Brian Meaney

❓ I have a question for product designers ❓ How do you understand that you’ve reached a certain grade or level in your career, such as transitioning to a senior role? Do you rely solely on performance reviews, or are there other ways you evaluate your growth? And what if there’s no formal performance review process? I’m asking because I often get questions about assessing one’s grade or level. So, I’m curious — do you have a similar need or interest in this topic? Let me know your thoughts!

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Do you want consistency between designers and front-end developers? Use of design tokens. When everyone uses the same terms, it simplifies things for both teams. Here's Google's introduction to design tokens and how you can implement them: https://lnkd.in/gpWMwqVz

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Companies are finally seeing the value of super-senior ICs! But career ladders and expectations for staff+ designers are often unclear, leaving lots of people who reach this level feeling unsupported. To help, I took my own 14+ years of experience as an individual contributor in high-impact roles at tech companies of varying sizes and made a highly interactive course. Join us starting Feb 3: https://lnkd.in/eqg4e2vx We’ll cover: 💡 Common expectations of the staff+ designer role 💡 Effective communication with senior leaders and executives 💡 How to set and uphold boundaries to focus on high-impact work 💡 Techniques to manage up and show impact Over the span of three weeks, you'll build a network of super-senior peers and acquire tactics from me: a designer who's been through these exact challenges. Grab your spot now! P.S. Thanks, Adekunle Oduye, for the kind words!

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🎨 Product Designers: The Strategic Partners Every Team Needs 🚀 In today’s fast-moving product landscape, product designers are no longer just task executors—they’re strategic partners shaping product direction, innovation, and user delight. Yet, some organizations still treat them as order takers, missing out on their full potential. Here’s why treating designers as strategic partners is critical: 1. Design Is Strategy in Action Great design solves real user and business problems. Involving designers early aligns creative insights with company goals, ensuring every decision drives user satisfaction and measurable results. Without this, design becomes reactive rather than purposeful. 🎯 2. Designers See What Others Miss Sitting at the intersection of creativity, empathy, and problem-solving, designers offer unique perspectives. Their user-focused insights elevate product experiences, identify opportunities, and advocate for meaningful innovation. 🌟 3. Collaboration Fuels Better Products Strategic designers unite cross-functional teams. Engineers build with empathy. PMs focus on user-centered priorities. Designers connect these dots, turning ideas into impactful solutions while fostering collaboration. 🤝 4. From Vision to Execution Strategic designers think beyond visuals—they craft scalable, accessible, and user-friendly experiences. Their early involvement ensures a clear vision that translates into successful execution, delivering real value. ✨ 5. Design Drives Growth and Differentiation User-focused design improves retention, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty. Companies empowering designers to take strategic roles stand out in competitive markets, driving growth through innovation. 🚀 The Bottom Line?  Designers aren’t just artists; they’re architects of user and business success. Treating them as order takers wastes their potential. By elevating them to strategic partners, teams unlock innovation, enhance collaboration, and create products users truly love. 💡 How does your team empower designers to take on strategic roles? Let’s share insights and elevate design leadership! 👇 #DesignLeadership #StrategicDesign #UserExperience #Collaboration #Innovation #ProductManagement #Collaboration #CrossFunctionalTeams #LeadershipInDesign #Teamwork #DesignLeadership #EngineeringLeadership #TransparencyInWork

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Great writeup on the value design can bring to product organisations irrespective of technoöogical shifts such as AI.

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Many designers still confuse a component library for a design system, but understanding the difference is critical for creating scalable, cohesive products. In this gabble of words I've explored how major companies like Airbnb and IBM do it right? 🧐 #UXDesign #DesignSystems #ComponentLibrary #ProductDesign #DesignVsDevelopment #Collaboration #Figma #DigitalProductDesign #TechDebate #DesignThinking https://lnkd.in/gGmxyKED

