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What's a product
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 p
designer?

Well—you are. Or you’re about to become one.

And you’re a part of something big: a design renaissance. The rise

of the product designer.

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 Because design is the new language of business. “Software is
eating the world.” Technology isn’t the di erentiator that it used
to be. Startup costs have dropped near zero, lowering the barrier
to new entrants. Companies can now operate at scale in single
domains, entirely in code.

And all that means that the product and its experience have
become the major di erentiators. Code’s easy to replicate. A
superior experience is not. A product’s design—how it meets
human needs, how it brings delight, and how it works, both
behind the scenes and on stage—has never been more in the
spotlight.

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 So what does that mean for the designer, the one whose job used
to just be to “make it pretty?”

It means that you now lead the charge. For the customer. For the
experience. For the brand. For the business.

Geo Teehan put it like this: “This is a most amazing time to be a

designer. It’s the golden age, we just don’t know it yet. In some

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 cases, you can work directly with people like Ev, Zuck and the like.
That’s pretty insane.”

So, you want to design the product of the future? You’d better know
your design history.

Because the role of product designer was born in a typewritten

memo from 1931, penned by a manager at Procter & Gamble, who
would later become Secretary of Defense and create NASA.

Don’t buy it? Let me take you back.

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 It’s May 1931. Cincinnati, Ohio. Neil McElroy is responsible for
growing sales for the Camay soap brand, and it’s not going well.
Camay’s in danger of being overshadowed by P&G’s Ivory soap.

McElroy realizes that the way his organization has an old-

fashioned structure. So he sits down in front of his Royal
Typewriter and taps out a proposal that would impact industries
that didn’t even exist yet. His proposal: the brand man.

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 The brand man was a novel idea at the time. Companies like P&G
hired people for speci c business functions such as, say, sales or
research or administration.

But the brand man—and later, brand manager—would be tasked

with guiding a product to success. He’d seek to understand which
processes worked and which didn’t, trying “to apply this same
treatment to other territories that are comparable.” And he’d go
into the eld to measure results, reporting back with data to
tweak their approach.

Soon, P&G would reorganize their company around this newly

invented role, and McElroy would take over the company.
Competitors around the world copied them.

McElroy couldn’t have foreseen his role in creating the concept of

product management in software. But it was a former P&G brand
manager who would introduce this concept to software in 1981:
Scott Cook, founder of Intuit. Their rst product was Quicken. You
may have heard of it.

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 A young Scott Cook proudly holds up Quicken.

Now, in 2015, we’re witnessing the rise of product design. And the
product designer stands on the shoulders of the product manager.
So to really understand what’s up with product design, we rst
need to understand how the product manager came to be.

Rewind to the 1980s. Software companies were on the rise. As new

product development got more complicated and engineers ran out
of bandwidth, usability tended to su er. On top of that, products
were becoming more and more consumer-oriented.

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 Scott Cook was one of the rst to implement brand management–
like principles at a tech company. From day 1, he sought to observe
customer needs and solve them with a product.

Other companies, like Microsoft, came at product development

from a di erent direction. They realized, in Joel Spolsky’s words,
that:

“[The] marketing team was ranting and raving about customer needs
and nobody had time to talk to them or translate their MBA-speak
into actual features. There was a lot of product design stu that took a
lot of work: talking to users, running usability tests, reviewing
competitive products, and thinking hard about how to make things
easier, and most programmers just didn’t have the time (nor were
they particularly good at it).”

Microsoft decided to ll the gap, and named the role, “program

manager.”

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 That was the 1980s. Flash forward 30 years and we have a new
term: product designer. So what’s the di erence?

The product designer blends aspects of a product manager and a

designer. Product management as we know it is shifting into the
realm of the designer.

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 In other words, a product designer bears responsibility for 2 broad
tasks:

1. Identifying the opportunity for a new product in a customer’s life

2. Bringing that product into existence

Why has this happened?

As noted earlier, design has become a signi cant competitive

advantage. To realize that advantage, companies need people
who understand the customer, the problems they face, and how
the product can help them overcome those problems. Then, that
understanding needs to be synthesized, visualized, and designed
into a solution. And someone has to choreograph the epic process
of bringing that solution to light, ensuring the e ective
collaboration of folks from a host of disciplines, including writing,
web dev, engineering, marketing, and more.

Of course, like most roles in the tech world, a product designer’s

responsibilities will shift slightly with every new company and

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 challenge. In some places, product designers might need to learn
to write code to bring a product to life. In others, a deep
understanding of a customer’s psychology is a critical ingredient.

But wherever they call home, product designers work to close the gap
between developer and customer.

The customer is who the product designer really works for. And in
our next chapter, that’s exactly who we’re going to examine.

Praxis
History and theory are nice and all, but they fade quickly without
practice. Moving forward, at the end of every lesson we’ll
highlight 3 action items you can apply to your design process right
now. Because your time is precious. (And reading sentence
fragments is easier than reading full sentences.)

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Sources

http://tedbarnett.typepad.com/producteer/2012/06/a-world-
without-product-managers.html

http://onproductmanagement.net/2010/03/10/the-origins-of-
product-management-part-2/

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 http://www.innovationinpractice.com/innovation_in_practice/
2010/06/brand-man.html 

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2683579 

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/03/09.html 

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/techtalk/archive/2005/12/16/504872.
aspx 

http://eleganthack.com/27-thoughts-on-product-
management/

About the Author

 
Scott Hur
@scotthur
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 Scott Hur is the lead designer and product
manager at Tinder. He also teaches designers
new skills at designers.how.

   

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