Becoming a Product Designer
What product designers really do beyond the interface, how portfolios are actually judged, and the routes into design work in Botswana.
What the job actually involves
Product design is decision-making that happens to produce screens. The visible output is an interface; the actual work is deciding what should exist, for whom, and what to leave out.
This is why designers who can only produce beautiful screens plateau early. The ones who progress are those who can explain why a screen looks that way in terms of a user problem and a business constraint.
In Botswana, dedicated product design roles are scarce. The ones that exist sit mostly in banking and insurance, at the mobile operators and the mobile-money businesses attached to them, and in government digital services. Everything else is agency work, where the title is usually graphic or communication design even when the job includes product thinking. Read the responsibilities, not the title.
A typical week
Less time in Figma than people expect. A representative week: two days of design work, and the rest in conversations with engineers about feasibility, with product about scope, and with users about whether any of it is right.
Skills required
Figma is the least interesting thing on this list. It is table stakes, learnable in a month, and no reason to hire anyone.
What actually differentiates candidates is user research and the ability to defend a decision. A portfolio that shows the reasoning is worth more than one that shows only outcomes.
Typical career path
- 01Junior designeryears 0-2
You execute against defined problems, usually inside an existing design system. The job is to produce work that is consistent and to learn how decisions get made.
- 02Product designeryears 2-5
You own features end to end, including the research. You are expected to bring problems as well as solutions.
- 03Senior designeryears 5-8
You work on ambiguous problems where nobody has defined the brief. Much of the value is in scoping and in preventing wasted work.
- 04Lead, or design manageryear 8 onward
Either direction across multiple product areas, or responsibility for a team of designers. As in engineering, these are different jobs, not levels.
Education options
Useful for craft fundamentals and critique, which are genuinely hard to self-teach. Design programmes in the region are oriented toward graphic and communication design rather than product, so expect to bridge the gap yourself.
4 years
Entirely viable and common. Works when you can find real problems to solve; fails when a portfolio is a series of redesigns of apps you do not use.
12-18 months · Low
Provides structure and critique, which is the hardest thing to get alone. The certificate itself carries almost no weight with hiring managers; the portfolio you build in it does.
3-6 months
Tools
Figma · FigJam · Maze · Notion
Portfolio requirements
Design portfolios are judged on reasoning, not on screens. A reviewer is looking for evidence that you understood a problem, considered options, and made a defensible choice.
- Two or three case studies, not ten
- Each showing the problem, what you tried, what you rejected and why
- At least one real project with a real user, however small
- Honest outcomes, including what did not work
Unsolicited redesigns of well-known apps are the weakest possible entry, because you had no access to the constraints the original team worked under.
Entry-level opportunities
Entry routes here are mostly agencies, in-house teams at banks and the mobile operators, and freelance work that becomes a role. Agencies teach speed and breadth; the few real product teams teach depth. Remote contracts are a realistic fourth route and often the only way to work on a product at scale.
Career progression
The natural progressions are into product management, into design leadership, or into a specialism such as design systems or research. Many designers move toward product because the decisions they care about live there.
Interview preparation
A design interview is almost always a portfolio walkthrough plus an exercise. The walkthrough is the one that decides it.
- Present one case study as a story: problem, constraints, options, decision, outcome
- Be explicit about what you would do differently now
- Expect a live exercise; think aloud rather than producing silence and a finished screen
Recommended resources
- Refactoring UI bookPractical visual craft for people who can reason but cannot yet make it look right.
Frequently asked
What is the difference between UI design and product design?
UI design is concerned with how an interface looks and behaves. Product design includes that but starts earlier, with deciding what should be built and for whom, and continues after launch into whether it worked. In practice job titles here use the terms loosely, and much product work is advertised as graphic design, so read the responsibilities rather than the title.
Do I need to know how to code to be a product designer?
No, but understanding what makes something expensive to build makes you substantially better at the job. Enough HTML and CSS to read a front-end codebase and hold a credible conversation with an engineer is the useful threshold. Learning to build production software is not necessary.
How many case studies should a design portfolio have?
Two or three, presented in depth. Reviewers spend a few minutes on a portfolio and judge the reasoning behind one project rather than counting projects. Ten shallow case studies signal that you have not yet worked on anything long enough to have learned from it.
Are unsolicited app redesigns bad portfolio pieces?
They are the weakest common entry, because you did not have access to the constraints, data or business context the original team worked under, so the work cannot demonstrate judgement. A small real project for a real user, even unpaid, is worth more.