Product Designer Salary and Insights for 2026

What Is a Product Designer?

What is a product designer? Someone who designs products, of course. But a product designer doesn’t sit down and think of an idea for a product, sketch it out, and start making it. Product designers consider whether or not their idea could work at all, let alone be worth making. Secondly, they need to figure out how to develop a product that works well and that users enjoy using. The work of product designers is rarely a solitary pursuit; it takes place in teams, where decisions about stakeholders’ needs must be balanced, from the chief executive to the end-user.

Product Designer Definition

A product designer designs pretty much anything that can be called a product: food packaging, stuffed animals, spreadsheet programs, pretty much everything! But product designer is really an umbrella term for many things. For example, an industrial product designer designs physical products (like the parts of a drill) while other product designers design SaaS products (like a customer management system). There are three main types of product design:

• System design. In this case the designer determines the layout of the store, what products are grouped where, how they are shelf-edged, etc.
• Process design. This technique is used a lot in e-commerce. For example, a potential buyer that will decide whether to buy a product (you’ve found the item, you read the description, you choose the size or color, you place the product inside the shopping cart, etc) will decide whether your store sells or not.
• Interface design means this is all about how the end-user interacts with the product. This is that kind of UX design, so that the product is easy to use.

Gain relevant skills. UX/UI: Understanding what a user wants to accomplish, what their pain points are, and how a product makes them feel is a core component of design. Technical skills to learn can include wireframing and prototyping, conducting research, and testing product features. Prototyping tools can include Framer, Principle, or Figma. Visual design tools: A product that’s pleasing to the eye can delight customers and make for a pleasant user experience. Job descriptions often request you have a sense of aesthetics, and some knowledge of the tools used in visual design. These can include Figma, Sketch, or Adobe Creative Suite. Project management or leadership experience: Having some practice seeing the bigger picture of a process, being able to strategize, and knowing how to execute a vision can come in handy as a product designer. You don’t have to have worked as a project manager, but some experience creating, overseeing, or implementing a project can be useful.