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A day in the life of a Meta product designer

At Meta, we have 3.5 billion people who use our products every day. They use them in various different ways. This is what the role of the product designer is to remind the rest of the cross functional teams of the reason why we're building the things that we're building. Yeah, half of the planet, no pressure casual, I'm Petra and I'm a product designer at meta reality labs and I live in London, I think that people very often think that product designers spend all of their time designing, That is actually not true. Product designers spend most of their time talking to people most of their time in documents and actually thinking holistically about the product every day. I get surprised by how users actually interact with our products, very rewarding to realize that you are, you are wrong in your assumptions, it's kind of humbling to see that and obviously when you're building global products for so many people, you have to remind yourself that not everyone are going to be using the products in the way that you thought about them. We are constantly talking to the people that were building products for. It's probably one of the best part of my work. To be honest, these conversations remind you that you are not your user get surprised absolutely every day of how people interact or decide to interact with whatever we're building Throughout my life. I have been exposed to software, the reason was quite banal, I think I wanted to Photoshop myself next to Orlando Bloom when I was 12. So this was my first exposure to Photoshop. From that point onwards, I kind of spiraled into other types of software and told myself how to code as well. When I graduated from illustration, I was already experimenting with new technologies, like connect some interesting tech like Arduino, I also had a raspberry pi and I was just building interactive experiences. So this very naturally led itself into a role of a digital designer. At the time, my first role was designing for a platform as a digital slash graphic designer. And from that point onwards I went into front end engineering, I would say that I wasn't the best engineer, I was more interested in the user journey, how products work, what are the problems that these products solve? So it was a very natural shift from being a front end developer to becoming a product designer and actually playing on my visual skills a little bit more. I worked between Web mobile VR and augmented reality, so it really depends on the project that I have at hand today. Generally the day starts with me catching up with emails and catching up with whatever has happened whilst I was asleep that as a global company. So a lot can happen during the night. After an hour or so. I would then catch up with my lead engineer and my product manager and then the day will start from there, we working very cross functional teams. That means that you might have meetings with someone from content design who are the people who are looking after our written content or you might be working with someone from marketing if you have a new feature that is coming up or you might be working with your engineers, which as a designer is probably most likely. I think engineers and designers do sometimes tend to have a disconnect particularly because designers might not know the code base, might not understand the the engineering limitations and on the opposite side, engineers might not really know what the design process is. What's important is to from the very beginning, build a very strong partnerships between the two functions. I would actually say whenever as an engineer, you're starting to work with the designer, don't dive into the work straightaway pose. And take some time to understand this person, talk through the processes that you're both comfortable with and after that dive into the more technical aspects of the work, like requirements or dependencies or discussing the actual functionalities that you're going to be building together. Don't be afraid of designers. I've seen that quite a few times where front end engineers tend not to not to contradict their designers but feel free to have a conversation. If you can see that your designer that the design does not fit the requirements or is not going to be easy to execute or there's a less costly way to execute it. Go to your designer, speak to them, have a conversation, designers are here to help you. We are partners in this endeavor, and we're ultimately going towards the same goal. So it's absolutely vital for us to collaborate. Good luck on your journey of becoming an engineer. It might feel daunting at times, but stick to it. It is worth it when you see how you impact the life of people who use your products.