Overcommunication — why is it so important for Product Designers?
By: Luthfi Sulaiman
Tags: Product Design, Communication, Soft Skills, Startup Life, Strategy Execution

This is more or less of what Product Designers should be doing (find me, I will think about giving you rewards)

For almost a year, working in Kargo has changed me a lot as a person and as a Product Designer. Kargo’s manpower are a mix of local and international talents put together in one vision, to build a world-class product to revolutionize the logistics Industry. I personally have learned from these amazing talents, like learning how to collaborate, learning their norms, what to say and what not to say. I even learned how much the foreigners (we call them Bule [Boo-Lay]) love rendang deeply.

This is Rendang, in case you live outside South East Asia (or you’re an Indonesian living under a rock) [Source: MOKA]

Now entering my 12th month in Kargo (with 9 months of #WorkFromHome isolation), I’ve had time to reflect on what was the most important things I’ve learned. Improving my design skills is a must, but developing my communication and stakeholder management skills are the most crucial.

When you have really smooth design process without any hitch of drawbacks from your stakeholders, then you might as well open the Pandora’s Box — some folksy Grecian Philosopher

Imagine you’re maintaining relationship with someone (this is the closest publicly relatable thing I thought about). Now I’m not one to talk about love stories, but I believe that the healthiest relationships are the ones who are able to communicate in improving one another. Things can go south very quickly if you’re not doing so. I don’t want to turn this blog into a love-advice blog, but it’s the same thing that you must do as a Product Designer. Keeping a close communication and collaboration with stakeholders involved within your project is crucial in delivering the best products, be it PMs, engineers, business teams, etc.

For freshies, I understand that you might encounter hiccups during those alignments, have heated discussions with your stakeholders. I also understand that this would require extra effort in your works. You already had lots of designs within your backlogs, now you also have to worry about how stakeholders would say about your designs? Believe me, my good friends, at least it is be far better to have these hiccups rather than finding them AFTER your product is delivered (Unless you want to see the world burn).

I made this meme for y’all. A simple simulation of overcommunication done wrong (video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI43U9UpkQo)

My experience when I did the exact opposite

Luckily for you, you don’t have to find out yourself about what happen if you don’t overcommunicate. I have some bags of experience of my own during my probation days working in Kargo. I worked alongside my then PM, working in Kargo’s Internal Tool Panthera (or at least I should have been). Back then, we were in the midst of a big bang project chunked into small sprints, where our goals were to enable our marketplace transporters to be able to fulfil shipments from our commercial environment (Commercial is where our bigger, more guaranteed Shippers are).

I was that typical fresh-graduate “Product Designer” diving in head first into one of the most fast-paced squads in Kargo. Working in silo, delivering designs by requests from people without knowing much technical and business contexts, you name it. Back then, I designed Panthera based on my gut feelings, ensuring my designs have the flow “they expect to work”. When I deliver the designs to the engineers and my PM, she said to me:

PM: “Pi, have you align this design with our users?”

Me: “Wait we need to align first? I thought it’s an internal tool, and a form, everyone gets it easily”

PM: “….”

Me: “….”

That’s when things started to go topsy-turfy for me. Midway into our engineering sprint, I’ve only just started aligning with the business team about the design. Their reaction were a mix of confusion, dissatisfaction, and resentment towards the design. Though I was only designing for an internal tools, everything still has to be tested, they are still part of Kargo’s users. After it happened, we just went along with the design, since there are still workarounds that can be done by the business team using my design, and it’s also way too risky to have changes now. I had my lessons learned at that time, and I promise to never do it again. Unfortunately, I bit my tongue twice, hard.

This is my state of mind when it happened

The second time it happened, I was designing one flow that could involve lots of cross-team collaborations in order to make it run smoothly. We already had our sprint planned, and pretty much done halfway. Then suddenly one of the business team member noticed something odd, there was one minor design change that we haven’t actually discussed. After noticing, lots of parties were massively infuriated and some even fed up with my performance.

The higher ups were immediately involved to handle this problem, controlling the situation so it didn’t go beyond it should’ve been. Turns out, this “minor component” could potentially be impacting our business workflow as a whole, in a horrible way. We had to rearrange our sprint, talked with many stakeholders in a flash, and made total overhaul of the design. All could’ve been avoided if I had aligned with stakeholders earlier.

What did I do next?

I opened up to my manager (by the time of writing), Rangga Husnaprawira on our 1-on-1 (re: therapy) session, he taught me how to say things the right way, getting more structured in articulating my thoughts, speaking practices, and confidence development. I started to shadow other meetings, see how my more senior colleagues work their way into an agreements with stakeholders. Summarise what and how they say it, and see if I can replicate or improve from them.

From Kargo Product’s standpoint, we have increased our alignments and overcommunications with the business teams every time an update happened within the product or the design.

For me personally, it required me a few more months before getting more used to it. I’m still learning this part of the job, even by the time of writing. But overtime, I noticed some improvements, and also providing more harmonies into my meetings. It helped me prevent lots of business and technical issues, with also figuring out edge cases of my design early.

The importance of overcommunication

When working on a complex project — especially if you don’t have enough people or you hired remotely — the last thing your team needs is to have to guess what you mean by saying “x”. Eugen Eşanu

One small component could be the difference between good and bad product. Our responsiblity as a PD is not only creating beautiful UIs, but about how good are we at communicating our thoughts and design applicable to our company. Think like a traveler, ask the right questions about practically everything, ask as simple as “What are we trying to solve?” rather than directly assure “Sure, I’ll finish the design by EOD”. Show how much we care and how we want to help achieve company goals.

I also made this meme for y’all

W hen you think that you have “trivial informations”, try to ask your stakeholders and hear what they think. It could avoid you into a lot of unnecessary mess

This does not only apply to when we’re figuring out requirements, explaining our designs and articulating the process also plays an important part in making sure that everything corresponds towards our previous discussions. There also are factors that we need to understand before delivering. By aligning to stakeholders, we can figure out these factors together and discuss about the end-goals of a project.

Going back into the present, and look into the future

The best designers are the ones who are able to properly communicate with others, and align on the goals. Learning how to communicate properly can be tricky. It takes time to get use to, building your own confidence, discipline, and soft skills. From me personally, improving your soft skills are just as important as building your design portfolio.

Would love to hear some thoughts and feedbacks from any Product Designer out there that are still with us in this article, Kargo folks are open for any feedbacks and iterate further!