• Replit — https://replit.com/

• Bolt — https://bolt.new/

There are small differences between them, but ultimately they are all quite similar and don’t require any engineering knowledge. What’s great about all these tools is:

• You don’t have to worry about setting up a dev environment

• You can build anything from simple to highly complex products

• You can immediately preview changes

• You can automatically deploy to a website

Some tools I’m not including in my recommendations are Cursor (steep learning curve for non-engineers), Claude (it doesn’t work once you surpass some code length thresholds) and Whindsurf (cause I haven’t tested them extensively).

Things you can try

• A mini-app that solves a small problem for you.

• Replicating a product you use on a day-to-day basis.

• A product you’d like to launch as a side hustle.

I tried building things like a color palette generator for people with accessibility needs (easy, a few prompts), a detailed accessibility checker for websites and web apps (hard, more than 50 prompts), and a personal finance calculator (easy, 10-15 prompts).

The key thing to remember here is you aren’t trying to build a successful product (yet). You are simply trying to become AI-ready by learning how to build products through prompting.

💡 Tip: Please note that the easiest way to start is by building a web app. Other types of apps (desktop, mobile, hybrid) are also very much possible, but require a bit more tinkering and can get overwhelming for a first project. So I highly recommend starting with a web app and then exploring more types as you go.

I believe that all these tools will see drastic change over the next few years, and their capabilities will improve exponentially, so don’t get hung up on mastering them right now, but rather learn to be comfortable using them.

How to start

The first thing you will want to do is create a detailed requirements prompt for building products. Some things that I have found very useful are:

- Outlining the goal
- What data screen should include
- What are the available actions to a user
- Is there a specific navigation pattern you would like to use?
- Any framework or design style you would like to use.
- An image reference if you’d like to mimic another product or a design.

Some people have found success in using ChatGPT (or any LLM) to help create a Product Requirements Document (PRD) before using it as a prompt in a coding tool. I haven’t found this to be significantly more effective than just creating my own prompts, but it’s definitely worth a try.

Once you have your basic prompt, I advise going into a few of these tools and testing them out. It will give you a first feel of how each product operates and you’ll start identifying each of the nuances and pros/cons.

💡 Tip: One important piece of advice is to start simple and add as you go. At the moment these tools are very capable of tackling one user flow and a few screens at a time, but struggle to tackle multiple flows at once. If you ask the agent to build Google Maps it will struggle, but if you ask it to build a map view where you can set your current location and get directions to a destination, it will easily tackle it.

When you are satisfied with your initial results, pick the tool where you recognise the highest potential and start refining.

• Try visual refinements. Some tools like v0 allow you to select a specific area and refine it. Others, like Lovable, have a visual editor where you can make changes yourself.

• Try adding secondary flows. Once you get your first flow right, try making it a complete product by thinking of secondary flows, unhappy paths and other use cases.

• Try adding authentication and/or a database to save user information.

Example use case: This is a real use case of mine; I was trying to generate a color palette for data visualisation and charting.

I starting by giving the same prompt to V0, Lovable and Replit and looking at early results.

🤖 Prompt: Create a web app for UX designers to generate a color palette for data visualisation. The user should fill in one to two brand colours, and the generator should create a palette of 8 colors to be used in charts. The first of these colours should be the main brand colour.

After some refinement, I was able to create a palette generator tool that takes one brand color, generates an accessible data visualisation palette, simulates color blindness, and allows exporting to CSS variables or SVG.

I picked one feature at a time and tried to refine it until I was happy, then moved on to the next one:

• I started by creating a simple palette generator.

• I tried different prompts for generating the colors until I was happy.

• I then added examples of bar charts and pie charts using a chart library.

• I then added a color blindness simulator.

• I then added exporting functionality.

• I enhanced the export functionality by including options for SVG and CSS.

• I then added some useful settings such as number of colors and dark mode.

• I also added nice-to-haves such as keyboard shortcuts.

Some example refinement prompts:

🤖 Prompt: Right now all the colors are very similar to one another, e.g. if I pick red, all colors are shades of red whereas they should cover as much of the color spectrum as possible (since it's for data visualisation and color coding)

🤖 Prompt: Is it possible to add an export button that generates an SVG with all these different color shades?

Visual refinements

Most of these tools allow you to select a particular element in your preview and suggest changes. I have found this to be a very effective way to refine the interface with a relatively high level of specificity.

Some tools also allow importing from Figma. I personally didn’t have a lot of success in doing that, and was much faster when starting from scratch and asking the agent to use a component library such as Shadcn to make everything look modern and slick.

Having said that, I strongly believe that we will soon see a much better integration between Figma and these tools, and Figma is also very likely to release something in the space. So we just need to wait and see.

Comparing between tools

I tried building the same tool with three agents at once (v0, Lovable, Replit). I preferred the more streamlined interface and deployment workflow of v0, but Replit managed to get to a workable result much faster.

Ultimately, I highly suggest trying out a few of these agents at once and seeing what results you are getting before you commit to one tool.

Wrap up

Overall, this is one of the most important methods to start incorporating in your workflow.

Firstly, it introduces a completely new paradigm of how to build real products through prompting, which I believe will be one of the most transformative changes in our industry.

Secondly, this space will advance so rapidly that it’s really important to start familiarizing yourself from now, so that you can leverage the opportunity as these tools become more advanced, more designer-friendly, and are able to better integrate to an existing product suite and codebase.

Verdict: One of the biggest advancements in technology we have ever experienced. Game-changing. 🥳

Skill to learn: Prompt engineering, refining builds, specifying requirements, visual refinements through prompts, building products as a whole.

Hope you enjoyed this post in the series, I had a blast writing it. If you’d like to see more in-depth content on any of the above areas, I’d love to know in the comments. As always, if you found this insightful, consider restacking ♻️.

If you are new to product design, I also recommend checking out my product design masterclass, a self-paced, end-to-end product design course for beginners and mid-level designers.

If you are new to product design, I also recommend checking out my product design masterclass, a self-paced, end-to-end product design course for beginners and mid-level designers.

Prologue

This is the second part of a series of posts on becoming AI-ready as a Product Designer. The series explores tools, workflows and methods that, as product designers, we should familiarize ourselves with, so that we are ready for a new AI-powered era in product design and development.

• 1: Content & Image Generation

• 2: Research & Analysis (this post)

• 3: Building Products & Prototypes

• 4: Wireframing & Design

• 5: Mindset

Let’s dive into it.

Desk research

(Method: Summarising, Analyzing)

I’m a huge advocate of using AI for desk research (secondary research). It’s one of the clearest, biggest optimizations in a workflow I’ve experienced so far, and it can empower more people in being comfortable doing their own desk research.

Depending on your type of research, I’d recommend the free version of Perplexity for most day-to-day work, and a specialized model such as Gemini with Deep Research (paid) if you are tackling something complex.

Day-to-day research

Example use case: You are trying to understand how people behave around a certain topic e.g. mobile banking. Instead of using a search engine, go into Perplexity and ask a number of questions to understand a topic.

Perplexity works similarly to older generation search engines, but does a great job:

• Summarizing the results

• Suggesting follow-ups (one of my favorite features)

• Showing citations very clearly, allowing you to dive into the actual data

In this example, I started with a wide search around mobile banking apps in the UK.

Because most of the sources were big publisher articles, I then narrowed down the search by asking Perplexity to only fetch results from Reddit and other communities, as I wanted to see how consumers actually think and talk about the topic.

Deep research

Example use case: You are a founding designer, preparing for the launch of a new product in a market (e.g. form builders) and trying to better understand it. In this case I’d sign up for Google Gemini Advanced and use its Deep Research Model to do a thorough market analysis.

I started by giving context on what I was trying to do:

🤖 Prompt: I want to run some competitor research on form-building SaaS products e.g. Typeform. Please find the biggest players in the market and outline:

- Their pricing
- Their target market e.g. startup vs. enterprise
- Key customers using them
- Feature breakdown along with how users value them
- What users like about them vs. complain about
- What you think the biggest opportunities are if we were to create a new startup in the space today.

The way that Deep Research models work is by creating an action plan, verifying it with the user, and then doing extensive analysis on multiple sources before summarizing all results in a separate document.

It genuinely feels like having a mini consulting firm working alongside you.

Verdict: Extremely powerful 👏

Skill to learn: Research prompting, follow-up prompts to add specificity.

Transcribing research

This section will be no news to anyone and therefore quite short, as transcription was one of the first workflows that saw a huge influx of new tools delivering a high quality of results.

Tl;dr, transcribing research sessions is extremely effective using AI. You should be using a tool to transcribe and summarize all research sessions. Just pick one that fits your team’s needs and budget.

