Speaker 1: Yo, what's going on YouTube family? It's your man Jeremy doodle here and in this video. I want to talk about who ux designers Collaborate with on a daily basis, and the reason I want to talk about this topic is because Oftentimes you might hear from other designers and myself That your soft skills are more important than your hard skills. How do you connect with people? How do you communicate your demeanor? cleaner, how you come across as a human being, all those things are important. And you're working with people on an everyday basis in order to build a product. Right. But why are your soft skills so important? And who do you collaborate with when you're using those soft skills? What do they care about? Right. What are those people that you collaborate on an everyday basis? What are those folks actually concerned about and what do they care about? So hopefully, at the end of this video, if you don't know any of that, I hope that this gives you some clarity into all of those questions. So let's get into it. So when you join an organization as an in-house UX designer, they put you on a scrum team. And that scrum team is comprised of a team of engineers. You're probably the only designer, or you're working with another designer in collaboration. you're working with one or two product managers, you're working with a copywriter or two, and if you're lucky, you might be able to work with a project manager who keeps everybody on the same page, right? But basically a scrum team is usually a team of eight to 15 people. I've never seen a scrum team larger than 15 people. These are the folks that you are working with every day, right? And as we go through this little Figma presentation, I'll talk about what each of these folks care about and what their concerns are. So a product manager, I feel like I want to start with them because oftentimes when you're working on a product, those are the folks that you are collaborating with the most. So a product manager is usually the product owner, and they're defining the roadmap and the vision for the product we're creating, right? So usually they get directives from executives on a business metric that we want to meet. So let's say that it's a clothing website and we want to increase revenue by 20%. So a product manager will have an assumption or an idea about how we can do that through a certain feature. And they'll work with the designer to come up with a solution for what that feature could be and how it could work. And they are also concerned about releasing a product in time, right? So if we need to deliver something in six months, what is it going to be? What is the long-term vision for what we create? And they're also concerned about any partnerships with customers or vendors that get created. But in my opinion, being a product manager is super difficult. I feel like it's one of the most difficult jobs on a scrum team because they're basically the folks who are trying to keep designers, engineers, other PMs, other product teams, customers, they're trying to create all these relationships with many people and so their time can get split up a lot, right? So they might be working on user stories, they might be going into meetings with designers and doing reviews. It's a lot. It's just a lot. And I'm not going to dive deeper because that could be a whole video in itself. Engineers, these are the folks who are making sure that you're creating something that's technically feasible on your project. They're concerned about, you know, if we're shipping an MVP, and it's just the first version of the project, how can that, how can what we build today be flexible enough for the long-term vision that we're creating for the product, right? So they're trying to understand the scope of work, meaning what should be shipped in six months versus what should be shipped in a year, right? And designers, on the other hand, we're like, you know, the visionaries, just like the product managers, but we're helping to create everything and make it come to life, right? So we We might do some user stories. We might do user research to understand the pain points. And we're always trying to validate those solutions. And we are also concerned about using the design system where we could collaborate with a team of engineers to make sure that we're all on the same page as far as how things look and how it functions. Copywriters, on the other hand, when you create a design, They're the folks who make sure that the copy is easy to digest, that it's easy to read, that the voice is on brand, and that if it's a technical website that folks are using, that it's just all the copy is just in human language. Other stakeholders that might be involved in your design process and the products that you build are managers, executives, marketing folks, sales folks, and other external product teams. And I don't have a page dedicated to them, but basically your manager is making sure that you are going in the right track for your career trajectory. So they might set up a one-on-one with you or a bi-weekly one-on-one with you. Your executives, those are the folks who are making sure that the teams are building the right folks, I mean, building the right products that can help meet those business metrics. Your marketing people, those are the folks who are making sure that they can, if it's a B2B product, right, they're telling the customers and consumers what we're building. And so they're doing that through social media or campaigns like advertising and whatnot. Sales folks, those are the folks who are hitting people up on the phone or building relationships with customers. And oftentimes they just want to understand what products and features we're building, right? might come to you for questions. And as far as external product teams are concerned, let's say that you're building a clothing website. That's the product that you work on, right? If you are the person who is focused on somebody clicks on a page, like a t-shirt, and they want an overview of how that t-shirt looks and how it feels and all the details around that shirt, you might have another designer who's working on another product, like the checkout flow. And user flows for what you're designing need to match up in the technical feasibility and whatever. However you guys implement those features, they have to integrate well together. So you might be collaborating with another product team as well. So in all of this, in an entire project, you might collaborate with maybe 20 or more people. if you're working on a large team, or even if you're working on a, so if you're working in a startup environment, it's much easier to make decisions, but if you're working with a larger group of people, it can get hard to make decisions because now you got a lot of opinions, and there's a lot of cooks in the kitchen, right? So your visual design skills do not always bring folks together, right? If you understand what those folks care about, and you can use your soft skills in the presentations of what design solutions you're proposing, then it becomes much easier, right? So I wanted to do this presentation because oftentimes when designers are working with product managers, they're not really understanding what a product manager goes through or what they care about, right? A product manager has a lot on their plate and they have to split up their time in so many different directions that it can be hard for a designer and a product manager to get on the same page. For engineers, they get pressured by both product managers and designers, right? So they got designers and product managers breathing down their back saying, this is what we need to get designed because this is what the user goes through and this is the business goal that we need to reach. Go build it, right? So that can be very stressful because they are trying to sometimes accomplish the impossible, right? So it's very stressful. For designers, we are in the middle of PMs and engineers, so it could be very stressful for us to get everybody on the same page and make sure that we're all aligned, because we're in the middle of everything, right? From the communications with executives, other engineers, other designers. So yeah, we have our own challenges as well. But in all of that, your soft skills are one of the most important things that you can use as a skillset, because if you have a great mindset, a positive attitude, and you're somebody who can overcome challenges as a human being, it makes that entire process much easier. So I don't want to go on too long, but I hope it paints a clearer picture of who we work with on an everyday basis and what those folks care about. Because when it comes to visual design, there are a lot of great visual designers out there who can comp up the best wireframes when it comes to being a UI or UX designer. But not every UX designer can collaborate well with the stakeholders that we work with. So the more that you can do that, the more successful you will be at getting your ideas implemented as a designer, right? So I hope that this video, it was helpful for you. If it was, if it changed your mind a little bit, you already know the deal, like, comment, subscribe. I'll see you guys in the next video. Peace.