Software Engineer turned Product Designer: Remembering a significant time in my Career Life.
Exactly this day 2 years ago, I had a turning point in my career life. The day was March 4th, 2019 I joined Andela as a Software Engineer. This was major for me because this was the first big international tech company I got opportuned to work with. I vividly remembered myself on the elevator of EPIC towers(The name of the office complex) heading to the 5th floor to go grab my free breakfast of choice. I remembered feeling like it was all a dream. I spent a little less than a year with them though but working with them opened a whole lot of opportunities. I wrote a review about that interesting year and you can check it out here.
2 years after and a lot of things have happened. I’ve adopted new soft and tech skills, from switching from full-stack to front-end engineering to dabbling a bit with blockchain development using solidity to now focusing as a Product Designer, it’s been a fantastic ride indeed. Over the past 5 years in tech, I’ve come to accept the fact that while I enjoy coding I’ve come to fall in love with Product Design — creating awesome and engaging experiences users love and that is profitable for businesses, and this has been my area of focus since leaving Andela.
A brief tale of how I ventured into Product Design
It all started about a month after joining Andela, my team and I were tasked with building a blogging application and I was assigned to come up with the prototypes using Figma and this was my very first professional experience designing with this tool. Within a week I came up with the high-fidelity prototypes and after several iterations with the help of teammates, we came up with a much better version.
Fast forward to about a month after leaving Andela, a friend reached out and wanted me to design an event scheduling application and he was willing to pay. I happily took it, designed and delivered it back to him in under a month. He loved it and was really impressed. I must mention though that on the side I was always dabbling with designs and its concept as a hobby and I was really enjoying every bit of it but I never thought I could actually make a living out of it.
It finally hit me when a friend referred me to a company that needed a design for a mobile app they wanted to use to scale into the African market and the pay was quite enticing. I took it, did a ton of research, collaborated with a couple of experienced designers and I delivered the app in a couple of weeks.
From there, more gigs came in and as each one comes and goes I figured I enjoyed every bit of it process and so that was it, I became a Product Designer…I guess😅
At the time of writing this, I am currently leading the design team for a company based in the United States and the experience has been incredible!
My role as a Product Designer requires that I have to keep learning, unlearning, and relearning because in a fast-changing world, user behavior keeps evolving and it is my responsibility to keep abreast of what’s new and how to continuously deliver usable, intuitive, and accessible products to users.
I just wanted to take a moment to remember this important day in my career journey. I must admit, it hasn’t been all rosy but I’m thankful for where I am today and I know the best is yet to come.
Hi, I’m Raymond Akalonu and I am a product designer with rich experience in Software Engineering. I help startups, businesses, and companies create quality, realistic, engaging and profitable experiences for their users. Check out some of my cover designs here. I am available for consultancy or working with your team to visualize that amazing idea.
You can drop me a note here or reach me on Twitter. Found this helpful? Do hit the clap button a few times. Till next time, have a good one.