You can pick from a wide range of tools:

• Gemini for Google Meet

• Read.ai

• Supernormal

• Granola (Mac only)

• Otter.ai

• Tldv.io (useful if you also want video highlights and aren’t using a specialized research tool)

To more specialised research tools such as:

• Dovetail

• Marvin

• Condens

Most of these tools offer free/trial versions, with their pricing starting from $15-20/user per month, so feel free to explore and pick a tool that you can afford and your team is happy with.

Verdict: Extremely powerful 👏

Skill to learn: None, they are all automated.

Analyzing user research

(Method: Summarising, Analyzing)

Via transcripts

This is one of my favorite workflows.

If you are using research transcripts to analyze research (as per the section above), one of the simplest yet most effective methods of analyzing is to feed your transcripts into ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to analyze them.

Example use case: You are a product designer working on a new healthtech product that helps people with digestive issues. You have run a series of discovery interviews to identify what the biggest problems and opportunities are, but are very short on time to manually analyze everything.

🤖 Prompt: You are a leading UX Researcher. Please review this transcript to identify relevant exceprts that address the research question [question]. Generate phrases (codes) that best represent the excerpts identified. Each code should be between two to five words.

Present your results in a table format. One column for the code, and one column for the participant’s quote(s).

(In the screenshots below I’m using a sample interview transcript taken from The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers by Johnny Saldaña)

ChatGPT did a really great job identifying quotes and coding them. It did miss some information that I thought was important though, which is why when using AI for research, it’s paramount that you double check the results.

To tackle this, one thing I have found quite useful is asking the chat to review the transcript again and add any additional quotes for each code.

Once I was happy with the notes form my first transcript, I asked ChatGPT to review additional transcripts and expand the table to account for multiple participants.

Tip: As with before, experiment with both ChatGPT and Claude to see which one creates a more accurate analysis and pick based on your preferences.

Tip: One headache that you will encounter is that — in their free plans — both chats have fairly small text length limits. A plugin I have found useful to tackle this is Split Long Text for ChatGPT, which splits your text into multiple parts and creates a prompt for the chat to wait for all the parts before doing the analysis. It’s not perfect, but it works.

Verdict: Very powerful, with a few headaches ⚡

Skill to learn: Summarizing, analyzing data through AI.

Via whiteboarding tools

If you are taking research notes in a whiteboarding tool, you can try using Miro and Figjam’s AI summary and clustering features. They are far from perfect, but can quickly help create some high level summaries of sticky notes that you can use as a reference point before diving in on your own.

The big caveat here is that visual note taking (via sticky notes) doesn’t fully encapsulate what the participant is saying or what the question is, and therefore might miss a lot of important context. I have found that depending on the quality of the notes, results here vary significantly, and therefore I can’t recommend this as a reliable way to analyze data.

In summary, using AI tools to analyze or summarize information captured in sticky notes isn’t very effective, purely because of the nature of whiteboarding tools which are meant to be scrappier.

I’d rather recommend you use an AI-powered transcript along with your sticky notes to accurately analyze a piece of research. Use the sticky notes as a reference point of what’s important, but then cross-reference with a transcript to get the highest level of accuracy.

Verdict: Highly dependent on how you note-take. Powerful when notes are very accurate, but not that useful when notes don’t encapsulate the full context or intention behind the note, which is usually the case.

Skill to learn: Summarizing, analyzing data through AI.

Hope you enjoyed this post in the series, I had a blast writing it. If you’d like to see more in-depth content on any of the above areas, I’d love to know in the comments. As always, if you found this insightful, consider restacking ♻️.

If you are new to product design, I also recommend checking out my product design masterclass, a self-paced, end-to-end product design course for beginners and mid-level designers.

Highlight of the month ✨

Fount is a wonderful website that gathers curated resources for designers. I’ve always kept personal notes of interesting resources, tools, tutorials but it has become a huge mess that’s impossible for me to manage, which is why I’ve been using Fountn more recently to find and bookmark resources until I have time to visit them. Hope you find it useful!

Prologue

AI is and will be one of the biggest revolutions in the world of technology. We are going through a big change, and change is often scary and exciting at the same time.

So I thought about writing a post on exactly that: How can you become AI-ready in a world where everything changes daily.

The reason why I’m emphasizing “AI-ready” is because the tools that we use today will be very different than the ones we will be using one year from now. Similarly, one year from now will look drastically different than five years from now.

So what can you do today that will make you ready for this change?

I’ve structured this series of posts around the areas and methodologies that I have tested for my day-to-day work.

This post is split into 5 parts:

• 1: Content & Image Generation (this post)

• 2: Research & Analysis

• 3: Building Products & Prototypes

• 4: Wireframing & Design

• 5: Mindset

It’s important to note that even though I’m recommending specific tools in each of these parts, I’m focusing more on learning to use one of the following methods through prompting:

• Generating

• Summarising

• Editing & Remixing

• Building

Let’s dive into it.

Content creation

(Method: Generating)

Content creation was the first big shift in the industry with the public launch of ChatGPT. It continues to be a really simple but extremely powerful use case that can save you tons of time in your design workflows.

You can use content generation for a number of use cases:

• Coming up with feature or product naming

• Writing or rewriting product microcopy

• Writing or rewriting website content

• Writing survey or research questions

There is a variety of LLM-powered chatbots you can try using for content generation, including ChatGPT by OpenAI, Claude by Anthropic, Gemini by Google, Copilot by Microsoft, or the newer Deepseek.

For most people, I’d recommend starting with ChatGPT, but feel free to play around with different models by giving them the same prompt and comparing your results.

How to prompt effectively

There are many resources about optimizing prompts, but if I were to summarize all my recommendations, it would be the following:

• Give the model a role — “You are a UX writer”

• Set the context — “We are trying to…”

• Outline the goal — “Please provide…”

• Set the detailed instructions — “Make sure the tone of voice…”

• Set the expected format — “Provide the results in a table…”

• Provide an example, if you have one — “Use this reference point…”

Example use case: You are introducing a new gamification feature in your mobile app that features a leveling mechanism, think Duolingo. Ask the AI model to give you a few ideas on how you can name your different levels.

In this example, I provided the context and asked ChatGPT and Claude to come up with a level naming system, including a few variations.

Example use case: You are introducing a new onboarding flow in your product. Attach the new full flow in an image and ask it to rewrite the content to better match your brand’s tone of voice, make it snappier and more concise.

Tip: Ask for variations, many of them. It’s a great way to start wide as you are exploring options, and then refine as you are finding styles that you like. You can always follow-up and ask the model to refine a specific style. “I really like this option, could you refine it by doing X….”

Tip: Content generation works really well when you give clear examples and guidance. The more you feed the chat, the more it will learn and adapt to your preferred style. You can website links, PDF documents, or plain text, and ask ChatGPT to mimic a certain style.

Verdict: Extremely powerful 👏

Skill to learn: Writing through prompts, giving context and reference content.

Photo generation

(Method: Generating)

One of the funnest ways to incorporate generation in your workflows is by using image generation tools.

This is one of my favorites, and, in my opinion, very underutilized workflows in the product design world.

I recommend image generation for a number of use cases:

• You are testing out different styles of photography for a website.

• You are testing out different styles of illustration for a product.

• You are putting together a moodboard for working with a specialist.

• You don’t have budget for photography/illustration, and need to create assets yourself as part of a small product team or startup.

I’ve been using Midjourney since the early days, but my recommendation at this point in time is Visual Electric, as it feels much more familiar to other design tools, and it offers a canvas which allows you to generate a collection of images and group them together. You can create and save styles, edit and remix images, all in an interface that feels very familiar to design tools.

Example use case: You are designing a new website or product in the fitness category. You are trying to find the right image style so that you can then start investing in custom content, stock photography or even a branded photoshoot.

In this example, I started with this prompt:

🤖 Studio photo of a woman, wearing lavender colored leggings and a fitness tracker, using colorful resistance bands.

Once I was happy with the result, I created a style to make sure that all my photos would look quite similar.

I then started using different prompts to generate different angles, poses and compositions.

🤖 Studio photo of a woman, wearing lavender colored leggings, checking her fitness tracker after exercising. The photo should focus on the fitness tracker.

The result was highly accurate, and by using a combination of variations, remixing and editing these photos I was able to achieve the style I was going for.

Illustration (2D/3D) generation

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of generating illustrations, mostly because it’s an art that I’ve always had massive respect for and never got to become good at.

A wonderful tool I’ve found myself using again and again for illustration is Lummi. Unlike generating content from scratch, Lummi follows an interesting approach: it features content from AI artists, and allows you to edit or remix that content using prompts.

