As product designers, we constantly face a challenging reality: balancing quality with speed. The more complex a user experience becomes, the more work is required to simplify it. Business demands and user needs often conflict, but one area they align on is time. In today’s tech landscape, global competition and limited resources push companies to deliver quickly, putting pressure on product designers to churn out work at a relentless pace.
If you’ve been in this field long enough, you’ve probably experienced the frustration of releasing a product you’re not entirely proud of. You might even feel like you’re not good enough or are failing in your role. But here’s the truth: you’re likely not a bad designer. However, you might need to improve how you communicate with your collaborators.
In this article, I’ll unpack how to communicate your needs as a product designer, advocate for better processes, and ultimately, create better products. Let’s explore how communication is key to evolving from a good designer to a great design leader.
The Design Dilemma
Before diving into solutions, let’s acknowledge the relationship between quality and speed in design. Over my 10+ years of working in digital design, I’ve developed a concept I call the Design Dilemma:
The Design Dilemma: A single designer can’t deliver a polished, usable experience quickly without risking burnout.
This dilemma mirrors the classic tradeoff between good, fast, and cheap work. Often, people see a polished, high-fidelity interface and assume it’s ready to ship. But visual design is only one layer of the user experience. Usability, accessibility, and thoughtful interaction design require time, testing, and iteration.
Delivering a high-quality user experience under tight deadlines isn’t realistic. Great design is about hypothesis testing, gathering user feedback, and refining solutions—steps that take time. However, product development processes often encourage speed over quality, leading designers to make guesses instead of being deliberate.
Defining Clear Boundaries
As a designer, you are responsible for advocating for users, which often means advocating for yourself, too. If you feel pressured to deliver excellent work quickly, it’s time to set clear boundaries. It’s not sustainable to teeter on the edge of burnout, and staying silent about an overwhelming workload only leads to subpar results.
If you’re vocal about your workload but still experience pressure to overdeliver, you might be facing a cultural issue within your workplace. A supportive company culture prioritizes humane work conditions and recognizes the value of thoughtful, well-paced design.
Setting Better Expectations
Clear communication is crucial to setting realistic expectations. By breaking down your availability and estimating work effectively, you can help your collaborators understand your capacity and prioritize projects more effectively. Here are a few steps I recommend, loosely inspired by engineering practices:
1. Assess Your Availability
Designers, like everyone else, have a limited amount of focus time. If you only look at your work day by day, you might miss the bigger picture. It’s important to zoom out and assess your availability over longer periods, such as a quarter. For example, in a 13-week quarter, if you work 40 hours per week and spend 10 hours in meetings, that leaves 75% of your time for focused design work. That’s about 9.75 weeks available for projects.
By analyzing your availability over a quarter, you gain a clearer understanding of how much work you can realistically take on.
2. Estimate Your Work
Once you know your availability, it’s time to estimate the complexity and risk of upcoming projects. Since design work can be ambiguous, use two factors to size your tasks:
- Risk: How much impact would an unsuccessful solution have on the product or company?
- Complexity: How much effort and research will it take to deliver a successful solution?
I assign points to these factors (1 to 3), creating a rough estimate of project size. For example, a project with low risk but high complexity might be a “Medium” task. This simple framework helps me understand the scope of each project and how much time it will take.
3. Clarify Your Capacity
With estimates in hand, you can now compare them to your availability. I translate each project’s size into time estimates based on my focus time:
- Extra Small (XS): 0–0.2 weeks
- Small (S): 0.4–1 week
- Medium (M): 1.2–1.6 weeks
- Large (L): 1.8–2.2 weeks
- Extra Large (XL): 2.4+ weeks
This process lets me gauge if my workload is manageable or if I need to re-prioritize. For example, after applying this framework, my product manager and I realized we had over 20 weeks of work planned for a single quarter—a clear signal to adjust our priorities.
4. Destigmatize Disappointment
Here’s the hard truth: estimates are almost always wrong. And that’s okay! Designers often worry about disappointing their team by giving larger time estimates, but it’s better to communicate realistic timelines upfront than to overpromise and underdeliver.
If you need to deliver quickly, negotiate with your team. You might focus on lower-risk tasks first while giving more attention to higher-risk areas later. Explain where you’ll streamline efforts and what can be iterated on post-launch. By being transparent about what’s possible, you build trust and set the stage for a better product.
Communicating the Value of Design
The tools and processes we’ve discussed aren’t just about time management—they’re about advocating for the value of design. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by deadlines, but great design leaders communicate the importance of thoughtful work. Talk with your team about the Design Dilemma and explain how rushing design can hurt the product in the long run.
While design is inherently a fast-moving, iterative field, by taking these steps, you can gain more control over your workload, set better expectations, and ultimately deliver work that you and your team can be proud of.
Conclusion: Championing Quality in Product Design
Product design is messy, but it doesn’t have to feel overwhelming. By setting boundaries, assessing your availability, estimating your work, and communicating clearly with your team, you can tackle the Design Dilemma head-on. Remember, great design takes time—and your role as a designer is to advocate for the time and space necessary to create meaningful, user-centered products.
So, the next time you feel pressure to deliver faster, pause and communicate your needs. Take control of your process, and give yourself—and your team—the opportunity to create something truly great.