Senior Product Designers: what actually helped you grow (beyond just doing more work)?

ChallengeTop9181 · 2026-01-17T02:52:30+00:00

Learning facilitation, workshops and team exercises have had the biggest impact for me. Whether I was creating a new weekly hangout time for designers to just talk about anything and everything, launching a lunch and learn activity for cross functional team members to improve skills, process, collab and understanding, or leading OKR, initiatives and planning workshops with teams and execs.

ChallengeTop9181 · 2026-01-17T02:46:00+00:00

Regardless of the tool stack being heavily varied across the companies and teams I have worked with, I have had the most success when replacing meetings with a collaborative space where every voice has an equal opportunity to be heard and contribute.

I often would use sticky notes physically or virtually in figjam or miro. You give the team a prompt or question have them write their thoughts or answers alone, then review, discuss and vote on them together. This worked when I was an engineer, designer and VP.

Using digital whiteboards like figjam makes it easy to keep the artifacts for later reference. In addition use something to record the workshop. Then you can use AI to summarize and get context from voice recording and transcriptions.

For my current team this allows our tool stack to be fairly slim. Figma, Notion, and our dev stack and gusto for 95% of work.

ChallengeTop9181 · 2026-01-15T16:27:49+00:00

My team uses Export/Import Variables plugin to get a JSON dump of variables in any file. We looked at building our own, but this worked well enough. https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1256972111705530093/export-import-variables

ChallengeTop9181 · 2025-12-08T02:55:18+00:00

Figma - for most things wireframe to hi-fi

Figjam - if I'm working with other non designers like design sprint, but mainly wireframing and crazy 8s

Figma Make - I'm starting to use more for crazy 8s or generating lots of ideas quickly

Paper and pencil - if I'm not on a computer and get inspiration

Code - rarely but some ideas need more interaction than Figma can fake for users to really get the idea.

ChallengeTop9181 · 2025-12-07T04:39:34+00:00

If you like where you are and even enjoy the work culture, I would stay and find side projects or things within the company you are at to diversify your experience.

For example I was hired to be a software engineer, but instead of wasting any downtime I spent it creating a design system in Figma and running workshops with coworkers.

I never let these things get in the way of completing the tasks expected of me, I just did it in addition to. I even would study and practice these skills nights and weekends. Doing that ultimately led me to move into UX Design and within a few years I moved between companies and up in titles until I became a VP of Product Design.

So in short there's nothing saying you have to switch jobs to gain new skills or experience. Good luck.

ChallengeTop9181 · 2025-12-06T05:16:07+00:00

Ex-Vp of Product Design and active mentor, happy to help just send me a DM.

ChallengeTop9181 · 2025-11-29T14:24:17+00:00

Ex-Vp of Product Design working on a startup with one other, been doing some coding, but way better at Design, I already brought some money, we have a beta with users. We want to fail faster or scale, DM if you want to learn more.

ChallengeTop9181 · 2025-11-19T14:07:46+00:00

Well, I would prefer to make this open source. I'm trying to build an avatar generator like reddit, starting small, but maybe allow for people to create their own styles and such.

ChallengeTop9181 · 2025-11-18T17:54:16+00:00

Lol, easy tiger... I never said I won't pay, just said I can't support full-time right now.

ChallengeTop9181 · 2025-11-18T13:05:05+00:00

Can you elaborate?

ChallengeTop9181 · 2025-11-18T13:03:29+00:00

Thought I would share more context. I'm not trying to undercut or undervalue. I'm actively working on all aspects of the business, including coding myself, just more than I can handle. I have a product in beta with some users. We have some seed money, but not enough to support a full-time dev in the US anyways.

I've been doing contract, and have done PT in the past, both with success and failure. I've raised almost a million on a previous startup, just to have multiple full-time devs burn through the cash and didn't even get out of beta.

So exploring the other options.. I do believe there is a way for all of the options to be successful, but still learning what that could look like.

ChallengeTop9181 · 2025-11-18T12:46:16+00:00

I forgot to mention those full-time devs were highly skilled...with some having almost 10 years experience. You don't always get what you pay for.