I’ve loved using Lummi to find illustration styles — both 2D and 3D — and then generate imagery to use in products I’m designing.

Example use case: You are designing a product that requires a lot of custom illustrated assets. You don’t have the budget for an illustrator and aren’t skilled in illustration yourself.

In this example, I’ll try creating 3D imagery for a fintech app. Let’s assume we are trying to create a futuristic style for all of a user’s spending categories; things like groceries, household, insurance, entertainment, and so on. To match the brand aesthetic, I don’t want to resort to using an icon pack, so I’ll try generate some 3D assets for each category.

I started by browsing the 3D page and looking for a style that I liked. I loved this particular glossy abstract style by Shiho, so I tried to use that as a reference.

I used the Create Similar function and described what I wanted to create, in this case a carrot to be used for the groceries category.

What’s also great about Lummi is that you can easily remove a background, which is something I’ve found quite finicky with other tools like Midjourney or DALL-E.

Overall, image generation can be extremely powerful and save tons of time in either moodboarding/testing or even creating production-ready assets for your websites and products.

Verdict: Extremely powerful 👏

Skill to learn: Generating through prompts, editing and remixing through prompts.

Hope you enjoyed this post and are already tinkering with some of the above workflows! In the next post in this series, we’ll explore using AI models to enhance our research workflows, including desk research as well as analyzing qualitative/quantitative research. Stay tuned.

Scenario

You are working in the Amazon buyer squad for iOS. You have recently launched an updated design language for the app that is getting positive feedback, but a lot of the feedback you are receiving also revolves around the fact that buying feels overwhelming.

Data

Here are some customer quotes from your latest round of research:

• “I like the new design but it feels like there is so much distraction”.

• “The deals I’m seeing are completely irrelevant”

• “Why do I see movies, light bulbs, and kids toys in the same screen?”

The feedback you are getting is reflected on your product data:

• The search bar has a conversion rate of 22.6%

• The home tab has a conversion rate of 6.2%

Your team’s hypothesis is that this happens because people use the search bar when they have made a decision on what they want, vs. the home tab when they are simply browsing. However, you all believe there is massive room for improvement.

Goal

Find a way to increase to increase the conversion rate from the home tab in the Amazon iOS App by addressing your customer pain points and potentially introducing a more personalized home screen experience.

Some suggested ideas by your stakeholders include:

• Introducing a personalization quiz.

• Restructuring the sections in the homepage to be more relevant.

• Allowing users to customize their home tab.

• Improving your personalization algorithm.

Deliverable

• Define the key metrics for an initiative like that. What data, other than conversion rate, is important to you to better understand the problem and test your solution?

• Come up with a few ideas using sketching techniques such as Crazy 8’s or Concept Sketching.

• Pick your favorite idea, mock it up in Figma, and create a simple, medium-fidelity prototype. You can find various UI examples of Amazon in the Figma community.

Sharing your work

This is an internal exercise, but sharing your work is recommended. If you’d like to openly get feedback from the Designary community, you can share your process and output in the Designary chat.

Recommended tools

• Pen & Paper for sketching and ideation.

• Figjam or Miro for noting down your thinking & problem definition.

• Figma for mockups and prototypes.

This challenge will help you with

• Product sense

• UI Design

• UX Design

• Prototyping

Disclaimer

This challenge's scenario, data, and content are purely conceptual and for educational purposes.

The presale for the Product Design Masterclass is now live! Get more information and access 30% off the full course price by following this link.

This course has been a year in the making. It’s a curriculum I have now run twice as a bootcamp, but my vision was always to make it accessible to everyone from all over the world.

With all the advances in technology, the rising role of AI and the ever changing product industry, there couldn’t be a better time for someone to venture into product design.

In the masterclass, I’m teaching you everything I have learned in my 14 year career in a concrete and practical way, covering all the foundations I wish I had when I was starting off.

Get the course

What will I learn?

We will cover the end-to-end modern product design process, with practical tips and exercises at every step:

• You will learn to understand your users by conducting research.

• You will understand how well defined problems lead to effective solutions, by bridging business goals to customer needs.

• You will learn different ideation methods to reinforce creative thinking.

• You will learn the fundamentals of interface design and interaction design, as well as practical tips on how to apply them.

• You will practice everything you learned in a real project in Figma.

• You will turn your static mockups into a fully interactive prototype.

• You will test your prototype using moderated and unmoderated testing.

What else will I get?

Community access

You will get access to a private community, connect with other members, share your work and get feedback.

Notion workbook, resources

You will also access a Notion workbook and a wealth of product design resources that are relevant to each part of the masterclass.

Aren’t there already many courses?

I have taken most product design courses that exist out there and have interviewed over 50 people that have taken some of the most popular bootcamps and self-paced courses.

And my answer is:

I couldn’t find something I could happily recommend to people starting off in product design.

Some bootcamps were okay but way too expensive for the average beginner.

Most self-paced courses that I came across were outdated or suffered from poor quality of learning; they were focused too much on theory and less so on practice.

Is this for me?

This course could be ideal for you if you are:

• Starting as a product or UX designer.

• A mid-level or senior product designer needs a refresher and a more robust approach to solving product problems.

• A UI/UX designer who wants to transition to full product work.

• Switching careers to UX.

This course may not be for you if:

• You are already quite advanced in product design.

• You are just looking for a Figma tutorial.

• You are looking for an advanced visual design course.

In the masterclass I’m teaching you everything I have learned in my 14 year career in a concrete and practical way, covering all the foundations I wish I had when I was starting off.

Get the course

When will the course go live?

The course is expected to go live on 12th February 2025. If you access the presale, you will receive an email once the course material is available, and will be automatically given full access to the course and community.

Everyone likes to talk about having a seat at the table.

But rather than obsessing about that seat, a much more impactful way you can think about it is — how much am I influencing strategic decisions and why?

There is no seat at the table that magically starts influencing the whole company.

Influence takes time, determination, and a bit of tactical work.

To drive strategic decisions through design, you need to:

• Be part of the conversation

• Speak stakeholder language

• Involve stakeholders early and often

• Champion the customer at all times

• Move others through storytelling

Let’s break it down.

Be part of the conversation

First things first, you can’t easily influence any key strategic decisions unless you are part of the conversation.

And you won’t become part of the conversation unless you are adding clear value to it.

So the first thing you need to think about is why you want to influence strategy and what are the areas where you can add value. This is ultimately up to you to decide as it will depend on the context and your organization.

Some of the common areas of leverage I’ve encountered time and time again are the following:

• Your organization doesn’t have a clear product vision.

• Your organization only focuses on small, tactical work.

• Your organization often focuses on the wrong problems.

• Your organization often dictates the solution, and you are simply executing.

• Your organization doesn’t understand the customer enough.

• Your organization doesn’t produce work that everyone is proud of.

These are areas where you, as a product designer, can add tremendous value.

1. In helping your team shape the product vision.

2. In helping your team balance tactical vs. strategic work.

3. In helping your team understand what’s a real problem.

4. In helping your team give you the opportunity to explore solutions rather than simply execute on them.

5. In empowering everyone to understand your customer pain points and how they can be linked to business objectives.

6. In moving your team to produce better quality work that makes everyone proud.

Once you have figured out your reasoning you’ll be at a much stronger place to become part of the wider strategic conversation.

—

Now, onto joining the so called conversation…

Being part of the conversation takes different shapes depending on the team and organization structure, but at its foundation, you simply need to ask yourself:

“What are the channels and discussions in which decisions are being made, and how can I start being included?”

Whether you are working in a small or large organization, the first thing you can do here is ask:

• Ask to be involved in strategic conversations.

• Ask to be involved in your quarterly planning.

• Ask to share your findings with key stakeholders.

And the “so what” behind all of these asks, is the answer you gave yourself earlier on where you can add value and what is the problem you are trying to solve.

Let’s look at some practical examples:

🔴 No: “Design needs a seat at the table.”

🟢 Yes: “I’d love to start being more involved in our strategy and planning conversations. It would be a great opportunity for me to bring in all the useful findings we have on the customer and the key problems, so that every decision we make considers both the customer and the business need.”

🔴 No: “I’m better at doing strategy that X person.”

🟢 Yes: “Sometimes we feel like we are focusing on the wrong problems, or on problems that aren’t that well defined. We can easily solve this if we start these conversations together rather than separately.”

🔴 No: “I don’t agree with our roadmap.”

🟢 Yes: “We seem to be focusing too much on short-term, tactical work, without really considering our product vision. By bringing design into this conversation we can align on a clear product vision and start thinking of the big bets we can make to take us there.”

