I have always found most performance rubrics for product designers to be either (1) overly convoluted or (2) naively tracking the traditional "design process" steps without considering relative weight.
Back in 2024, I set out to try and unify the one I use with my team at Top Hat into 5-6 big skills that I could evaluate each designer on regardless of level.
I eventually landed on 6 big categories that I have found have scaled well since:
Design Quality: Producing work you’d want to put in your portfolio.
Experimentation: Reducing the time it takes to explore a new idea.
Research: Gathering data to support your design decisions.
Working with others: Being a great design partner across the business.
Process: Executing the required design “rituals”.
Adjacent skills: Building capabilities in non-design fields.
Below is how I articulate each of these to my team. In the complete document, there is also role-specific guidance that I have left out of this public version.
Design Quality: Producing work you’d want to put in your portfolio.
We try to “punch above our weight” when it comes to the design of our product. The bar for quality is not other products in our industry, but all best-in-class products. This means over-investing in skills like:
Visual design: Using type, spacing, colour, and effects to communicate the purpose of individual elements. Making use of Gestalt Principles.) to assemble layouts that “make sense“ overall.
Heuristics / Usability: Discovering and using common patterns for functionality that is similar to other products solving similar problems.
Interaction design: Considering how a user flows through our product via navigation, gestures, inputs, feedback, and flows.
Accessibility: Application of WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria. Testing the implemented designs meet these criteria.
Design Systems: Adhering to the established and look and feel of our product. Evolving our patterns when it makes sense to do so.
Specifications: Providing detailed & high quality guidance to engineering teams on finalized work.
Experimentation: Reducing the time it takes to explore a new idea.
We have a strong preference for agile development. You need to adapt your design toolkit to reduce the gap between articulating your ideas and getting them developed. This means building habits like:
Defining scope: Understanding early what it will take to develop your designs. Making compromises while maintaining the essence/intention of your design ideas.
Iteration: Showing work to your peers early and often. Making space for explorations of an idea to happen; avoiding “one and done“ work when possible.
Innovation: Coming up with net-new ideas for features that may not yet be on the roadmap. Pushing the envelop of what our product “is“.
Intuition/taste: Developing a “gut sense“ for what makes a feature or product great. Using this as a shortcut for the traditional design process.
Research: Gathering data to support your design decisions.
We cannot always rely on our own intuition for design work. It’s important to know when you need to gather more data to move a project forward or convince others of its efficacy. Specifically, when you should apply:
Secondary research: Tapping into pre-existing resources that bolster your understanding of the problem or seeing how others have solved it in the past.
User research: Engaging with real users of our product to understand their experiences, wants, and needs.
Usability testing: Using qualitative or quantitative methods to evaluate how well an existing or upcoming feature performs.
Data analysis: Working with (and getting access to) data from our own product to inform your design approach.
Working with others: Being a great design partner across the business.
We provide a design “service“ to our organization. Like any service, the ‘how’ matters just as much – if not more so – than the ‘what’. More specifically:
Communication: Letting others know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and when it will be done. Across meetings, documents, and messages.
Time-management: Meeting deadlines set by you and others. Balancing which design projects to give more or less focus to.
Organization: Maintaining tidy files and prototypes that others can easily understand.
Presenting work: Helping others understand the intention behind your design work. Getting people onboard with your ideas. Receiving feedback on your work charitably.
Trifecta relationships: Contributing significantly to discussions of scope, roadmaps, and technical constraints with PMs, EMs, Data Leads, and Tech Leads.
Non-product stakeholders: gathering input and feedback from other parts of the organization when it makes sense to do so (ex: Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, etc.).
Process: Executing the required design “rituals”.
We have a few core “rituals” that all designers are expected to follow in their day-to-day work. These are the only areas where we prescribe how you design:
Design Critique: Major design projects should receive regular feedback from peers (via Design Slots or async) throughout the project lifecycle. You’re also expected to regularly provide critique to others on the team.
Design Finalization: All major projects must go through the finalization process before handoff to engineering. You’re responsible for following up on any recommendations that come out of this review.
Design Review: You must review the implementation of your designs to ensure quality, completeness, and accessibility. You are responsible for setting up and maintaining this process — especially when it comes to resolving issues in a reasonable time.
Outside of these rituals, your design process is up to you. We intentionally avoid enforcing a one-size-fits-all approach. We trust you to use — and continue growing — your design toolkit to deliver high-quality work.
Adjacent skills: Building capabilities in non-design fields.
Product Design is an inherently multidisciplinary craft and the line between what is and isn’t “Product Design“ blurs a lot as you mature in your craft. As a result, it’s important to invest some time in building knowledge and capabilities in adjacent fields like :
Product Management
Engineering
Business Strategy
Marketing/Brand/Writing
Sales/Customer Support
Sociology / Psychology / Anthropology