The Effective Product Designer

The best designers are effective outside of Figma.

Learn how to achieve more as a designer with 27 actionable lessons on communication, persuasion, influence, decision-making, productivity, and more.

This book will help you:

• Boost impact — Discover strategies that top designers use to influence others, sell their ideas, and generate more value.
• Build a better career — Learn which companies to join to maximize wealth and to create positive change.
• Attract more opportunities — Build relationships and a personal brand to maximize your career development.
• Learn better and faster — Acquire the right knowledge faster by knowing what and from whom to learn next.

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE AMAZON BEST-SELLER SOLVING PRODUCT DESIGN EXERCISES

27 highly actionable lessons:

• Communication and collaboration
• Building up your influence
• Selling your ideas effectively
• Learning the skills that AI will never replace
• Building a relationship with your manager
• Career building
• What designers regret in their careers
• Attracting more career opportunities
• Becoming (un)wealthy as a designer
• Knowing when to quit
• Positive impact
• Building a career that does good for the world
• Finding companies solving impactful problems
• Doing good with design decisions
• Decision making
• Making better and faster decisions
• Reflecting on your career and work
• Identifying the most impactful tasks
• Productivity and craft
• Making your design timeless
• Building a personal brand naturally
• Geting more done in less time
• Outsourcing and automating
• Adapting ideas from non-design industries
• Learning
• Where and from whom to learn design
• How to pick design books

+ a reading list of 26 books FAANG-designers found most impactful for their careers.

and more…

Featuring chapters by:

• Matthew Ström-Awn — Head of Design Systems at Stripe (ex-SoundCloud, The Wall Street Journal)
• Cassie McDaniel — Design Director (ex-Adobe, Webflow, Lattice, Mozilla)
• Jessica Harllee — Staff Product Designer (ex-Etsy, Kickstarter)
• Ran Segall — Educator, Founder at Flux Academy
• Cate Huston — Engineering Director at DuckDuckGo (ex-Google, IBM)

Table of Contents

Part I: Decision-making

Upstream thinking

Inversion

Avoiding inertia

Reflecting

Part II: Having a positive impact

Having a positive impact

Level 1: “Doing good” initiatives

Level 2: Product and business initiatives

Level 3: Earning to give

Level 4: Working on an impactful problem

Part III: Career

Wealth and equity

Don’t work for free

Outputs upcycling Career regrets

When to quit

Part IV: Craft

Timeless design

Applying leverage

The creator-customer switch

Interdisciplinary solutions

Part V: Productivity

Disproportional effort

Air quality

Outsource and automate

Part VI: Communication and collaboration

Persuading others

Managing up

Jargon

Timeless skills

The role of doubt

Your favor battery

Part VII: Learning

Good challenges vs. bad challenges

Sources of knowledge

How to choose books

Recommended books

About the Author

Artiom Dashinsky is a product designer and author based in Berlin. For the past 14 years, he has led design at multiple startups, owned a small agency, and worked as a freelancer and consultant.

In the last five years, he has built his own products and published three books, including the Amazon bestseller Solving Product Design Exercises.

The products he built for the design community are used by tens of thousands of designers working at companies like Google, Meta, Airbnb, Netflix, and Boeing.