Product designers are amazing assets to most teams, if we do say so ourselves.
But you might be surprised to learn that we don’t ALWAYS recommend hiring designers. Here are some questions to ask yourself before you hire a designer.
Do we need a team lead or an individual contributor?
Some designers become great team leads, but not even great team lead comes directly from design. A great candidate might be a design manager who "put the pixels down" 5 or 10 years ago. Others might come from user research, information architecture, or product management rather than design.
Leaders sometimes expect that designers naturally evolve into managers, who no longer wants to do the design work themselves. Oftentimes, that’s not the case. In fact, it's not uncommon for a great individual designer to think that's what they want, but realize quickly that they're unhappy or in way over their head.
Leaders need different skills: people management, resource management and planning skills, career pathing, and even political negotiation skills. They don't necessarily need to be Figma wizards. So hire accordingly.
Can we utilize a full-time designer’s contributions?
Few companies want to hire an expensive designer and have them sit idle. And we see it too often: it's demoralizing for designers to work hard on stuff that will never be used. (Something Brant experienced before Slide UX’s founding!)
When you think about staffing up in UX, look out for "logjams" in your organization. Do you have adequate leadership in place? Are your business and engineering teams prepared to keep up with the pace of design work that might result from lots of new design work?
Teams often push for lots of design work, but then, execution moves more slowly than expected, for various reasons. Some organizations need to do a lot of backend or data work in order to create a great user experience. Other find themselves shorthanded on the dev/end side. Others need to identify and tackle new integrations, or focus on further market validation.
In these cases, finding a fractional or project-based UX partner can sometimes serve you better than hiring an individual designer. Agencies like Slide UX can reliably perform a wide range of UX tasks. Investing on a project-by-project basis can allow you to divert more budget towards other needs.
It can also give you a sense of pace. Depending on your situation, sometimes 12 or 16 weeks of intense design work can keep development teams busy for a long time. Design support is always valuable, but the need for design hours and throughput often drops while work is in initial production.Do we have the budget to hire the level of talent we need?
We all know that great designers are far from cheap. Sometimes budget limitations can lead to compromising on skillset, experience, or team size. That’s a major risk when you’re trying to build the case for a more user-centric approach.
A UX hire that flops can be worse for your case than never hiring at all. We've seen organizations hire underpowered design talent, and the results add ammunition for that skeptical executive to push back on future UX investment.
If you don’t have the budget for a great full-time hire with the level of experience you need, consider hiring a fractional option. A world-class agency partner or contractor can help you build your business case for UX without breaking the bank. These partners might even be able to help guide team design and your hiring process. A great partner will help you highlight the impact of the craft and the importance of proper investment.
When it comes to adding UX skills to the team, we encourage our clients to play the long game. Building a user-centric approach takes time, and we're here to help you navigate these choices and demonstrate the value of investing in UX.