The Hats We Wear in Product Teams

Tiffany Eaton
UX Planet
Published in
6 min readMay 17, 2017

Credit: angelanm

In a product team, every role is important to ensure we are designing the products we love as well as what our users will love.

In the UX design world, those “roles” tend to be referred to as “hats”. We wear “hats” based on the tasks we do at a given moment and due to the amount of skills we can have as UX designers, sometimes we go between different skills or roles. There are many hats one can wear, but in a company setting, we tend to stick to wearing one hat, which is our main role.

But having one role goes against what UX designers do. UX designers have a wide spectrum of skills. It is just a matter of getting out of the mindset of having “one” role and being able to seamlessly transition to many. In fact, most of our skills overlap because the nature of some of these roles are similar to one another.

Hats are important because they symbolize the countless abilities designers can utilize depending on the situation. Which hats do you like wearing and which hats would you consider wearing in the future?

Some of these descriptions are based on my experience working in design, but if you have a different experience of how design teams work in your company, feel free to leave a comment down below. :)

UX Design Hat

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