Design Doing - What I would tell my younger self when thinking about my career and tooling

Hi everyone, I’m Hallan Moulin, a Product Design leader who still gets way too excited about learning new tools and figuring out how things work.

The further I’ve gone in my career, the more I’ve realised that craft, capability and a willingness to learn really matter. So here are a few things I’ve learned along the way — and some advice I’d probably give my younger self if I were starting in Product Design today.

Design Doing – Designers don’t always start strategic.

I’ve always been a bit of a tools person.

I like learning the tools. I like knowing how things work. And I’ve always put a lot of effort into being as capable as I can be when it comes to actually executing.

And the longer I work in Product Design, the more I realise that this was actually quite important early on my career, taking me through to Design Leadership.

We talk a LOT about problem solving in Design. Strategic thinking. Business acumen. Influence. Understanding the bigger picture.

All incredibly important.

But these things take time to develop.

I think somewhere along the way, our industry started creating this expectation that junior designers should come out of a short course, or their first role, being experts at solving complex problems.

That’s just not realistic.

You can learn the process. You can learn the frameworks. You can learn how to facilitate a workshop.

But judgment comes from experience.

It comes from making decisions, seeing what happens afterwards, understanding the consequences, getting things wrong, working with different people and different businesses.

So if someone asked me today how to get into Product Design, I’d probably give them slightly different advice than I would have a few years ago.

Get really good at your craft first. Learn the tools. Learn how to communicate an idea visually. Learn how to execute it well, and then learn how to execute faster and smarter.

While you’re still learning the ropes, being someone who can actually make things happen gives you a lot of value to bring to a team.

Develop a can-do mindset.

I mean being the person who says: let me see how I can help.

Build bridges. Work with Product. Work with Engineering. Don’t spend your energy defending Design territory.

Be useful.

You learn a LOT when people trust you enough to bring you into their problems.

And probably the biggest one for me: Take your development seriously.

Learn on the job.

Upskill on the job.

Use the opportunities you have while you don’t need to look for another job.

Your manager can help you. Your company can give you opportunities. People around you can teach you.

But your development is yours.

Nobody else’s.

One day you might need to look for another role. And when that happens, you’ll be competing with people who had access to the same years of experience — and used them to learn, experiment and get better.

You don’t need to pretend you know everything.

In fact, nowadays I’m probably more impressed by someone who can confidently say “I don’t know how to do that yet” and then goes and learns it.

Confidence is good — but only when it comes backed up by actual capability.

Ps. Oh, and in regards to Ai? It’s a tool. Leverage it.

Design Doing - What I would tell my younger self when thinking about my career and tooling was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.