If you work with me, you might have overheard at some point that I am not passionate about designing things. When it comes to smaller visual details I tend to get impatient and rather disappointed in the result. There is a reason that Design is a whole separate career path – to do it good, a lot of practice and knowledge is needed. While I like to know everything and do my job as good as possible, I had to come to peace with myself that design will never be my strong skill.
If you are working on a smaller or midsized company, mostly you will see yourself though in the position of covering at least a basic interaction design, on which you iterate together with a designer. To be able to do the interaction design knowledge of the product, the planned feature and the users is needed, which should all be present in general when being a Product Manager.
While I like to get into the interaction design, I do not feel like having the skills or even the taste for a good visual design. I like functional implementations, which serve the purpose – which is not necessarily what a user wants though. Especially for external facing applications I rather involve (as available) people with more design knowledge or taste for the visual designs.
My opinion: You don’t need to know a lot about Design to be a good PM (as long as you work at a company which has a designer for the product). As a starter in PM space, get a solid understanding of interaction design and design patterns to use. Read about the design patterns and check out the applications you normally use in your daily life. Compare how they are implemented. Usually it is not a good idea to introduce some revolutionary new way in designs – no matter how cool it might be – because your users are not used to it and will get frustrated. There is a reason there are patterns used across all software you can find.
Useful links:
– Navigation: https://ui-patterns.com/patterns/navigation/list
– Input Elements: https://ui-patterns.com/patterns/getting-input/list
– Onboarding https://ui-patterns.com/patterns/onboarding/list