A Designer’s Take: Soft Skills to Level Up Your Craft | HackerNoon

Product designers often act as intermediaries in the IT world. They need to balance business goals, user needs, and developer constraints. That’s why soft skills matter just as much as technical ones. We all know this in theory, but in practice, there’s no clear list of essential soft skills for product designers. So, you might end up trying to master them all, hoping it’ll make you a better designer.

That’s precisely what I did until I reached the position of lead designer at Yandex. A few months in the new role helped me identify the four key soft skills I needed. Once I developed them, my design process became much more structured—no more scrambling between tasks, staying late, or constantly reacting to urgent requests. With clear priorities and proper documentation, I knew exactly what to focus on at any given moment.

I believe that these soft skills would be helpful to any designer, regardless of their grade.

Skill #1: Timeboxing for Designers

Once I became a lead designer, my daily routine changed drastically: often half of my day became occupied with urgent meetings that were never planned in advance. As a result, my weekly schedule began falling apart, and it was getting harder to complete all the planned tasks on time. I realized that significant changes were needed in how I manage my work time.

I switched from a simple task list to fully scheduling my day in a calendar. The logic behind this decision is simple: a list can be endless, while time slots in a calendar are finite. It’s impossible to squeeze more tasks into your calendar than your eight working hours permit. Thanks to this change, I could see the real number of tasks I was able todo in a day.

In my view, a calendar is similar to a bank app in a way. In it, all the blanks signify free time, while occupied slots are equal to your “budget” for tasks. When I look at the slots as expenses of different types, I can roughly estimate how much each task costs and which are the most “expensive” ones.

Tips

1. Reserve 20-30 minutes each morning to prioritize your design tasks: mockups, reviews, design QA, etc.

2. You don’t need to add every single task to your calendar. Instead, focus on scheduling ‘focus blocks’—groups of related tasks that require your attention within a specific time frame.

3. Reserve 1 hour for lunch, ideally at the same time every day, so the development team or PMs clearly see when you’re unavailable, preventing sudden meetings during your creative time.

4. Schedule a specific time to address colleagues’ questions. Of course, you’ll never guess the exact time when questions might arrive. However, reserving a slot for this activity will help you to be more precise in calculating your daily “budget.”

I think that these 4 steps are a good starting point for experimenting with a calendar.

If something changes during the day, disrupting the plan you prepared in the morning, make sure to make the corresponding changes in your calendar (either in the moment or in the evening). This way, you’ll get the exact picture of how you spend your work time, and it’ll help you with daily planning in the future.

How to Deal With Urgent Questions From Colleagues

1. When developers or PMs reach out urgently about edge cases or implementation details, quickly assess if their question affects the current sprint. If not, batch such design-related questions into your designated review time.

2. Wait until you have a list of non-urgent questions. It’s easier to answer several questions in a row than to get distracted by answering 1 question every 10 minutes. That’s exactly why you should create a dedicated “question time” slot.

3. If the subject requires your full attention, suggest answering later or planning a meeting. It’ll take just a couple of minutes to create a time slot for this, while a lengthy conversation can distract you from your current activity. So, here’s where the skill of negotiating will come in handy: ask your colleague whether the conversation can be delayed. As my experience shows, it is possible more often than you might expect.

4. Set notifications so that they won’t disappear immediately after popping up. If you see them, it’ll be easier for you to estimate whether some questions can wait, and not to miss anything truly important. If you receive a question offline, set a notification in Reminder (macOS). This way, you won’t forget to answer your colleague a bit later.

Once I learned how to budget my time, it became easier to deliver polished design iterations consistently and dedicate focused time to detailed UI reviews. Clear time boundaries allowed me to defend critical design tasks from unnecessary distractions.

Skill #2: Make Design Meeting Summaries

No matter if you’re a junior or a lead, you’re not gonna have all the answers on tap—especially when devs start grilling you about edge cases. Yet, the more knowledge you have, the more you are valued by your colleagues.

