Imán Calderón

Hello. So I am Imán. I am from Spain and I am a product designer that works as a freelancer for seven years now.

I work for companies from being like startups to well-known or established brands. Because I work as a freelancer, I tend to do many projects. So I work for established brands such as Zara, the Soho House, BMW, Hublot, and big agencies.

And the kind of work that I do when I say that I'm a product designer is UX/UI, which means basically designing apps and websites. So all the screens that you see when you open an app or when you interact with a website, there's a thought process behind it. So where to place the buttons or how the layout of the page is gonna be like, or what happens when you click the button, what's the next screen that you're gonna see? The hierarchy of the information and the visuals too.

So it's basically the digital experience of an app or a website.

My typical day looks like I start checking messages. So I use platforms like Slack or Google Chat. So some of the clients that I work for, they work in different time zones. So I need to check that I don't have messages or if I have messages from them from the previous day.

Also, I need to check emails because sometimes I have urgent tasks and my day starts basically prioritising the kind of work and tasks that I need to do along the day or along the week.

Then we usually have every day what is called a standup meeting, which is basically a meeting in which all the team, all the members of the team meet and everyone says what they're working on, if they have any blockers, and when they think the task that they are working on is gonna be done if they have any questions. So in that meeting, everyone knows what everyone is doing, and it's very helpful because sometimes you're working on the same task as your colleague and you can get help from him or from her. After that I do some research or I start designing or I help with testing. I usually work very closely with the PM, which is the Product Manager.

The Product Manager is the person who defines the strategy of what we're gonna be working on next. And I'm always checking with him that my priorities align with what he has in mind. And I also check with him that my designs or the research or the kind of work that I'm doing is what he thinks or like he agrees on because he's more in touch with the business side of the product.

So, I'm more creative, he's more product oriented. So we both need to meet in the middle ground, so I always have these very direct and clear communications with the product manager. And yeah, that's what my day usually looks like. Meetings, emails, and communication and when I have time, of course, design and research and all that.

But communication, I think it's the priority. So everyone is aligned and everyone knows what they're doing.

The best thing about being a product designer is when you... when someone says that you've done a great job. Like, I guess like in every role, right? I think one of the best moments or the happiest moments is when you get feedback from users. You, for example, have launched a new feature within an app and it's something that you've been working on for weeks or months, and there's a lot of hard work behind and you finally released it and users start to to use it.

And if they're happy with it or if this new feature has improved a little bit more their lives, it's something that is very rewarding because that's the kind of job that you wanna do.

Sometimes, on the other hand, the worst part of this job is sometimes there are a lot of politics involved and sometimes you need to balance some of your designs or decisions that you will do in a different way. But because of these needs and because these goals that the business now have you need to change what you will do in order to make what they want.

So sometimes you don't agree with those decisions but it's part of the job. So you just need to choose your battle sometimes and let it go.

I didn't know I wanted to be a product designer at the beginning. I think that this is a fairly new position, it's like less than 10 years old. I come from a background that it's more like an old -school graphic designer. And then I was working at an agency for a very heavy printed law firm, so it was a very, like a very old school client, everything was printed. And everyone in my surroundings that had the same job as I did I could see that they were starting to do a lot of digital stuff and I didn't have the chance.

So I started to get super obsessed with getting a project that was digital and I started to ask at my agencies if I could get a different client and they said no. So I did myself a course, for three months about UX/UI and I got the knowledge, or like the basic knowledge, that I thought that I needed to have in order to be able to jump into digital projects.

With that knowledge, I actually offered to these law firms to transform their print agenda into something digital that they can consult and that they can reference. It was a volunteer project that I did that they really appreciated and that they actually wanted to do in the law firm. They didn't know that they wanted to do it until I did it.

It was my first project and that's when I realized that that was the job that I wanted to continue doing. I really love branding and I really love graphic design but design was evolving and everything started to happen much faster when COVID happened, when everything became digital. So that's when I realized that, you know, print was still okay but it was a branch within design that it was gonna get old, so I started to do everything digital until now, so it's been eight years now.

My education... so I studied something completely different at the beginning. I studied protocol and international relations for almost four years. I started to do a lot of events with the royalty here in Spain and politics and private events too. And I did that for almost10 years. I really liked it but I hate politics.

So I always had this artistic brain that I got from my Mom, so I decided to go back to art and I did a graphic design degree for another three years, and then I jumped into art direction, and then I did this UX/UI course that I told you about when I was in London, and then from there I started to do a lot of little courses of interaction design, design systems, AI in design and things like that.

I've been always very curious about everything and I think that that's what led me here. What I'm saying is like, you never know where you're gonna end up but I think that the key is to keep yourself curious and to keep yourself motivated in learning, because also being in a tech world means that everything changes very fast and you need to be updating your knowledge all the time because everything changes.

And every day there's a new AI app or a new system or a new platform that you will need to use. So you need to be very fast and educated.

Well, I have a few, I have a few moments of my career that are memorable.

I remember the first client that I got being a product designer that was a startup. And it was a small startup but what they did, they did it with a lot of care and with a lot of love. It was a small team of very passionate people. It was a coffee brand. No, it was not a coffee brand. It was like they did these machines to be able to roast coffee. And I got this exciting project. For me, it was very exciting because it was my first project and I was working by myself in there, and we put a lot of effort into redesigning the whole experience from the beginning till the end.

So that involved branding, packaging, and the app for iOS and Android. And I did that all by myself, from the beginning to the end for a year and a half, and I remember when we launched the app, it was, it was so emotional. I actually got emotional when that happened because I was so lost.

I didn't know what I was doing. I had to ask a lot of people that were doing the same kind of job that I did. Asking for opinions, like asking for guidance. and I wasn't sure what I was doing was actually the right thing to do. But then when we launched it and we started to receive a lot of feedback from the users saying that it was exceptional and that they loved the new way of how the experience was designed, I think that was the best gift ever.

That reassured me, again, that I was on the right path. Of course, there were things that could be much more improved as always, even though if you think that you're mastering something, there's always something better that you can do better. But for me it was like a, a big, big, big gift and that's one of my best memory moments of my career, for sure.

The one piece of advice that I wish someone told me when I was younger will be that there's so much pressure or at least that that's what I felt. There's so much pressure on knowing what you want to be when you grow up, right? When you become professional.

There are some people that have a very clear idea of what they want to become but people like me, for example, I didn't know that this profession existed until I was 29 years old because it didn't exist. My profession, the profession that I'm doing right now.

So I wish that someone told me when I was younger that it's okay to not have everything figured out, that you can change your mind. The world can change. You can also try different things.

Choosing one career path doesn't mean that you cannot try something else in the future because you can always change, you can always go back. There's not a clear or defined way to do things, and you never know where you're gonna be or what you're gonna be doing, or what you're gonna like and how you're gonna be in the future.

So I think that the most important thing is to stay curious in every area of life and to keep learning, and of course, trust yourself, always work hard and, and believe in what you do.