The need for skilled product designers in the tech sector is growing, and with the normalcy of remote working setting in, remote product designer jobs are on the rise too. Many thoughts and processes designing beautiful and functional products; however, everything is designed, but a few things are designed well. To achieve the latter, you’ll need to learn and hone the necessary skills.

Fundamentally, a product designer is a problem solver. To give an insight into the skills that product designers need, let’s explore their day-to-day activities. Averagely, a product designer will have to

  • Talk with customers
  • Create mockup software wireframes
  • Work with a manufacturing team on the packaging and delivery
  • Streamline parts of an existing product to improve its functionality
  • Design

While interviewing for remote product designer jobs, employers want to know that you know the primary workflow as well as the necessary skills to excel in the role. So, here are the 5 top skills that you need.

1. User Research

While creating a product for the user, the ultimate goal is to understand the user’s needs and use them to implement the final product. The most significant influence on your workflow is what the user wants, and to get that info, you’ll need to be open to research and experiments. Through interviews, focus groups, and surveys, product designers use informed decisions from synthesised qualitative and quantitative data to build valuable products.

2. Visual Design

To create a precise balance between what you have in your head and what the user wants, product designers, need to be skilled in visual design. More specifically, skills such as typography, hierarchy, grid systems, colour theory, e.t.c, help you bring clarity to the product compositions.

3. Information Architecture

Constantly building digital products comes with a responsibility to appropriately organise and store the data and information. Employers interviewing people for remote product designer roles want to know that you’re aware that you’ll usually deal with a shared cloud environment that requires planning and IT storage organisation. With this in mind, product designers need to know how to create a website tree with few topics; however, it’ll be easier to cope with diverse content with more experience.

4. Prototype and User Testing

Product designers put in a lot of work into actualising their designs. Therefore, they need to use user tests to measure the product’s performance before going live. These tests enable the product designer to ensure that the digital product is worth the time and investment. They also allow to find and fix problems that may have slipped through the production stage.

5. Frontend Design

While applying for remote product design jobs and looking for how to scale yourself, knowing a bit of frontend programming is a great plus. Interviewers don’t expect you to be a coding expert, but it’s a bonus skill to advance your career. 

Finally, although product designing involves designing, it is not a one-size-fits-all role. It consists of a lot of creativity, empathy and gut thinking. These skills will help you bring your A-game into remote product designer jobs you may apply for.