"Worry Later. Try First," says Product Designer Agnieszka Zimolag

“In these unprecedented times…” The Humans of Hacker Noon design unprecedented products, and contribute to the internet in unprecedented ways. One such human is Agnieszka Zimolag from the US - interviewed here following a 2020 Noonie Nomination for contributions to the subject of Product Design.

Thank you to our 2020 Noonies partners: Sustany Capital, .TECH Domains, Grant for the Web, Skillsoft, Flipside Crypto, Udacity, and Beyondskills! The Noonies are Hacker Noon’s way of getting to know — from a community perspective —  what matters in tech today. So, we asked our Noonie Nominees to tell us. Here’s what Agnieszka Zimolag had to share.

1. Which 2020 Noonie have you been nominated for?

Hacker Noon Contributor of the Year - PRODUCT DESIGN.

2. Tell us a bit about yourself.

I'm a Product Designer at BCGDV, part of the Boston Consulting Group Inc. with 7 years of industry experience working for startups across the US and India.

I am excited to be part of a vastly digitizing world where more and more value is captured online and therefore can be made accessible to people and digital ecosystems around us.

Product Design is a tool for me that allows me to build interfaces between people and businesses and allow for the exchange of this value.

I am constantly trying to learn and update myself about the changing role of the product designers and bring that fresh perspective to the projects I am working on.

As a product designer, I am thinking very holistically about the products/services I am working on and when evaluating the Product Market Fit or the Right To Win - I am taking every aspect of the product such as the UX/ Branding/ User Impact/ Business Impact/ Acquisition/ Retention models.

I believe that all puzzles need to work together in order to build sustainable and edge-cutting solutions.

3. Tell us about the things you make / write / manage / build.

I write about new ideas for products that can help businesses and users to gain more value out of the digitized world. I like to take the specific aspect of the product design for example; building trust or ethical principles and dissect it into small pieces and advise companies how they can implement these changes into their own offerings. These product ideas can be implemented into the organizational structures/ DevOps too and are not bond purely to product design.

I am also very enthusiastic about the new technical solutions for example Explainable AI (XAI) and how that can be brought into the product design so that people can use it in the most intuitive and impactful way.

To summarize, I am product designer by heart but I am trying to enrich that discipline by doing research in various fields to see how products are going to evolve in a couple of years and bring that knowledge back to the community.

4. What are you most excited about right now?

How technology such as quantum technology, blockchain, AI/ML is becoming accessible on the enterprise level and product designers can get their hands dirty with these amusing offerings and be researchers and main stakeholders at the same time!

5. What are you worried about right now?

One of things that bothered me is that discontinuity from the research world and the enterprise level design. I would love to see more connections/ interactions happening so both can influence each other and let designers get up-skilled faster. I would like product design field to be evolving at more accelerated pace just like the tech solutions are.

6. What's the most useful advice you've ever given somebody?

Worry later. Try first. Learn from mistakes.

7. How has the pandemic changed your life and/or career?

It made me think that we need to shift from the human-centered thinking to more societal, global, civilizational level as we are one big community that lives off the ecosystems surrounding us.

8. If we gave you $10 million to invest in one thing right now, where would you put it?

Program that could allow product designers to work with the companies they always dreamt to work with or projects they really want to be involved.

I think eye-opening experiences can accelerate someone's life to unprecedented scale and could let more people be super excited about product design discipline!

9. What's an opinion you have that most people don't agree with?

Human Centered Design and Design Thinking. I think these terms are overused.

Since we face many global challenges we should shift our thinking from the individual level to be more ecosystem oriented and see impact on a larger scale. Design thinking term became vague to me so i would propose to think beyond it and define what actions we should take to iterate.

10. Which apps can't you live without?

Definitely Instagram and Linkedin. I just love the amountoof news cming from the tech and design world everyday.

11. What are you currently learning?

I am learning about the smart contracts, quantum computing, product management and just discovered this very exciting website called untools - around systemic thinking.

VOTE for Agnieszka Zimolag as Hacker Noon Contributor of the Year - PRODUCT DESIGN before voting closes on 12 October, 2020! 🚀

With gratitude to Hacker Noon's 2020 Noonies Partners: Sustany Capital, .TECH Domains, Grant for the Web, Skillsoft, Flipside Crypto, Udacity, and Beyondskills!