What I've learned as a PM working with designers

Hi everyone. Hi, Christian. It's lovely to have you here again in our couple session. Oh yeah, finally. I was waiting for it all week. Yeah, it's not that we haven't talked, especially this week. We've been working on actually preparing some new interviews and episodes. We had some lovely, I keep saying lovely guests. We had some very interesting guests. Interestingly enough, a couple of duos, so quartets. We are not allowed to say foursome, right? No, not on the internet. There is this toggle on when you launch a podcast, which is like explicit content. So don't say it, otherwise we need to pick that, like we can just beep whatever you just said. How was your day, Christian? Exhausting, but very good. I'm ready for the interview. And I don't believe consulting life can be so exhausting. I see your calendar. So today I had a coaching day and you don't see everything in my calendar. Okay, so you're hiding the dates. With all the evenings that we pass together. If you see me busy, I want you to see me busy. I see. Cool. And Christian, I was thinking you spend a lot of time with working with me. You spend a lot of time working with other designers. We had a couple of designers also in our podcast. I would say to some extent you, I would probably hire you as a designer if you would apply simply because I know a lot of stuff. I would be curious to hear from a non-designer how you actually learned a lot about design and how like working with designers influenced you overall. Wow, big question. But there is a saying from someone, I don't know his name, but he said a very nice quote, which is everyone can be a designer, but not everyone is good. Actually, I know that saying, but I would almost disagree. Everyone can be one, right? I would say everyone can be an artist. You can be an artist. You need to have some certain, like to me, design is still a technical role. It's beyond like just drawing something. That's why it's a compliment. Like I'm not saying you're a bad designer. I'm saying you could be one. I did work as a baker, so there was not much with design, but I remember, I think it was in 2009, all my friends started buying MacBooks and they explained it to me in a very nice way. They said, you buy this MacBook, you open it and it just works. You don't have to install anything. It just works. And I was so blown away that I think in 2010, I bought my first MacBook, the white ones. Was it like that? Did you open it and everything worked? So yeah, it was like that. So I just opened it. I typed in the Wi-Fi password and it was running. So yeah, that was the first time where I realized, okay, Apple and an iPhone in combination is cool and it looks so nice. So I was always attached to it. And yeah, before I was, while I was starting my first company, Pocketrobe back then, I met Alex, my former founder, and he was always an Apple fan as well. And then he talked about that he designs and builds apps for iOS. And I was blown away and had the first time talking to someone who does something like that, because I never thought about how a phone works. So there's this back button, there are navigation bars, there are a lot of elements that you can tap and use, but I never thought about that. And once I've met Alex back then, so greets to him, by the way, I realized, okay, there is much more than just color on the screen. So there's something that was thought through very well. And yeah, then we decided to build our first app, which was the WordDrop application, as well as a small online shop. And I just printed out some iPhones and I started scribbling inside the iPhones to do the mock-ups together with him. And I just realized, okay, there is no back button. That doesn't make sense at all. So yeah. And with that, yeah, I just started getting into the world of design. Sounds so easy, right? So the thing is, once you pay attention to these things, you automatically learn how it works, right? It's not a rocket science to at least get a basic understanding of how the interface works in an app. But yeah, it took me some time until I just realized it. And then once I started focusing on it and also regularly checking the Apple updates, the new iOS versions with the design updates, you can get into it. You don't need to be the one who designs it, but you also see how it should look based on what you have just taught yourself. Yeah. And I think you just mentioned two very important things. You don't have to be the one that designs it. I think obviously as a product manager, you should not even have to design it, but it's very good to have a basic understanding and to be able to talk with professionals because they will know you need to trust them. But the more you can actually bring to the conversation and the more you understand the field and the more you understand best practices and so on, the better the conversations that you can have. And secondly, I think what I also like is you mentioned sketching out different screens on paper and then realizing that there is no back button, right? I think this highlights the importance. And it's so funny because designers even easily forget this of working with a flow. Everything you design, you don't design it as a single screen, but you design it as a flow, helps you actually spotting a lot of deep problems in the user experience that you might have. I fully agree with you. And back then, there were two things that helped me a lot to get better in designing actually, because I had my own project back then with my friend and then we both started working for the same company. It was our first job. And at that company, we needed to redesign shopping apps. We had shopping app template that was used by and customized by all of the merchants and retailers that were part of the platform. And we needed to do it globally for all of them. So the impact was for everyone the same because they're all using the same template and they have custom size and stuff like that. But the navigation and the checkout process, et cetera, was designed by us. So I started that redesign project with my friend because he was actually an iOS engineer, but we let him design as well because he's a super good designer. And yeah, once we started building everything from iOS 6 to iOS 7, so away from the square morphism to the flat design, it was a complete new experience we needed to build. We didn't have much time because there was pressure and I wasn't even asking the question why, I have to admit. But yeah, so we sit down together, we reviewed many times the buttons and at some point, and I'm not kidding, I bought a magnifier because when I was having the phone on my app or the prototypes, I was literally every time finding pixel too much left or wrong on any kind of buttons. So that was also much fun. But yeah, it forced me to go very deep into this whole user interface and also the user experience back then. Looking back, do you think it's good that you actually developed or got forced into developing a better understanding of design and even going that far for like really checking pixel perfect designs? It's definitely good because whenever something doesn't show me a pixel perfect design, I just see it directly. You maybe also know from the times at SumUp, I was sometimes just looking at the screen and saying, Hey guys, there's an inconsistency in the screen. The engineers will ask because they will be the first ones who are going to see that. Therefore, I have an eye for that, but it's not like that I'm telling a designer what to do. So not at all. I'm always trusting my designer. And we talked last episode also about product management and design collaboration. And I couldn't agree more with the fact that you have to trust each other. And I had very good experience working in the past with designers, which were like, we were doing almost the same things. So he was designing, but when I didn't have the time, my designer was creating tickets in the backlog. And when I was sick, he was doing the backlog refinements. And when some people had questions regarding user experience and he wasn't there, they reached out to me. So it was working really well. And we had a very good product ownership together. Christian is talking about me here because I spent weeks and months writing tickets. I remember when we were together in Bulgaria on that day off in between a public holiday, where we were having the whole office for us and were drawing with adding on the glass to use the space for designing the flows for our new app. So yeah, it was fun. Yeah, absolutely. I miss those days. I wish we could go back and work with you besides talking. Yeah, that's true. Sometimes you miss it. So being on the front and writing the tickets, fighting the stakeholder meetings. So nostalgic. I still have those people having those. It's not that much fun. Yeah. You can join one of my meetings. Yeah, I'm happy to. Cool. Christian, I think I'll let you go back to your product work. I stick to the design. Nevertheless, I think obviously it's great to hear that from the collaboration, like you learned a lot and that it actually helps you in understanding how to work with designers and to generally also get a better picture of the products that you built and the experience that they have end to end. Yeah. And my most important advice is if you are a product manager, stick your heads together with a designer and become a team. Lovely. Cheers to that and bye-bye.