Speak stakeholder language

One of the most common mistakes we see in the design field is that people focus on output rather than outcome.

Stakeholders don’t really care about:

• Research methodologies

• Workshops

• Customer journey maps

• Design thinking

• Prototyping

What they care about instead is:

• Confidence to pursue a solution

• Identifying product-market-fit

• Knowing who the customer is

• Moving a business metric

In order to influence, it’s imperative that you practice the following:

1. When speaking to stakeholders, senior leaders and pretty much everyone outside of your product org, you need to shift your every conversation from output-based to outcome based.

2. When presenting your methodology, share it only at a high level and focus on the insight and leverage you produced.

3. Learn how your design decisions affect key business metrics and outcomes, and always remind people of that connection. Use that connection to argue for or against specific decisions.

Here are some examples:

🔴 No: “We need to use design thinking because it’s the right thing to do.”

🟢 Yes: “Several of our recent bets haven’t succeeded, and it’s because we often think of the business side of the equation rather than solving a customer need. I strongly believe that if we bring the customer at the forefront and considering what they need, we’ll be much better able to meet our retention/engagement goals for Q1.”

🔴 No: “We have spoken to 20 customers and produced a wonderful report.”

🟢 Yes: “We have identified three key insights that we believe can be actioned almost immediately and move us closer to our goal.”

🔴 No: “This solution uses modern design trends, and we prototyped it using cutting-edge prototyping software. We are also using microinteractions to delight.”

🟢 Yes: “We believe that this solution could significantly reduce Month 1 churn, as it really focuses on solving the big burning problems that users face as they onboard.”

Involve stakeholders early and often

Rather than only trying to influence decisions at the point at which they are made, you should try involve stakeholders in the process as early as possible and as often as works for you and your team.

💡 Big caveat here: This works only with specific types of stakeholders and people. You need to find stakeholders that are product-minded and have the required openness to learn and adapt.

What often happens is we work as part of a product squad, in silo, and then present our ideas and solutions to a broader range of stakeholders who see our thinking for the first time…

And that makes it especially hard to get our points across and influence decisions.

Instead, the best way to influence decisions is to involve stakeholders in our processes from earlier on:

• Involve them in our research.

• Involve them in our ideation sessions.

• Involve them in our design sprints.

• Involve them in our design iterations.

A huge mindset shift occurs when stakeholders are involved in the process of building a product.

In psychology and behavioral science we often talk about “The IKEA effect”, which simply explains the phenomenon where we often attribute a a lot more importance an value to an object or a process if we have been involved in creating it.

There is no better way to make a stakeholder more customer-focused product-minded than involving them in the design process from earlier on.

Here are some examples:

🔴 No: “You need to think of the customer more.”

🟢 Yes: “We are scheduling a few interviews in the following weeks to identify the biggest reasons for churn. It would be great if you observed at least a few of them to really see the context behind what they are saying.”

🔴 No: “You shouldn’t suggest solutions, that’s our job.”

🟢 Yes: “There are many great ideas on the table here, and everyone should have their voice heard. I’ll be facilitating a group ideation session this coming Wednesday and we’ll use some sketching exercises to come up with a great solution to move our acquisition targets for Q2.”

Champion the customer

One of our biggest levers as designers is our closeness to the customer.

By actioning this closeness you have an incredible opportunity to influence decisions and be seen as a thought leader in your organization.

1. Begin every conversation by bringing it back to the customer

2. Play back important insight as you are uncovering it (more on this below)

3. Be very strategic about where you focus your discovery efforts.

In an ideation session or design sprint:

🔴 No: “We could rethink our plan selection flow?”

🟢 Yes: “If we think about our customer, we know one of their biggest obstacles is understanding which plan is right for them. One of the ways we could solve for this is updating our plan selection flow so that we recommend what’s best for them depending on their needs.”

In a stakeholder review:

🔴 No: “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

🟢 Yes: “We know from our ongoing research that our customers are very much against complicated dashboards and widgets. They value simplicity, easy-to-understand graphs and important insight.”

Move others with storytelling

Notice that with all of the points we have already covered, a big emphasis is on communication.

If you want to influence, the way you use words and creative a narrative around what you are presenting is crucial.

At its foundation, I like to use a very simple formula for storytelling:

1. Context

2. Problem

3. Evidence

4. Solution

5. Belief

Here is how this works in a few different scenarios.

A. In a stakeholder alignment session or kickoff meeting:

• Set the context — Why are we here?

• Outline the problem and goal — What are we trying to solve?

• Put the customer in the center — Why is this a burning problem?

• Make it real by using quotes and video reels — Why should I care?

• Connect the problem to the solution — How will we solve it?

• Make everyone believe — Why will it work?

B. In a research playback session:

• Outline the problem and goal — What did we want to uncover?

• Give a high-level summary of your process — How did we do it?

• Focus on the key insight — What did we find out?

• Make it real by using quotes and video reels — Why should I care?

• Connect it to action — How do we suggest to action it?

• Follow-up — What are the next steps?

Let’s look at a more realistic example of a full narrative:

🔴 No: “Let’s think of some ideas to improve our onboarding funnel.”

🟢 Yes: “To set the context, we have identified a big dropoff in our new onboarding funnel; we lose almost 25% of our customers in only two steps, which results in an onboarding completion rate of only 35%, compared to 52% previously.

This is a huge problem for the business, as we are acquiring customers at great cost only to lose them before they even use the product.

To understand why this is happening, we tested our new onboarding flow with 8 customers over the last week, and here is what we uncovered.

(Show insights, including real quotes or video reels)

Based on this, we strongly believe that the biggest reason people drop off is privacy concerns. We have some suggested solutions on how to solve this, but we would also like everyone’s input on anything else we can try.”

In summary

Driving strategic influence is a gradual process that takes time, and there is no magic formula that will get you there as it heavily depends on your organization’s structure.

However, there are a few simple steps you can take to drive that strategic impact.

• Figure out what the gaps are in your strategy and therefore the areas where design can add the most value.

• Understand which channels and conversations are used to make strategic decisions. Ask to join the ones where you can have the biggest impact.

• Involve key stakeholders in different steps of your product design process. There is no better way to get their support and shift their mindset.

• Champion your customer closeness in every conversation. It’s your superpower and you should leverage it.

• Focus on your narrative and storytelling in order to move others. It’s what will bring everything together.

Thanks for making it to the end 🙌. What did you think of this post? How have you managed to influence strategy in your organization? I would love to know in the comments.

Leave a comment

Scenario

You are working in one of Slack's AI Product Squads. Your squad consists of a product manager, three AI-focused engineers, a data analyst, and a user researcher.

Your team has recently launched the first pilot of Slack AI and has seen some positive results with pilot customers. Slack AI can:

• Summarise unread messages

• Summarise conversations

• Answer search queries

From your conversations with existing pilot customers, you notice that customers talk positively about the different AI features but do not remember to use them frequently enough to continue paying for it.

Data

Along with your user researcher and data analyst, you have run a few initial surveys and interview cycles, showing the following:

• Customers report a 32% Sean Ellis Test score (“How would you feel if you could no longer use Slack AI?”), which indicates there isn’t product-market fit for the feature just yet. Your team goal is to get that score to 40% and up.

• Customers use Slack AI features 1-2 per week, whereas your company goal is to get people to use AI features 3-4 times a day.

• Customers report that the AI features are slightly hard to find, so they forget to use them.

Goal

Come up with a new, radical way for Slack users to find and engage with its AI features, that is significantly easier to find than the current version. Assume that the technical possibilities are endless, and your world-class team can work around any concept you can imagine.

Deliverable

• Define the goal and key metrics for an initiative like that. What data will show you if you are successful?

• Come up with a few ideas using sketching techniques such as Crazy 8’s or Concept Sketching.

• Pick your favorite idea, mock it up in Figma, and create a simple, medium-fidelity prototype. You can use one of the Slack UI Kits that are available in the Figma Community to take some inspiration on the overall direction.

Sharing your work

This is an internal exercise, but sharing your work is recommended. If you’d like to openly get feedback from the Designary community, you can share your process and output in the Designary chat.

Recommended tools

• Pen & Paper for sketching and ideation.

• Figjam or Miro for noting down your thinking & problem definition.

• Figma for mockups and prototypes.

This challenge will help you with

• Product thinking

• AI-first Design

• UI Design

• UX Design

• Prototyping

Disclaimer

This challenge's scenario, data, and content are purely conceptual and for educational purposes.

Scenario

You are working as a product designer at an early-stage startup called Readle, which is about book discovery. The startup has just closed its first funding round.

You are working on the first version of the Readle app, a product that helps people discover books they might enjoy.