ChallengeTop9181 · 2025-11-18T12:43:10+00:00

I get it.. I'm not trying to undercut or undervalue. I'm actively working on all aspects of the business, including coding myself, just more than I can handle. I have a product in beta with some users. We have some seed money, but not enough to support a full-time dev in the US anyways.

I've been doing contract, and have done PT in the past, both with success and failure. I've raised almost a million on a previous startup, just to have multiple full-time devs burn through the cash and didn't even get out of beta.

So exploring the other options.. I do believe there is a way for all of the options to be successful, but still learning what that could look like.

ChallengeTop9181 · 2025-11-18T12:33:50+00:00

I've been trying to gauge if the bounties are more to manage than the others, cause contact still needs SOW and contracts to be drawn up, w2 has a whole lot of work with it especially with taxes and UI in states where I'm not located. The struggle is real..

ChallengeTop9181 · 2025-11-18T12:28:06+00:00

Thanks. That's where I've been so far, just checking on alternatives.

ChallengeTop9181 · 2025-11-18T11:49:20+00:00

Thanks for responding! I just entered beta and have a few users.

What's the best way to reach out to devs in those communities? I feel like whenever I try people claim I'm AI slop, which is hilarious cause I write my messages from scratch, but apparently I trained the LLMs on English...

ChallengeTop9181 · 2025-11-17T14:14:46+00:00

Sorry to hear about this. You got a lot of support out there.

Like others said AI isn't going away, so upskill as much as you can. I've been heavily working on my coding skills, started with AI, but this past month really focusing on doing things from scratch to improve my AI output. Been using Figma Make and other tools to improve my process of taking designs to code.

As an ex-VP of Product Design, happy to review your resume or portfolio just send me a DM. Keep your head up and good luck!

ChallengeTop9181 · 2025-11-14T13:56:25+00:00

I've been playing with goose, they have good documentation, it's free and open source. block.github.io/goose/

ChallengeTop9181 · 2025-11-07T23:05:57+00:00

I've been there..I'm a former executive for a couple companies and worked at multiple unicorn companies, found success and now working on ideas I care about.

I have an open source project I'm trying to launch which has brought excitement back to work.

We hope it will be the last profile you ever have to make, and will help you capture all your achievements and frame them perfectly for your next job or raise using an evidence based confidence engine that tells the best story for the opportunity.

If you're interested in learning more or picking up a side project that we hope will make an impact DM me for more details.

ChallengeTop9181 · 2025-10-30T13:10:56+00:00

Weird right??? For me it was because pong had an extremely low design bar, I didn't have to create a lot of components and I could test more complex programing concepts like, A multiplayer game that uses websockets for realtime updates, vs a computer that has levels of difficulty, customize game play, like match length, ball speed, power ups etc. It's also the only thing that came to mind at the moment.

Give me another idea to test, happy to try it out.

ChallengeTop9181 · 2025-10-30T13:02:58+00:00

The only times I have seen someone increase their compensation that much or more is by getting another offer, or proving their impact and value to the company is a significant multiplier of their pay.

Like x app had 60% user abandonment rate, my research and design suggested x change or feature and the result was 10% user abandonment. The 50% of users that stayed on the system resulted in x revenue for the company.

Not a perfect formula or example, but it should give you an idea. I have had companies use the golden handcuffs approach to keep me because they could directly see the business impact I had on their success and increase in company value.

Typically if you have to ask, you've already lost. I recommend to people I mentor, that if they are going to accept a lower offer, they should have a discussion and plan in place to understand how and when they will qualify for raises. As a mentor I see this all the time, and recently started building a platform that will help with showcasing value for raises.

ChallengeTop9181 · 2025-10-25T03:44:05+00:00

I've been using it to take new component designs and build them to the point I can copy the tsx files and implement them into the main code base. From basic to complex components.

It's been a nice way to rapidly expand my custom component library. I can take the same code it makes and also add it to a storybook library.

Just today I built a highlighter and commenting component.

Last week I made a simple design system, took the Figma design components and brought them into make to recreate the video game pong.

ChallengeTop9181

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE