Product design is one of the most exciting roles in tech. As a product designer, I am often innovating with cutting edge technology. I get to impact and improve the lives of others. Despite many rewarding experiences, no job is perfect, especially in the late-stage capitalistic and corporate world. There are more challenges than I can list in one post, so I’ll share my top five.

#1 It's a corporate job

Product design often seems like this mythical amazing job where you’re always creative. It seems like you spend all day doing cool, fun projects with no restraints and saving users along the way. In most cases, you're hardly doing that. 

In more established companies, you do what most corporate jobs will have you do before you design. These include stakeholder management, presentations, and meetings. These roles mean you're a businessperson before you're a designer. 

Although you're supposed to be solving user problems, business needs often take priority as they need to survive and profit first. This means business priorities are usually going to be two steps ahead of what users want, no matter how cool the feature could be.

This also means like any corporate job, you are a businessperson first and have to watch out for yourself. Because implicitly, you and your colleagues are competing for the same thing: visibility, whether that's for job security or advancement.

#2 Speaking for airtime

As a product designer, you need to speak a lot. The work doesn’t “speak for itself,” and more airtime increases your likelihood of a promotion. You may need to actively participate in meetings, even if you don't feel like it. This is a corporate job, after all. 

If you’re a woman in a male-dominated environment (e.g. tech), you have to learn how to tactfully interrupt that male coworker who always dominates the meeting by taking up all the time. You instantly got a picture of someone you know, right?

There’s been countless times I’ve sat in group meetings and a male coworker will just keep talking and talking, subtly dominating the meeting. Oftentimes they take up so much time, they end up saying what others wanted to say. I often want to interrupt them, but fear of being labeled negatively holds me back. Unfortunately, it’s not my individual dilemma as research backs this up.

A study by James Orcutt and Diana Menella show that a woman who interrupts a man speaking 64% of the time is perceived negatively. But the reverse is not true. If a man interrupting a woman speaking 64% of the time, he is not penalized. This is another reason (of many) why men have are more likely to get promoted than women. “

YOU need to make space so that your ideas are heard, because more often than not, others won’t.

#3 You’re tertiary in the trifecta of roles

Product designers are typically in a trifecta that includes product managers and software engineers. Unfortunately, product design is still tertiary in the trifecta. 

The two other functions also tend to carry more “voting power” than product designers. Also, product management and software engineering are heavily male-dominated, while product design tends to be better represented with women (especially the bottom and middle). These teams usually have more say in what gets built because they pretty much drive most of the culture in the industry. 

Frankly speaking, culture come from the leadership. In the beginning of my journey, I was told by a mentor to “be the change you want to see” when I talked about the difficulties of a lack of design culture. It sounded good in theory, but now I question that advice—how does one designer have the power to influence a whole entire company culture, let alone industry?

The advice I would give now is: get the experience you need and move on to a company where founders already invested in a mature design team.

#4 Showing your work is as important as your work

Your craft is less important than the need to get your work seen. Hence why office politics will always exist even if you think you aren’t participating. I’ve learned that having a great presentation on mediocre work is better than mediocre presentation on great work. So just be great at presentations, and all the chips fall in place right? Unfortunately, there’s more to it.

The reception of your work can vary. Some of it is within your control, while a lot of it is outside your control (others’ biases). For example, you could achieve the same results as a white male colleague, but the way your work and its perceived value can measure up differently. Your coworkers and managers rely on racialized and gendered cultural schemas to evaluate achievements. No one will admit it though, and fewer are consciously doing that.

#5 More stakeholders, more design changes

When you have a lot of stakeholders, your design decisions and solutions can change drastically. The changes can drag on and push the project timeline out by months or until it never sees the light of day.

Design is a team sport, meaning your solution will go through so many hands it won’t resemble anything close to your original design. The end result isn’t truly ever yours, especially if you work at a larger company. You don’t have ownership over it like an artist has over their paintings.

Because of the high number of stakeholders in product design, there's often more of a formal presentation structure to adhere to, depending on who you're addressing. A formal presentation for the VP of Product will be different than a formal presentation for the VP of Engineering, because they focus on different factors.

Each time they provide feedback, this could provide design changes that can elongate the project timeline. Then you do additional meetings to go over feedback AND redesign the work AND formal presentation.Conclusion

Conclusion

While I don't enjoy these aspects of product design, it's still a highly rewarding career. Over the years, I’ve grown and transformed in ways I never could’ve imagined. This is not meant to dissuade you from continuing a career in product design. I am being frank, because there needs to be at least one article that balances out this "perfect job fantasy."