The team is two co-founders — one with a background in data science and another with a technical product background — and a full-stack engineer.

Intro

Avid book readers often look for new book recommendations, but options are limited and very old-fashioned.

Key players in the market are Goodreads and StoryGraph. However, people find their apps quite outdated and only use them out of necessity due to a lack of better options.

The founding team has developed an AI algorithm that achieves better book recommendations than the market standard using the following inputs:

• The genres you are interested in.

• Your 3 favorite book authors.

• The last 3 books that you read and whether you liked them or not.

Goal

The goal of this challenge is to design the end-to-end flow for the Readle app, including the following use cases:

• Users can sign up for an account.

• Users can fill in their onboarding information, including their favorite genres and their favorite book authors, as well as the last 3 books they read.

• Users can see book recommendations and add them to their reading list or purchase them directly.

• Users can mark books as read and rate them — you can decide on the rating system based on what you think works best.

• Users can see AI-generated content about books, such as a summary, and tags that help people decide whether the book is right for them.

Deliverable

• (Optional) Interview 1-2 people who use apps or websites to get book recommendations to identify key pain points and opportunities.

• (Optional) Do some light desk research by looking at book forums and Reddit communities and seeing how people currently get their book recommendations.

• (Optional) Use sketching or low-fidelity wireframing to generate a few ideas of how this flow would work.

• Mock up the experience in Figma and create a rough prototype. You can use an existing UI kit or create the app from scratch.

• Think of the key metrics you would want to track once the app is launched. What business metrics would be important? What product data would you want to track and why?

Sharing your work

This is an internal exercise, but sharing your work is recommended. If you’d like to openly get feedback from the Designary community, you can share your process and output in the comment section by adding a note.

Recommended tools

• Pen & Paper for sketching and ideation

• Figjam or Miro for noting down your thinking & problem definition

• Figma for mockups and prototypes

This challenge will help you with

• Product thinking

• UI Design

• UX Design

• Prototyping

Disclaimer

This challenge's scenario, data, and content are purely conceptual and for educational purposes.

Visual design is hard.

We have spent nearly a decade hearing that visual design isn’t essential, that it’s easy, and that product designers should only spend time harnessing their product thinking, user experience fundamentals, workshops, design systems, and so on.

Yet the most prominent, design-led products we use and love pay significant attention to visual design, craft, and polish.

Think of any modern product-led company: Airbnb, Duolingo, Stripe, Uber. Their love for the actual craft of design is apparent in every interaction.

Here is the harsh truth: Visual design is really hard to practice in a world where everything is systemized and where all the resources and documentation point to thinking that it’s not something that should be practiced.

In this article, I’ll break down the most important aspects to practice your visual design skills:

• Basics

• Design languages

• Practical knowledge

• Recreating other work

• Remixing old work

• Adding variety

Get the basics right

Before you jump on to practicing, it’s essential that you understand the fundamentals of visual design that apply to user interfaces:

• Typography

• Color

• Hierarchy

• Layout & Spacing

Depending on your background, you may need an intensive deep dive into these aspects or simply a refresher and practical tips to understand how they work as part of a user interface.

• Visual hierarchy — https://blog.designary.com/p/sections-structure-and-visual-hierarchy-in-ux

• The box model — https://blog.designary.com/p/layout-basics-the-box-model

• Spacing — https://blog.designary.com/p/spacing-systems-and-scales-ui-design

• Color — https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/ui-color-palette

• Typography — https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/typography

Study design languages

There is an immense amount of knowledge you can get by simply studying widely used design languages. It will give you a solid understanding of how operating systems define core guidelines, as well as how they use interaction patterns and components.

Design languages

• Apple Human Interface Guidelines — https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines

• Material 3 — https://m3.material.io/

What to practice

What you are looking for at this step is the following:

• Understand how design languages define their typography and color systems.

• Understand how layout and spacing work.

• Understand how navigation works.

• Get familiar with standard components such as tab bars, buttons, forms, tables, toasts, banners, bottom sheets, and so on.

• Get familiar with key interaction patterns: E.g. when are modals used vs. full screens?

Learn from other design systems

Studying design languages is a great first step, but you might also want to understand how different companies create their unique design languages and interface kits.

The best way to do this is by looking up open-source or publicly available design systems by prominent, design-driven companies.

One of my favorite resources for design systems is The Component Gallery, in which you’ll find both publicly available design systems, but also a breakdown of standard UI components and how they are used in each design system.

💡 The practical tip: Every time you design a new component, try understand how other popular design systems use it, what variations they use and why. It will help you think in systems, rather than in screens.

Get practical knowledge

One of the easiest ways to accelerate your learning in visual design is to get a book that focuses on practical tips rather than theory.

When I started my career in product design nearly 14 years ago, most of my knowledge came from trial and error. It worked, but it took me years to realize what I was doing wrong and how I could fix it.

Luckily, today, there are plenty of practical resources that you can use to speed up your learning and understand key methods, tips, and techniques for designing better interfaces.

My favorite recommendation —that I use for all teams I work with— is Practical UI by Adham Dannaway. It’s a very easy read with short, practical tips on user interface design, including essential knowledge, common mistakes and ways to fix them, as well as empirical tips that will improve how you think of and design user interfaces.

There are several UI design books that offer practical tips, which you can find below (pick one depending on your needs):

• Practical UI — https://www.practical-ui.com?aff=eEnA8

• Refactoring UI — https://www.refactoringui.com/

• The Design Manual — https://uiadrian.gumroad.com/l/design-manual

Build intuition and muscle memory

Especially early on in your career, no matter how much you have studied the fundamentals of design, you will not have built enough intuition or “design muscle memory,” so to speak.

• You may make mistakes in spacing or alignment

• You might accidentally combine different text styles

• You might not pick colors that work well together

The best way to build design muscle memory is through mindful repetition.

And the best way to practice repetition is by copying popular products of different styles and understanding the patterns that emerge.

Luckily—and contrary to the method I followed 14 years ago when I was starting—there are tons of tools available to do this.

The method 💡

• Go to a design inspiration library (I highly recommend Mobbin, Appshots, and Pageflows) and find a product that inspires you.

• Download a set of screens, ideally of a full flow or at least part of a flow.

• Paste them in Figma and try to recreate them from scratch.

• Pay attention to layout, spacing, color, typography, and any small details that make the interface polished and delightful.

• Practice this once a week, ideally on different types of products (mobile vs. web, consumer vs. business facing)

Inspiration websites

• Mobbin — https://mobbin.com/

• Appshots — https://appshots.design/

• Pageflows — https://pageflows.com/

• Nicelydone — https://nicelydone.club/

(Pick one depending on the type of inspiration you need)

💡 The practical tip: Every week, use an inspiration website to review and digest new trends. Get a visual design book and study its practical tips.

Remix your old work

A big part of improving your visual design skills is identifying your previous mistakes and learning from them.

There is no better way to do this than to revisit your previous work and improve it. A fresh take on a product or feature you worked on 3-6 months ago can do wonders for practicing everything you are learning.

The method 💡

• Go back to your previous designs every 3 months and refine them: What’s not working? What would you do differently?

• Identify what’s not working and why based on all the knowledge you are gathering through the other methods:

  • Is the spacing consistent?

  • Are you using too many different text or color styles?

  • Does it feel branded and delightful?

  • Are there ways to improve the hierarchy or completely rethink the layout?

Work on different products and styles

The best visual designers constantly explore different styles.

However, exploring styles becomes practically impossible when you work within the restrictions of a single product or design system.

If you are working as a full-time designer in an organization, you can only explore so much on your own, no matter how creative or entrepreneurial you are.

There are a few solutions to get around this.

Some of the most talented designers that I know became extremely capable visually through freelancing; the constant friction with products of different mediums, formats, and industries can drastically accelerate the progression of a designer’s visual skills.

However, freelancing is not for everyone. You might also be in a full-time role you enjoy that doesn’t allow for outside work.

The good news is there are other, more flexible solutions that you can delve into no matter your current work situation.

At its essence, you need to do exploratory work outside your regular working constraints:

• Do conceptual work on a popular product that you use

• Create a conceptual product from scratch

• Take on a realistic design challenge

What to explore

• Business vs. consumer products

• Friendly vs. strict design styles

• Illustrated vs. photo-heavy

• Mobile vs. web-based products

• Minimalist vs. Content heavy interfaces

• Different industries and verticals

💡 The practical tip: Every week, set some time aside to work on something that’s completely different than your day-to-day. This could be a fictional product, a real product that you use, or a design challenge.

The method summarized

• Daily: Every day, use an inspiration website to review and digest new trends. Get a visual design book and study its practical tips.

