End-to-End Product Design Workflow for Senior Designers

What changes at the senior level

Junior and mid-level designers spend most of their time executing well-defined briefs. Senior designers spend a significant portion of their time figuring out what the brief should be — and that shift requires a different set of skills than Figma proficiency.

This course is structured around that reality. Less time on tools, more time on thinking frameworks, cross-functional collaboration, and the kind of design decisions that come with actual trade-offs.

Scoping and problem framing

The first module works through how to take a vague product opportunity — something like: users are not engaging with the notification system — and turn it into a focused design brief. Students practice this with real product cases, not textbook examples. The outputs are messy before they get clean, which is the point.

Working with engineering and product

Two sessions are co-facilitated with a senior software engineer and a product manager who regularly work with design teams. They talk candidly about what makes handoffs go poorly, what they wish designers understood about technical constraints, and how design decisions interact with roadmap planning.

• Technical feasibility conversations — how to have them without losing design intent
• Working within component libraries maintained by engineering
• Prioritising design debt alongside feature work
• Communicating design rationale in Jira and pull request comments

Measuring design outcomes

Most design courses end at launch. This one does not. The final two weeks look at what happens after a feature ships: reading analytics with a critical eye, distinguishing between metric movement and genuine user behaviour change, and knowing when low engagement means bad design versus wrong problem.

Lead instructor Ines Karasek has worked as a principal designer at three product companies over twelve years. The last four years were spent as a design lead on a team of nine, where she developed the decision frameworks taught in this course from direct experience, not theory.

Time commitment

Eight weeks. Approximately six to eight hours per week — two hours of live sessions and four to six hours of independent project work. The workload is front-loaded; the final two weeks are lighter to allow reflection and presentation preparation.