About 4 years ago, an app I designed hit the App Store. Soon after, I started my first job as a product designer at thredUP. I like to think that’s when my journey began.

Since then, I’ve learned to do things like use Figma, draw rectangles in a visually pleasing way, prototype, write specs for developers, and design for web and mobile platforms. These are certainly essential skills for a modern digital product designer, but the true skills are less tangible and take time to develop. Communication, presentation, listening, and problem solving are soft skills that matter more in design than any tool or technical expertise. Here are some things I’ve learned over the last 4 years:

📣 Articulating your work

This is something I had to learn early on. In design reviews, you’ll be asked and probed about every design detail. How do you respond to feedback? One, you have to be intentional about every decision during the design process. How do these decisions map back to the intended outcome, your research, and established best practices? Two, you have to get good at articulating why your design solution accomplishes the goal. Being able to present your work to different audiences was also a big learning curve, as I found myself having to walk through the same project but tell completely different stories to PMs, the marketing team, and engineers. Because design is so collaborative, speaking about your work is just as important as doing the work.

Resources: Articulating Design Decisions by Tom Greever

🧪 Validating ideas

Like many self-taught junior designers, I loved diving into solutions and bringing them to life. I was proud of the pixel pushing. But the truth is that design doesn’t start in a design tool. It starts in a word doc. It begins with problem exploration (What is the problem?) and validation (How do we know it’s a problem?) From here you diverge, converge, and repeat until you get down to a solution that’s been validated by customer research and testing. All of this takes time, but it’s important to push for the process of product development. We’re not here to ship products; we want to solve a problem. Dare to disagree with anyone who thinks otherwise.

One of the biggest changes I’ve been proud to champion alongside the thredUP design team during my time here is a focus on customer validation. I walk through how we proved out this new process as we developed our newest feature, Thrift the Look, in my latest Medium post for the team blog. The results weren’t perfect, but the design process rarely is. It’s fluid and evolves with every project.

Resources: Inspired by Marty Cagan. Sprint by Jake Knapp.

💰 Thinking Business

I mentor at a UX bootcamp and find myself making this distinction this to my students all the time. A UX designer’s role is primarily focused on usability, whereas a product designer solves business problems. There’s a higher level of decision making and business acumen required in a product designer role, which overlaps with PM responsibilities. Traditionally, designers who can code were considered unicorns, but that idea has since shifted in favor of business savvy.

At thredUP, we’re very data-oriented. The product team is responsible for the P&L, so, as designers, we have to understand the full context of our business to do our work right. Stakeholders will listen to a designer who is able to ground user needs with business metrics. (That’s how you earn a seat at the table.) Product thinking aims to find and solve real problems by building meaningful solutions that add value to both the business and customers.

Resources: Understanding Michael Porter by Joan Magretta and Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen

🛎️ Design is a service

Beyond the world of digital product design, design in and of itself is a service. It has no place for ego. In fact, ego has to be completely removed from the work in order to be in service of user needs. Good designers are humble, empathetic, adaptable, and collaborative. They question personal assumptions and listen with an open mind to identify problems and pain points to address. They also understand that design is a group effort. Many times, an engineer may have a better design solution than you do. Your job isn’t to be recognized for good ideas, but to foster an environment and relationships that empower your team to contribute to a shared goal. We’re in it together.

The reward of design is ultimately making something that works for people.

📚 Infinite learning

I can go on about the traits and skills of a perfect designer, but in practice, perfection doesn’t exist. There are always growth areas. Here are some of the areas that I’m working on:

• Get better at leading and facilitating discussions. I want to get great at synthesizing feedback and decisions on the spot and making an action plan for the next meeting. This will obviously take practice and learning to filter through noise to get to the crux of what’s important.

• Remembering to clarify success metrics and tie efforts toward delivering business value. Many times I depend on the PM to have this all ironed out, but as a product designer, I should also be accountable.

• Overcommunicate. Especially in a remote work environment, I need to get better about letting people know what I’m working on. I have lots of ideas but I have to evangelize my work and proactively drive initiatives and outcomes.

My time at thredUP

As I wrap up my last week at the job that taught me just about everything I know, it’s bittersweet to reflect on my last three and a half years here. A virtual scrapbook:

As a child I was obsessed with drawing. I loved clothes. I spent my weeknights dreaming up and sketching out an enormous closet full of clothes, my most prized body of work. One night, my dad caught me “wasting time” doodling and in a moment of anger, took my stack of drawings and ripped them up in front of me. I had never cried that much in my life.

Luckily, that incident never dimmed my creativity and passion for fashion and design. Fast forward to today, 10-year-old me would never have guessed I’d be working at the real life version of that dream. ThredUP has been my home for the last 3+ years, shaping me to become the designer I am today. I love being able to build and innovate on a product I truly believe in, with a brilliant team that inspires me everyday. I could not have asked for a more talented and wonderful team of partners to collaborate with.

To all my colleagues, mentors, and friends at ThredUP, thank you! I am so grateful for the opportunity to have worked alongside all of you in our mission to keep clothing out of landfills and inspire a new generation to choose used.