3 Non-Design Books To Read Now
Influence, negotiation and communication are skills that are imperative to becoming an evolved designer
It's not enough to just be proficient in a design tool;
Being a product designer means more than just being able to push pixels around a screen. We have to be problem solvers, negotiators, innovators, influencers… the list goes on. In my experience, my skills prospered most when I started thinking outside the box; the box being a hyper-focused design mentality thriving on medium articles and videos focused on improving how fast I could make a design, and instead on the soft skills required to sell or communicate it. If you want to get there faster than I did, here are three non-design books that I highly recommend to any designer looking to enhance their skills beyond the Figma file.
1. Growth Mindset by Carol Dweck
Book Summary: A “growth mindset” is the belief that one's abilities can be developed through hard work, dedication, and perseverance despite any prior existing talent. Dweck explores how this mindset can help people overcome obstacles to ultimately achieve their goals. A classic example Dweck notes is a name we all recognize: Thomas Edison. The inventor of the light bulb failed thousands of times before finally realizing success. When asked about his repeated failures, Edison famously said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
Why it's applicable for designers: If everything you and your team put in front of your user base is testing and passing with flying colors, you’re likely not doing enough to challenge your team/product. The easy wins come from solving the simple, recognizable problems e.g. an icon missing a label or adding a needed field to a drop down. Don’t get me wrong, fixing those pieces are important too, and meeting users where they’re at is crucial for adoption and retention, but, what if you re-imagined an entire screen or workflow in your product?
Showing users and customers more “out there” concepts can help spark ideas that may not have been considered otherwise; however, you won’t know until you put something out there that could “fail”. Adopting a growth mindset, designers can learn to embrace and look forward to every failure as a learning opportunity rather than a setback. Ultimately, what you’ll become is a more resilient and adaptable designer, hungry for feedback to guide improvement.
2. Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
Book Summary: This book is about negotiation strategies and tactics. Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator, shares his experiences and strategies for negotiating effectively, emphasizing the importance of active listening, empathy, and understanding the other person's perspective (sound familiar?). Each chapter starts out with one of Voss’s negotiation experiences; the stakes are typically high with the outcomes being either life or death but are immediately followed with an explanation of a new negotiation technique or strategy applied in an example with considerably lower stakes.
Why it's applicable for designers: Do I think team members are holding software users hostage? Not exactly. However, we do exist in a world of trade-offs. If it’s crunch time and not everything is going to make it into the product release, where does the debt go? The user? The development team? The business? How long does that debt linger? And what’s the cost of delaying a fix? What part or parts of your design are you willing to strip, and which are non-negotiable? These are all real stakes designers deal with while working within a product team.
Negotiation is an essential skill for designers, period. When influencing your team’s decisions, you’ll need to leverage not only research data and user feedback, but also your communication toolkit so that what you’re advocating for is clearly understood by your counterparts. By learning effective negotiation strategies, designers can improve their ability to communicate user needs and ideas with clients, stakeholders, and team members to persuade others to see their vision. This skill alone helps to build stronger relationships with working partners, and ultimately leads to more successful outcomes.
3. Crucial Conversations by Al Switzler, Joseph Grenny, and Ron McMillan
Book Summary: How do you tell your partner that their breath stinks? Or an executive that their idea for your department has some major flaws? What both of these scenarios have in common is they are high stakes conversations that impact you in decidedly different ways. This book offers practical advice and strategies for having these conversations by creating a safe and respectful environment, listening actively, and focusing on finding common ground for resolution.
Why it's applicable for designers: As a designer, not a week goes by where you don’t need to have a difficult conversation with a team member, stakeholder, or even your boss. How many times have we heard, “I like where your design is going – here’s a sketch I did. Can we just make this?” Although stressful and challenging, handling these moments gracefully is essential for building more trusting & collaborative relationships, achieving more with your team, and eventually, improving your designs. By learning how to have productive conversations around tough topics early and often, designers become better communicators and collaborators, and get where they want to go faster.
Wrap up
Reading these books has made me more empathetic, a better communicator, and someone who gets excited at the idea of a design needing changes. It means we’re learning, and therefore getting better. Understanding how to adapt to changing circumstances and communicating effectively are skills that can transcend your design career, at any stage. To add to the list, sometimes being a designer also means trying to be a better human, and the more time we spend doing that, the better we are at our craft.
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