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**yells into the void** Advice to designers creating your design portfolios (or presentations) Start with the "actual" designs, discuss how you collaborated with the team, what was your responsibility and how beliefs or user feedback shaped it. Don't just skim over and show design or sketch at the end but discuss what interactions or features you explored, and how you evolved the design to solve the problem given the goals and constraints. aaaand if you want to land people understanding your design skills- start with the magic- share videos, click-throughs and prototypes and what would you do if you had more time? Process? Share enough process to provide context. Have the rest in your back pocket to back it up. (We can't read those post-it notes anyways)

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My pal Vitaly Friedman is second-to-none when it comes to delivering thorough, thoughtful, and actionable design advice. He's released a few courses that are really valuable for practicing designers and design leads: 🧠 Smart Interface Design Patterns: https://lnkd.in/e-v-jsCG 📏 How to Measure UX Impact: https://measure-ux.com/ #design #ux

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Instead of digging your heals in to "you don't understand UX or design", spend just half that energy on understanding your stakeholders, what they value, what they're up against. Loved this from Michael Holzer and Academy UX Adam Perlis. ✨ This is the biggest differentiator that I see from junior to senior product designers. Learning what hills to die on is a skill that isn't taught in bootcamp or school. Watch your design leaders. Ask how they make trade offs. Think at a skip level. Ask what matter's to their leaders. This is a way faster road to successful projects, careers, and relationships.

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🗣️ Pssst! Many (most?) UX/Design orgs have way more people than are actually necessary to deliver great user experience. This is something I was first clued into in 2014, speaking with a design leader who had recently left a Silicon Valley software company to run a team at a bank. She told me how the team she inherited had 20 people, but, given her team's straightforward remit (showing balances, transaction activity, and other basics), she should only need 10 folks to deliver a quality user experience. But then she said something that I've replayed in my head at least weekly since then. She said that she was stunned to realize that, given the complexity of her product organization, she actually needed 40 people to cover all the work and relationships. This is when I realized that many design orgs were not "user-centered" or "customer-centered," but "product-centered." And these product teams are bloated (from the perspective of delivering meaningful customer value), which drives design teams to be bloated as well (again, from the frame of reference of delivering user/customer value). What I didn't know at the time was the trend (and cult) of agile transformations and SAFe, which I now believe to be the primary culprit of this bloat. Shortly before I left Adaptive Path, I lead a team that designed the entire ecommerce experience (for desktop and mobile web) for a major brand, including landing pages, category pages, detailed product pages with reviews, shopping cart and checkout functionality, wishlists, address books, birthday reminders, and more. We had 5 people. For a team covering all those things to be effective in-house now, you'd need at least 15, and many would have so much more. I know what I'm saying may strike a sensitive chord in this time of layoffs and difficulty finding work. And I'm not saying we should cut UX/Design teams in half—these teams need to be this size to ensure quality UX is delivered in these contexts. But I suspect the convulsions we're experiencing are in some part due to a realization that these product development organizations are fundamentally misshapen to deliver the kind of value expected of them.

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New Article Alert: "A VP of Design Portfolio: Insights from an Industry Leader" I'm excited to share my latest Substack article diving into the crucial elements of a VP of Design portfolio. If you're a design leader or aspiring to be one, this is for you! Key takeaways: - Strategic focus: Showcase how you drive business results through design leadership - Team achievements: Highlight successful product launches and tangible growth - Metrics matter: Quantify your impact with clear, visual data - Bridge the gap: Help recruiters understand the true scope of design leadership As one VP shared, "I use my design skills now for designing teams that design products." Ready to elevate your design leadership portfolio? Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/e_nXvh2J 📅 I publish new articles every Monday and Thursday. Don't miss out on future insights! Subscribe to my Substack for regular updates: https://lnkd.in/eT3g9eCD #DesignLeadership #UXDesign #CareerDevelopment #PortfolioTips

