The designer’s job is both doing and thinking

Wireframe, user flow, UI,… all deliverable of the designer. They are the results of our hard work. What if one day you don’t have anything to deliver? It happens very often on a product team, what would you feel?

Do you feel frustrated? Do you feel useless? Do you feel that you are redundant to the team and you would be…fired?

If your answer is yes. Yeah! You’re not alone. You get me. I felt very frustrated when I see the roadmap of my team that there are not many things for me to do work in the next three months, not many things to deliver.

Then I shared with my design manager about it got wisdom:

“Designer’s job is not only doing, but it’s also doing”

That advice reminds me of the designer’s job: solving problems. To solve problems, we need to know what the right problems are. I know it, we have to understand people how’s using our product. And the understanding just comes from talking and listing to them. That’s the time we nee dot do user research. And we need lots of time to plan for it.

We also need time to step back and think about what do we want to do for our product.

Designers are both doers and thinkers. And it’s our job. So next time when you don’t see you have enough things to deliver, it’s a good time for you to prepare for the next leap.