• Weekly: Recreate a product flow using an inspiration website. Understand key patterns, how they use layout and spacing, how they use color and typography, and any small detail that adds delight to the interface.

• Every 3 weeks: Work on something that’s different to your day-to-day. This can be a side project, a design challenge, or an improvement

• Every 3 months: Review your previous designs and note down what’s off, then try to improve it by rethinking your approach.

Thanks for reading this in-depth guide! If you are new to product design, I also recommend checking out my product design masterclass, a self-paced, end-to-end product design course for beginners and mid-level designers.

Scenario

You are working for Uber as part of the passenger special projects team. Your team comprises a product manager, two full-stack engineers, a content designer, and a user researcher.

Intro

The Uber commercial team is considering testing a new initiative for passengers: allowing them to pre-order drinks and snacks for their rides.

• Rides less than 15’ long allow users to preorder drinks (water, iced coffee and tea, soft drinks).

• Rides longer than 15’ also allow users to preorder specific types of packaged snacks (crisps, puffs)

Uber drivers will stock some of these items in the car trunk in special fridges & containers. Only selected, high-rated Uber drivers will participate in this program, so the service won’t always be available to the passenger.

Your product squad has been tasked with developing a prototype for this new experience, testing it with users, and evaluating its viability.

Goal

Come up with a high-fidelity flow and prototype to allow users to pre-order drinks and snacks when hailing an Uber.

• Think of the end-to-end user flow;

  • How would you announce this feature to users?

  • When should the user see this option?

  • How do they order and pay?

• Make sure to include happy and unhappy paths;

  • What happens if an item is out of stock?

  • What happens if drinks aren’t cold yet?

  • What happens if a driver doesn’t offer this service?

• Include a way for the user to rate their ordering experience.

Deliverable

• (Optional) Interview 1-2 people who use Uber regularly for longer rides and test their intent to have drinks or snacks onboard.

• (Optional) Use sketching or low-fidelity wireframing to generate a few ideas of how this flow would work.

• Define what metrics or qualitative data you plan to gather and evaluate to test the viability, usability, and satisfaction of this new experience. What commercial and product metrics are important? What research methods are you planning on using to get deeper insight?

• Mock up the experience in Figma and create a rough prototype. If you are practicing your UI skills, recreate the app from scratch. Otherwise, try a file from the Figma community and use the public Uber Base Gallery.

Sharing your work

This is an internal exercise, but sharing your work is recommended. You can share your process and output in the comment section (by adding a note) if you’d like to openly get feedback from the Designary community or simply share it internally with your team and peers.

Recommended tools

• Pen & Paper for sketching and ideation

• Figjam or Miro for noting down your thinking & problem definition

• Figma for mockups and prototypes

This challenge will help you with

• Product thinking

• UI Design

• UX Design

• Prototyping

Disclaimer

This challenge's scenario, data, and content are purely conceptual and for educational purposes. There is no affiliation with the companies portrayed.

👋 Welcome to the Product Design Challenge: Every month, you’ll receive a realistic product design challenge to work on your skills, including product thinking, UX design, research, and prototyping. You can use it purely for practice purposes or even as a portfolio case study. If you don’t want to receive the monthly challenge, you can manage your preferences in your account settings.

Scenario

You are working for Threads (Meta) as part of the consumer app team. Your team comprises a product manager, two full-stack engineers, a back-end engineer, and a user researcher.

Intro

The Threads commercial team has noticed that many users churn after Weeks 1 and 4, as the content they discover in the app is “less relevant than on X”.

Through a recent testing cycle, your user researcher has come back with the following key issues, as reported by your users:

• A lot of the content on the home feed is irrelevant.

• There is no way for users to see the most recent posts in their home tab.

• There is no way for users to filter content by people they follow.

• The hashtag functionality is hard to understand/use.

Goal

Come up with a few ideas on updating the app home screen in order to:

• Increase average time spent on the Theads app.

• Increase app retention after Week 1 and Week 4.

You can suggest new features, update the layout, or suggest a change in the algorithm (if you are up for it). All are potentially viable ideas that will be evaluated by your product manager, tech lead, and commercial team.

Deliverable

• Optionally, interview 1-2 people about using the Threads app, to further capture insight on the stated problems.

• Come up with 1-3 ideas on how to solve the most notable issues from above.

• Optionally, sketch out some of these ideas on paper.

• Mock up at least one of these ideas in Figma. If you are practicing your UI skills, recreate the app from scratch. Otherwise, try following a file from the Figma community.

• Optionally, create a working prototype and test it with the users you interviewed.

Sharing your work

This is an internal exercise, but sharing your work is recommended. You can share your process and output in the comment section (by adding a note) if you’d like to openly get feedback from the Designary community or simply share it internally with your team and peers.

Recommended tools

• Pen & Paper for sketching and ideation

• Figjam or Miro for noting down your thinking & problem definition

• Figma for mockups and prototypes

This challenge will help you with

• Product thinking

• UI Design

• UX Design

• Prototyping

Disclaimer

This challenge's scenario, data, and content are purely conceptual and for educational purposes. There is no affiliation with the companies portrayed.

I have a simple tip I use to reinforce design innovation on a daily basis.

It's called Safe vs. Radical Thinking, a mental model you can apply whenever you are thinking of solutions for a given problem.

The dangerous habit of opting for quick wins

In most cases, working in fast-paced environments means product designers often opt for quick-win “MVP” solutions.

Product Managers are often happy with that approach: it means the team can deliver at a good pace while still managing to gradually move key metrics.

But this mentality can create a dangerous habit of always thinking of the safest ideas; ideas that can be launched quickly without too much effort.

And then the big, bold, radical ideas never see the light of day.

Thinking safe, then radical

To break out of that habit loop, we need to allow ourselves to think of bold ideas.

In order to do this, whenever I need to come up with a design approach for a given problem, I think of (minimum) three different ideas:

1. A safe one — "What would I do if we needed to launch ASAP?"

2. A radical one — "What would I do if there were no constraints?"

3. A balanced, middle-ground option — "What if there is a compromise between the two?"

The safe idea

“What would I do if we needed to launch something as quickly as possible?”

I often start with the safe idea.

That's often a combination of using existing flows and components and sticking to what has already worked for the product in the past.

I like to think of safe ideas as a baseline on which to improve rather than the default suggested route.

The radical idea

I then push myself to think of a radical idea.

“What would I do if there were no constraints? What if we had all the time, capacity and resources to build anything that would solve the problem?”

This idea may leverage new tech, require operational changes, or be fairly challenging to deliver.

In most cases, ideas like that are completely disregarded and moved to the bottom of a backlog that no one ever checks.

However, radical thinking does a few things:

• It pushes designers out of their comfort zone

• It sparks a lot of creativity due to boundaries being removed

And, very importantly, it creates the opportunity for a middle-ground area:

The balanced, middle-ground idea

"Is there a way I can combine elements of the two or create a middle-ground solution?

In many cases, parts of the radical idea can be tested earlier on.

More importantly, the creative thinking involved in coming up with a radical idea sparks some interesting, shorter-term ideas that the team can launch without all the added effort.

Anecdotally, I find that the best product ideas are produced in this middle-ground area after some safe vs. radical thinking has taken place.

In summary

Whenever you are tasked with finding a design solution to a problem, try to think of three different ideas: a safe, a radical, and a balanced option.

Using that thinking model will do the following:

1. It will help you be more creative within logical boundaries.

2. It will help your team exit the rabbit hole of only going for the quickest solutions.

3. It will help develop your short vs. long-term thinking.

Hope you found this entry useful! If you have any additional thoughts, let me know in the comments 👇

👋 Welcome to the Product Design Challenge: Every month, you’ll receive a realistic product design challenge to work on your skills, including product thinking, UX design, research, and prototyping. You can use it purely for practice purposes or even as a portfolio case study. If you don’t want to receive the monthly challenge you can manage your preferences in your account settings.

Scenario

You are working as a product designer for Spotify in the podcast team. Your team comprises a product manager, a front-end engineer, a back-end engineer, and a user researcher.

Intro

Improving retention for paid subscriptions is one of the company’s most important objectives for this year.

Data & Key Considerations:

• The team has decided to invest more in podcasts to increase engagement and retention.

• Users who listen to podcasts on Spotify retain 24% more at 6 months than users who don’t.

• Currently, users on a paid plan don’t get any added benefit when listening to podcasts.

• Engineers in your team have been playing around with the OpenAI API and are open to trying options that use Generative AI for new ideas and features.

Goal

• Identify some key opportunities/features to improve the podcast experience on Spotify to increase usage and retention for paid subscriptions.