Every correct answer, every promise that was kept, or advice that you gave to a teammate would give you a “+1” point to your (imaginary) work score because it shows that you are a reliable team player.

More than anyone else, a lead designer needs to be well-organized and keep track of all work meetings: he won’t allow himself to forget about questions that are waiting for a reply or promises that need to be kept.

I try to summarize all the meetings I attend.

Tips

1. Record everything that requires changes: new mockups, new goals, new meetings.

2. If it’s appropriate, take the initiative in taking records. Firstly, it will increase your value for a team. Secondly, it will help you to remember important information. The same applies to 1:1 meetings.

3. At the end of the meeting, suggest summarizing the main points. Make sure that everyone is on the same page.

4. Choose a shared space specifically connected to your design workflow—like linking meeting summaries directly to design tasks in Jira, or embedding them in Figma files, so that devs and other designers easily see relevant decisions.

How to Deal With the Information Overload

Information overload is a common case if you’ve just switched a company or taken up a new role.

1. Talk to your colleagues. If you need to take notes, politely ask the speaker to pause. If you feel like you’re losing track of the conversation, ask them to repeat or rephrase their statement in a simpler way.

2. Record meetings, especially those focused on complex design decisions or UX flows. This is helpful if you later need to revisit tricky interactions or clarify edge cases. Plus, these recordings can speed up onboarding new designers who join your team later.

Treat meeting recordings as a backup: they will always be ready in place for you in case you need to freshen up your memories. Files can be kept in iCloud. Just don’t forget to clean up the storage from time to time. Thanks to this skill, I gained a reputation as a well-organized and reliable designer.

Skill #3: Properly Document Your Design Decisions

Every design decision comes with hours of research, thinking, and meetings. However, after time, some decisions might appear vague or even counterintuitive. This is the case when no one takes notes regularly and meticulously.

As a result, some arguments in favor of a certain decision get forgotten. In turn, it brings up a new round of discussions on the questions that seemed to be solved a long time ago. Then, a new decision emerges that might overlook certain details or edge cases. All in all, your team loses precious time and starts to doubt each other.

To avoid this, it’s crucial to document all your design decisions.

Tips

1. For non-obvious decisions, make sure to leave comments in your mockups on how you arrived at this outcome. Non-obvious decisions are the ones that came as a result of multiple team discussions.

2. Don’t forget to attach links or screenshots of discussions or research that led to a certain decision. My team uses Slack, which lets us copy links to threads. We often attach this type of link to the files that we prepare for developers.

This skill helped me not only to level up my own productivity but also to make communication among my teammates more smooth and cohesive.

Skill #4: Review Your Work Regularly

To become a stronger designer, you need clarity about your strengths in UX, UI, research, communication, and other essential skills in your design toolkit. For that reason, it’s essential to keep track of all your work tasks—from quick UI tweaks to prominent metric-moving features—and to review your design decisions from time to time. This habit will help you understand your strengths and recognize the areas of potential growth.

Tips

1. Thoroughly document every task that you have finished. Create a list with links to the tasks.

2. If you work on large tasks where you influence the product’s metrics, try to be precise when describing:

   1. goals
   2. what you’ve done – in steps
   3. results – with metrics
   4. further steps

Keeping thorough documentation of your design work makes it easier to track decisions, iterate on past solutions, and revisit the reasoning behind mockups when refining features. Instead of spending time piecing together past discussions, you’ll have a clear reference for why certain choices were made. This habit also streamlines knowledge sharing with teammates and ensures that well-thought-out decisions don’t get lost over time.

So, Let’s Sum It Up

The skill of budgeting my work time allowed me to manage my daily workload more productively. As you can imagine, productive days build into productive weeks, supporting long-term planning, too. As I started making meeting summaries and taking care of documentation for the team’s design decisions, the communication among team members became smoother and more precise. Lastly, the habit of keeping track of my tasks was invaluable for my professional growth as I was able to review my decisions and set myself new goals on a regular basis.

I hope these four soft skills, which helped me adapt to my new role, will also benefit young designers eager to grow quickly.