To Be or Not To Be a Niche Product Designer

Preface: Last week I talked to a software product designer who was trying to find a next role in AR/VR, a sector that has been hit particularly hard with layoffs this year. They had a couple years of solid experience working in the space, and their portfolio looked great — I had a hard time recommending changes. I thought back to over a year ago, when I was a hiring manager at a previous company. This candidate would have been someone I’d want to interview for our design team. However these days, like many product designers searching for their next role, they were finding the job market to be tough.

We then shifted the conversation to their previous work background. I scrolled back and noticed that this person had spent a few years performing a different role in another industry. I was immediately aware that there would be opportunities at the overlap of past and present — not many, but there were designers working at this intersection now. I asked if there was interest in working there—yes, definitely. In fact they confessed they had applied to a position at this crossroads recently and been rejected (we’ll get back to that). This article is about how product designers can make niche work.

Sea of Sameness

The job market is especially tough for product designers right now. To make the job search harder, product use cases vary, however, most products are not particularly unique from a user interface perspective. Software applications are largely web or mobile-based composed of similar UI elements and design patterns. This has set the bar very high for product design generalist roles, where one often needs to have strong visual design, interaction design, not to mention many other skills, to stand out among hundreds of other candidates, who have done similar UI work. Granted visual design polish is only one part of the job, but it’s one of the more immediately noticeable aspects of a portfolio – and can be gauged (sometimes harshly) without reading a single piece of supporting text.

Echoing this sentiment, I recently talked to an executive at a design agency, who said, in so many words, that their company’s website is beautiful (not going to argue there – it was), and the bar for product designers hired to their company was the ability to create something just as beautiful. They described their agency as “design forward” and then asked if I was interested in working as a software engineer.

I chuckled a bit at this proposition. Don’t get me wrong. I am honored. As an individual contributor designer, I am more technical-leaning, have worked as a prototyper in the past, can go deep in areas of input and interaction, with an understanding of how engineering would put it all together. However, for polish I have been fortunate to partner with amazing graphic designers or work within a visual design system they’ve established. If I’m managing a design team, I make sure to have someone on it who can serve that function. However, if I’m showing a design portfolio, I am typically less focused on dominating with beautiful, glossy UIs, than I am drawing attention to the unique ways my team and I went about solving unique, often technical, design challenges that led up to final product, visual design being just one aspect.

This conversation reminded me that people approach product design from different perspectives and experiences — not all are generalists, and not all our graphic designers. Most of the companies I’ve worked with over the years would never have insisted on a designer’s ability to design something as nice as their company website to be criteria for making a hire unless they were hiring someone to design their website. Many great product designers I’ve worked with aren’t ones whom you’d want designing your website, or icons, nor are they masters of typography. But, they are great designers. They have just chosen to go deeper below the surface. You might think of them as “design entrenched.”

Being Niche

If you step away from the product design generalist lane, into the realm of products less typical, you often find that depth is valued more than breadth. Think IoT, automotive, and medical technology to name a few. But those are just industries — technical ones at that. There are other ways to go niche. Product designers can work on products that serve unique populations (eg persons with disabilities) or rely on very different deliverable outputs (eg interactive data visualizations). Product designers can even reside within more mainstream applications (es SaaS, e-Commerce) while flexing niche backgrounds (eg culinary, pet products, why not culinary pet products!).

Enter the product design specialists. The opportunities are fewer and far between, but if you’ve worked in these areas (or better yet, spent time in more than one domain that a position overlaps — see above diagram), you could find yourself short-listed when applying for a job, if you take the right approach.

It Only Takes One

When applying to a niche software product design job that is a match for your specific skills and interests, here is my advice:

• There may not be many jobs where you are an ideal fit. But fear not. It only takes one. And when you find that one (or two)…
• Spend a fair amount of time tuning the resume. You may know you are a fit, but perhaps to cast a wider net, your current resume encompasses skills and accomplishments that have less to do with this new opportunity. You can go deeper. Now is the time invest time, focus, remove less relevant skills and make it clear to the hiring company that you are a specialist in what they need. Also create a section of key accomplishments highlighting in clear single-line bullet points, the things you’ve done and are proud of that relate to role.
• Similarly your cover letter should focus further on your unique specializations and link to actual work examples (Full disclosure: this is the only piece of advice I’m sharing here that I haven’t tried myself, but a friend of mine, who just landed a job did, so I’m listing it here). Others applying for the job may list skills, which are not hands-on, but in actuality more domain familiarity (e.g. AI is going to be common one that people will just list on a resume these days), but as a specialist you’ll be able to link to actual projects that demonstrate your approach and mastery of unique skills.
• Find a referral for the role, and get their help. Also, if the job doesn’t require or request a cover letter (and arguably even if it does), it’s to you advantage to try to learn who the hiring manager / recruiter is and communicate this information to them via your referral person, through LinkedIn, email or elsewhere. Might be best to try multiple approaches simultaneously. You might even find someone at the company, who can determine who the person is, but is not comfortable saying who/ doing an introduction, due to know there not knowing the person, however is comfortable sending your details to them — that’s great, take in. The hiring manager recruiter may not reply immediately or at all, because they are getting bombarded by other applicants, but they will most certainly see it — it can’t hurt.
• Lastly to generalist product designers who aren’t currently niche, but want to be, I have two bits of advice. You should absolutely still apply to positions that are niche. These roles often have a smaller applicant pool, so hiring managers can become more flexible. For instance, in my last full-time role I was a design director of interactive experiences at an augmented reality brain-computer interface facilitating communications for person with severe disabilities (yes, that’s a product). On the domain expertise side I had the UI/UX and Augmented Reality boxes fully checked, had some experience working in assistive technology, and had zero experience in neurotechnology, but expressed a strong interest in developing my knowledge in the latter two areas on the job — it worked. Finally segueing into my final words of wisdom: most product designers start out as generalist, however by working more in the field, remaining open to learning and broadening their idea of what product design is, they too may find their niche.