• (Optional) Interview 1-2 people in your local network who listen to podcasts on Spotify or other apps to identify their biggest challenges.

• (Optional) Sketch some of these ideas on a piece of paper.

• Pick one of these ideas and design a high-fidelity prototype on Figma.

Hints

• Take inspiration from other podcast apps; what key features provide high engagement? Try putting together your inspiration and references in your Figma or Figjam file.

• You can choose to do this exercise on the mobile or desktop app.

• You can explore options that use Generative AI or not; it’s entirely up to you.

• You can use openly available Figma libraries such as this one for desktop or this one for mobile.

• Alternatively, if you would like to practice your UI design skills, try recreating the Spotify UI from scratch.

💡 Retention is a challenging metric to track, as you can only see the results of a product update after time. How can you use more short-term product metrics to evaluate how successful you are?

Sharing your work

This is an internal exercise, but sharing your work is recommended. You can share your process and output in the comment section (by adding a note) if you’d like to openly get feedback from the Designary community or simply share it internally with your team and peers.

Recommended tools

• Pen & Paper for sketching and ideation

• Figjam or Miro for noting down your thinking & problem definition

• Figma for mockups and prototypes

This challenge will help you with

• Product thinking

• Business thinking

• UI Design

• UX Design

• Prototyping

Disclaimer

This challenge's scenario, data, and content are purely conceptual and for educational purposes. There is no affiliation with the companies portrayed.

If you don’t want to receive the monthly challenge but would still like to receive the Designary newsletter, you can manage your subscription preferences in your account settings.

Last updated: January 2026

🧪 User Research

• Maze ($) — Product suite for unmoderated usability tests.

• Hotjar ($$) — Brilliant toolkit for in-app surveys, recruitment, and user recordings.

• User Interviews ($$) — Recruit users for interviews from a participant pool or from your own user database. Offers built-in scheduling and incentive management.

• Lookback ($$) — For unmoderated testing on mobile apps.

• Great Question ($) — For managing your user research panel.

💬 Transcripts

• Gemini — Google’s Gemini, if your team uses the Google Suite, is a brilliant transcript and note-taking tool that defeats the need for more specialised transcription tools.

• Granola.ai — A desktop transcript tool with smart note-taking features, that works across multiple video-calling platforms.

🎯 Collaboration

• Slack — Use Slack to exchange quick feedback, give context on what you are working on, and share research insights.

• Loom — Use Loom to record video walkthroughs of your work or give detailed feedback to designers or engineers.

• Screen Studio ($) — Record professional-looking video walkthroughs of your screen and product. Particularly useful for creating product onboarding videos without the need for an animator.

🎨 Design

• Figma — The only essential tool you need to know for interface design.

⚡️ Prototyping

• Figma — Use Figma for all standard prototyping and basic interactions.

• Protopie ($) — Optionally, use Protopie for advanced interactions, user input, and leveraging a device’s hardware features. I only recommend Protopie if you are designing mobile apps.

• Lovable ($) — A really user-friendly AI-powered prototyping tool for websites and web apps.

• Replit ($) — A slightly more complex, but very robust tool for building apps and prototypes with AI.

✏️ Writing & All-purpose AI

• Gemini — Great for writing, product sense and image generation with Nano Banana.

• Claude — Great for combining writing, product sense and building small products from one interface.

• ChatGPT — Great for writing and product sense.

Tip: Pick one of the tools above depending on what works best for your needs.

📖 Documentation

• Notion — Notion is fantastic for design documentation. Create a repository of your principles, guidelines, onboarding processes, frameworks, and tooling.

🖋️ Whiteboarding

• Figjam ($) — A great whiteboarding option with a delightful and easy-to-learn user experience. Good for smaller teams with smaller budgets as you can have an unlimited number of drafts at no cost.

• Miro ($$) — Miro is still a fantastic tool and offers several advanced capabilities and integrations compared to Figjam.

👀 Inspiration

• Mobbin ($) — The most popular app screenshot gallery. Best if you are working on mobile, especially consumer-facing apps.

• Appshots ($) — Another recent app screenshot and flow gallery.

• Pageflows ($) — Browse videos and flows from the most popular web and mobile apps. Particularly good for B2B web products.

• Design Spells — Interaction details from well-crafted products.

🎨 Color

• Coolors — Use to generate new color palettes.

• UI Colors — Easy-to-use color shade generator.

• Colorbox — An advanced color palette tool that allows you to configure your color palette and ensure all shades are consistent.

• Supa Palette — A great color palette generator plugin for Figma.

⏺️ Icons

• Phosphor — One of the largest free icon libraries.

• Lucide — A great open-source icon library.

• Nucleo ($) — Icon library and organizer app.

• Streamline ($$) — The biggest paid icon library.

• Material Icons — Free icon library by Google’s Material Design.

📝 Type

• Fontbase — An optional, free font manager to manage all your installed fonts without slowing down your device.

• Typescale ($) — A robust type scale generator tool with free and paid options, great if you are setting up your type and text styles in your design system.

🧑‍🎨 Illustration & Visual assets

• DrawKit — Great library with free and premium illustrations.

• Undraw — A free, large repository of open-source illustrations.

• Wannathis — Free and premium 3D assets.

• Ouch — Free and premium sets of modern-style illustrations.

• Humaaans — An open-source library of illustrated characters.

• Lummi — AI-generated illustrations based on existing references.

🎥 Animation

• Rive — Robust engine for interactive, lightweight animations.

• LottieFiles — Browse readymade animations and create your own from within Figma (now with a text-to-video function).

• Jitter — A highly user-friendly, easy-to-use tool for creating simple animations. Exports Lottie or GIF/MP4.

🏞️ Photography

• Unsplash — The most popular free stock photo gallery.

• ChatGPT ($) — OpenAI’s latest image generation model is an incredibly powerful and great value tool for generating photography, basic illustration and 3D assets.

• Midjourney ($) — An incredibly capable GenAI tool that excels in realistic imagery.

• Visual Electric ($) — A great tool for AI-generated imagery, with a canvas that feels similar to other design tools.

Product workshops usually revolve around several repeating exercises:

• Idea generation

• Thematic analysis

• Voting

• Synthesis

Dot voting is one of the simplest voting exercises in which participants are asked to place their votes openly on a selected number of ideas.

It’s one of the most effective methods to quickly decide on what to focus on as a group, and it usually takes less than 5-10 minutes to set up.

When to use dot voting

Use dot voting when you want to quickly narrow down a list of items and identify what’s most valuable to your group.

You can use dot voting for any type of group decision:

• Voting for the biggest issues or opportunities for a product.

• Voting for which area of a product you want to focus on.

• Voting for which solution to pick for a given problem, as part of an ideation session.

• Voting for which assumptions you’d like to validate as a group.

How to use it

If you are doing an in-person workshop, you can either use a dot sticker pack or sticky notes, which may be easier to find in your local shop.

If you are running a remote workshop on Figjam or Miro, put aside a small area in your whiteboard with the right number of dot votes for each of your group participants.

Setting the rules

• Allow people to only place one vote per item, unless you want to indicate strong preferences across the board.

• Place votes silently to eliminate group bias.

Running a dot vote

1. Align on the voting rules with all participants.

2. Give each participant a number of stickers equal to their respective votes.

3. Set a time box for voting. We usually recommend 5-10 minutes for a dot voting session: more experienced groups will need less time.

4. Ask participants to place their votes silently.

5. Once the time is up, call out the ideas that are winning.

6. Optionally, you can do a quick roundtable to hear the reasons why people voted for specific ideas. That should only be done after the voting to eliminate any bias in the decision process.

The right number of votes per participant

There are two popular methods for deciding on the number of votes, which depend on what you are trying to achieve from the session.

If you want a clear winner

If you’d like to quickly decide on something, divide the total number of items by two, and then divide that number by the participant number. Finally, round the number up.

Example:  If you 25 ideas to vote from and 5 participants, you would use: 25/2/5 = 2.5, rounded up = 3 per participant.

If you want to generate a heatmap

If you want to see the group’s interest and generate a heatmap, then you may generally want more votes per person.

In this case, give each participant votes equal to roughy one quarter of the number of ideas.

Example:  If you 25 ideas to vote from and 5 participants, you would use: 25/4 = 6.25, rounded down = 6 per participant.

Dot voting template

If you are looking for a template to use for Dot Voting, try our free Figma Community Resource.

References

Dot Voting, NN Group — https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dot-voting/

Dot Voting Template, Miro — https://miro.com/templates/dot-voting/

Dot Voting Template, Figjam — https://www.figma.com/community/file/1334419179628212327/dot-voting-template

My product design career started shortly after university and was riddled with a lot of conflicting opportunities.