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A word of caution for designers thinking about a move to product management. I know, I know: design can be frustrating. Product managers seem to have more influence. It is hard to care, and have a PM dash those hopes. It feels better to "join 'em" instead of to keep struggling. The hype seems to be around product. And yes, design jobs at companies that seem to value design are in super high demand, whereas product manager jobs seem to crop up everywhere (though it is still tough). But also consider this: you have to consider where things are going. Companies are rethinking what constitutes a product meaning we may see far fewer PMs. The hype of "multi product" and "turn everything into a product" is fading. It is very hard to argue that every little pod of engineers and designers NEED a PM, when these things aren't even products. A great designer with an engineering partner can effectively run most product areas. Slowly slowly, and with fits and starts, we are seeing companies mature their approach to product, which has the net effect (in many ways) of elevating design. In many companies, PMs are becoming more of a "business role", which means you can kiss the creativity you enjoy, and the ability to "make" goodbye. Advancing in product within a company can be highly competitive (job advancement is harder). A lot of PMs realize how brutal the advancement schemes are. Yes, some companies appreciate the idea of a highly skilled individual contributor, but there is a lot of pressure to move up solely through management roles. Which is all to say that the grass may seem greener right now, but it might not stay that way. We *need* skilled and experienced designers.

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Well that’s a wrap on Config! It was so great to see so many folks that I’ve worked with, admired, hired, managed, led, followed and best of all loved to work and be around in one place. Last year was epic but this year was sublime. And what a delight it was to see Figma’s new design magazine and little ole’ me playing a small part in this community publication! I’m talking about my favorite topic - data. With the pomp and circumstance of LLMs and “look what I can do,” brag of GenAI people are falling silent on the most important part of all this new technology - the data that fuels it. We’re forgetting the labor that goes into collecting, labeling and making data machine ready and the class of people who aren’t getting fairly compensated for this work. We’re forgetting that entire business models are being celebrated right now that use the stealing and appropriating of other’s creative content as their foundation. First there is awarness. Then anger. Now it’s time for advocacy. Here’s a question how can we make AI development for equitable overall all by fairly compensating those unseen data producers who make the AI tree grow? Check it out! I’m Proud to be part of The Prompt, a print and digital zine from @Figma’s Story & Brand Studios exploring the intersection of AI, design, and code, which launched at #Config2024. My Q&A on the power of input in AL and ML is here:

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Not sure how I missed this podcast with Lenny Rachitsky but this episode with Katie Dill is amazing. There's a reason it has 47k views on YouTube. Just furthering my claim that the very best of Lenny's podcasts are not about product development or traditional product management. His best episodes are about design and business. "The use of the word beauty in books that have been digitized by Google has decreased,  like pretty dramatically. And it's aligned with this idea of, "Well,  functionality is king. Functionality is what matters." As if people think about  functionality and beauty as like two opposite things. No, they're not two  opposite things. Functionality is important. And actually beauty enhances functionality  because it does make things easier to use, more approachable, more comp elling to use.  And the other piece of it that is not talked about in business as often is just  the importance of how people feel. Things that are more beautiful, increase trust. You see that  we've put painstaking detail into this, and we care about the details of how something works,  and that gives you assurance that we care about other details that you can't see too." —Katie All I have to say is YES.

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"For increased readability, we’ve rewritten sections of our privacy statement with simpler, more consistent language." Is there a better summary of the benefit of UX Writing for privacy related work? Well done, Amber and Heather.

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The best designers are systems thinkers in disguise. Systems thinking is crucial for iterative, efficient design improvements. Rather than attempt to design a wholly new, perfect solution, oftentimes it’s better to find leverage points—areas where an incremental, often non-intuitive change will lead to significant renovation in the system. The smallest nudge for the biggest effect. A systems thinker knows surface issues are symptoms of deep systemic structures and patterns. They draw up a holistic view of the entire system and identify leverage points that, if altered, create a more efficient, cohesive design. Point being: you don't need to make sweeping changes every time. One of the most pernicious challenges facing our nation is the need for more affordable housing. And when you factor in the manifold constituents, regulations, and interests, this could be one of the most complex systems to navigate. Which is why I was so encouraged to read about Minneapolis’s recent approval of major zoning reforms to promote housing. The director of City Planning there said, "No single legislative action did more to contribute to housing creation than the elimination of parking minimums." This seemingly small change—removing a vestigial mandate for parking that was not even likely to be used—had an outsized impact on the entire housing ecosystem. By relaxing this one constraint, the city unlocked a cascade of possibilities for new developments, more affordable housing, and vibrant neighborhoods. Sometimes, details distract. But when you widen your aperture and begin to understand how the various parts of a system interact, a small adjustment can lead to a massive unlock. Try to see the whole world at once and make sense of it. Widening your aperture can sharpen your focus. Embrace *Systems Thinking*

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Somtimes the content that can up your UX game comes from unlikly sources. This article puts into context some of the best places to start!

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"Any tips for presenting design case studies in an interview?" a friend recently asked. Most certainly. ✦ Don't bury the outcome with a big reveal. Many times I've watched patiently as designers wait until the end to share the final outcome of their labors, first sharing their process (which is typically the same as every other candidate), sketches, post-its, and so forth. INSTEAD: Lead with a few screens that best represent the outcome. You can do this in 10 seconds. And then avoid the next mistake... ✦ Don't jump straight into your process. See note above. Your process is probably identical to every other candidate. This does little to set you apart. INSTEAD: State the problem clearly you were trying to solve. Clarity about the problem is a designer after my own heart. It shows clear intention to solve user/business needs. ✦ Don't show me personas. Some will disagree with this advice. But as a seasoned design leader, few things leave me more concerned about the inputs to your design work than fictitious avatars, names, and bios. INSTEAD: State the target audience you were designing for. If necessary describe the inputs to identifying this audience. Then follow up with how your work met or exceeded the needs of this audience. (Even better, stop using personas altogether and use archetypes or JTBDs instead.) BONUS TIPS ✨ ✦ If multiple designers worked on the same screen, be upfront about this and clarify what your role was. Personally I find it to be a bit of a letdown when something looks/functions great, only to find out later in our discussion that another designer did part of the work. ✦ Proactively share what you would have done differently if given the chance to do this work all over again. No work is ever perfect. But if you *could* get one step closer to perfection, what would it be. This shows me you're capable of critiquing yourself, which honestly not all designers are adept at. ✦ Provide me with a link to what you're presenting (slide deck, figma). I may want to jump around while you're presenting to find areas that are most likely to help me — and therefore you — discuss the right things relevant to this role. I realize this may be problematic to grant me access, so make a copy and then delete the copy after our interview. Hope this helps.

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Empathy in Application Design: Why Great Leaders Foster Great Teams As leaders in product design, empathy isn’t just a tool; it’s a necessity. Empathy fuels the connection between design vision and human need, but it also creates an environment where designers can bring their full selves and creativity to the table. In my experience, fostering a culture of empathy has fundamentally improved team dynamics and the quality of our work. Here’s how I see it in action: ↳ Open Communication: Empathy encourages active listening, where team members feel truly heard. This creates space for honest feedback and innovation because designers feel safe to express ideas and iterate openly. ↳ User-Centric Vision: When we prioritize empathy, we keep our users front and center. Our product decisions are made with their experiences in mind, ensuring we’re solving real problems in meaningful ways. ↳ Empowered Teams: By showing empathy toward our teams, we support their growth and confidence, which in turn fuels their passion and productivity. A team that feels valued is a team that strives for excellence. → True Story... sharing insights from what it's like to be on a great team: In a project designing a web app for elderly users, our team faced a common challenge: most of us were young and didn’t fully understand the tech limitations older adults might face. To bridge this empathy gap, we held “empathy workshops” where each team member simulated age-related challenges—using gloves to limit dexterity, applying screen filters to mimic vision impairments, and adjusting text sizes to the maximum. A few product team members quickly realized the frustration of navigating with shaky hands and commented, “We had no idea how challenging even simple actions could be.” This experience reshaped our design & development process: we made buttons larger, simplified navigation, and enhanced contrast. By stepping into our users’ shoes, our deliverables went beyond meeting requirements—they genuinely addressed user needs, making the app truly intuitive. With empathy as a foundation, we didn’t just deliver a product; we delivered a meaningful, user-centered experience. Empathy-driven leadership isn’t a buzzword; it’s a pathway to building cohesive, high-performing teams. Leaders who prioritize empathy create an environment where collaboration thrives, communication flows, and great design flourishes. #Leadership #ProductDesign #Empathy #Teamwork #UXDesign #LeadershipInAction

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