I studied software engineering, and I absolutely loved it. The career path was fairly clear; I was a half-decent engineer, and everyone around me seemed to be getting good opportunities in the field.

But something felt slightly off.

I liked engineering when things worked but hated it when they didn’t. Building something from scratch was fascinating to me, and I could easily code all night. Debugging and maintenance, on the other hand, made me feel sick.

I couldn’t see myself following engineering as a career path.

I was way more interested in the “why” behind building apps and products. The problems being solved, the end user experience, and finding ways to delight users.

First steps into product design

During my university years, I did a lot of side projects: some paid, others completely voluntary.

Side projects were a great avenue for me to actively practice my skills, build connections and also get some real-world experience to counteract the purely theoretical nature of my studies.

One of these side projects led me to meet someone who genuinely wanted to invest in me. They knew little about me but offered me a junior product role at an up-and-coming startup with an international audience.

Rule #1: Side projects are one of the most effective ways to practice and get exposure early on.

The role wasn’t design-specific: I could code, had designed a few websites and apps, and had a lot of drive. It was more of an open invitation to “join us and do whatever you can to make things work”.

It’s important to note that I wasn’t offered a role because of my technical skills — at this point, I had little real-world experience, and my knowledge in product was in its infancy.

I was offered a role because I showed drive and passion to learn/explore.

Rule #2: Early on in your career, determination and drive will often outperform technical superiority.

I didn’t know exactly what to do, but I knew I needed to deliver value from day one.

Progressing to senior

Progressing is often a combination of different parameters:

• A personal aspiration that acts as the North star

• A healthy environment that fosters growth

• Ambitious people around you that fuel that growth

I was lucky to have all of them in that first startup role.

So in that year, I did everything I could to grow while delivering value to the business.

1. I learned everything I could possibly learn about UX.

2. I helped with any type of product work there was: web apps, mobile apps, websites. This made me highly adaptable, which proved to be one of the most crucial skills for my career progression.

3. I helped engineers with their challenges — even beyond design — which made me understand what they value and what makes their job easier.

4. I helped build investment decks, which taught me the value of storytelling and — very importantly — the “so what” behind data.

5. I helped with internal presentations, which taught me that your designs and features are only as good as the level at which they are presented.

I didn’t care about specializing (yet). I didn’t mind that there was no process or prioritization framework. What was important for me at that stage was to deliver value to the business to prove I deserve a long-term role.

Which brings me to one of my most important career rules.

Rule #3: People care if you deliver value. They rarely care how you do it.

So I went all in on that.

It meant I was in for quite a bit of pressure, but it also skyrocketed my progression to senior in less than a few years.

The breadth of problems I was tackling meant that I had to quickly upskill in:

• Every aspect of UX

• Business thinking

• Problem solving

• User research

• Storytelling

• Writing

Looking back, it all feels chaotic.

But it was also one of the quickest learning experiences I’ve ever had in my life. It taught me skills — soft and technical — that would take me years to build on if I started today.

That brings me to my fourth rule, and one of the most important ones:

Rule #4: You will have limited chances of exponential growth in your lifetime. When you do, you need to go all in.

Tackling scale

My second role in product design was quite different.

A year and a half later, I was hired as a senior product designer at a high-growth consumer tech startup.

Even though the company was still quite early-stage, the scale was drastically different: It was a consumer business with exponential growth and tens of thousands of daily customers.

Here is the problem: I was good at going from 0 to 1 but had never experienced going from 1 to 10.

This also meant that what mattered previously didn’t matter much anymore: I wasn’t doing pitch decks or taking on small side projects.

As a senior, I needed to focus on driving scale for the product and the business.

So I invested in three key areas:

1. I started working with data daily. Working with marketers and engineers to understand the why behind data, figuring out ways to move that data, and realizing that a 1% increase might mean five or six figure changes in annual company revenue.

2. I had to build a design system to drive that scale. Multiple products, multiple countries, and tons of ongoing experimentation meant that things could go rogue easily unless there was a centralized system to allow for consistency and speed.

3. I learned the importance of building authority and influencing strategic product decisions. My early work in that role helped me build trust with the founders and key product stakeholders, which meant that very soon, I was having an active say in what we were building and why we were building it.

The third point was one of the most influential ones to my career, which also brings me to a crucial rule:

Rule #5: To get a voice at the table you need to first build trust. Most people demand a voice without doing the hard work.

Tackling problems at scale helped me grow in a very different direction than before.

Going from a B2B startup to a B2C scaleup was daunting at first, but it accounted for the majority of my early learning and growth.

Rule #6: Every role you choose should help you evolve in a specific area. If you are doing the same thing again and again, your growth will halt.

Breaking into the international market

After several years of working in the Greek market, I felt stuck.

I had already worked with promising startups but was nowhere near my growth aspirations. I wasn’t learning anymore, and I had little to aspire to.

The local market had brilliant people, but it was only a handful.

So I made the decision to target the global market and work with international teams.

I wanted to work with:

• Product designers and design managers that were 10x better than me

• Engineers that were top of their league

• Seasoned product managers

• Ambitious founders

Rule #7: Surround yourself with people that are much better than you; that’s the only true way to grow.

So here is what I did:

Firstly, I devoted a good year to building a very strong design portfolio and being more outspoken with my work by sharing it on different platforms.

Getting featured on these platforms meant that I started getting a lot of exposure to great product and design teams worldwide.

Secondly, I felt like I was ready to lead teams internationally, therefore I also wanted my salary to reflect that.

So I effectively doubled my rates before going out to the market.

Through my portfolio work, word of mouth, and a bit of luck, I was able to secure a long-term contract with an international company at my new rates.

🤯

At first, I felt like an imposter.

But looking back, I know that every time I thought, “Do I deserve that?” and pushed beyond my uncertainty, it became a step change in my career.

On the other hand, every time I undermined myself and asked for less than I deserved, I was unhappy and ultimately regretted it.

Rule #8: Ask and you shall receive. Then do everything you can to prove yourself.

Big tech, failure, acceptance, growth

After several years of remote work, I once again wanted a change.

Working remotely was great, but I wanted to be where all the action was. I wanted to meet the teams I was working with, connect with new founders in person, even talk about obscure design or engineering problems over coffee.

At the time, a recruiter from Big Tech approached me to relocate and join their team in London.

This felt like a great idea: It would facilitate my move abroad, be a great new opportunity for me to grow and learn from, and give me experience in much larger-scale problems.

The feedback I received after each round was extremely positive, and the process was progressing rapidly.

The ego part of my brain kept repeating, “It would be impossible to lose this”.

And then 5 interviews and several flights in, I got rejected.

Rejection from big tech hit hard but gave me three profound realizations:

1. Humbling moments in life don’t come often, but when they do, you need to fully embrace them and learn.

2. Even though I was good at what I was doing, my ways of doing it didn’t necessarily conform to the needs of big tech at that point in time.

I realized that the narrative I was presenting — helping things during early-stage — was somewhat irrelevant to teams of such scale. The feedback that cost me that role was that I “didn’t have experience in a big established team”.

Which leads me to another crucial rule:

Rule #9: You can’t be good at everything. But there should be one thing where people around you go “You are the best at X”.

Throughout this process, I also realized that London was the city I wanted to be in; everything about it just clicked.

So I made the decision to move, regardless of the company and role.

A few months after my move, a co-founder of an ambitious health tech startup in London approached me. We had worked together in the past, and they needed someone to help kickstart things in product and design.

Rule #10: The best career opportunities come from building long-term relationships

The mission was big, bold, and ambitious, all of the things I love doing.

So I joined them.

A year later, that same big tech company from before approached me again. By then, I knew the enterprise world wasn’t for me.

To this day, I only work for early-stage companies.

Hope you enjoyed the story. 👋

In summary

• Rule #1: Side projects are one of the most effective ways to practice and get exposure early on.

• Rule #2: Determination and drive will often outperform technical superiority early on.

• Rule #3: People care if you deliver value. They rarely care how you do it.

• Rule #4: You will have limited chances of exponential growth in your lifetime. When you do, you need to go all in.

• Rule #5: To get a voice at the table, you must first build trust.

• Rule #6: Every role you choose should help you evolve in a specific area.

• Rule #7: Surround yourself with people who are much better than you; that’s the only true way to grow.

• Rule #8: Ask, and you shall receive. Then do everything you can to prove yourself.

• Rule #9: You can’t be good at everything. But there should be one thing where people say “You are the best at X”.

• Rule #10: The best career opportunities come from building long-term relationships.