How My Design Background Made Me a Better Product Manager

How My Design Background Made Me a Better Product Manager

Brian Omoruyi spent years as an art director and UI designer before transitioning into product management. 

Brian’s work has been featured on Ads of the World, and since then, he has led product development teams and projects across several industries like HR tech, logistics, and health. 

We sat down with him to learn about his creative background and how this experience has helped shape the way he builds products, and why he thinks more PMs should understand design beyond the surface, but at a deeper level.

First thing first. What was the thing that made you jump from design into product management?

To be honest, it’s because I kept getting frustrated sitting on the design side of the table.

This is what I mean.

As a designer, I’d create amazing interfaces that I am certain would work perfectly for users, I’d make flows that made perfect sense, interactions that felt natural, and eventually, I’d watch them get watered down or misused and misunderstood as they moved through the product development process. 

Oftentimes, the priorities would shift in ways that absolutely didn’t make sense from a user perspective.

This was my experience for quite a while. 

After a thorough consideration, I then realized that if I really wanted to protect the user experience, then I’d have to be in the room where those decisions were being made. 

And I don’t mean just designing and presenting them, hoping someone will understand them.

I mean I have to be shaping the product strategy from the beginning.

So I made the move. Scared as hell, honestly, because I didn’t have the traditional PM background. 

But it eventually paid off.

That was a lot, so, what was the hardest part of that transition?

Learning to think bigger than the screen.

As a designer, I was obsessed with the details. The micro-interactions. The spacing. The way something felt when you clicked it.

But as a PM, you have to zoom out. 

As a product manager, you’re thinking about business goals, technical feasibility, market timing and even resource constraints. 

At first, this was very uncomfortable. I had to learn that sometimes good enough ships, and perfect doesn’t. That hurt my designer heart initially, but I’ve learned to balance it.

Okay, but let’s flip that. What advantages did your design background give you as a PM?

So many. So many to even count.

The first thing is, I was able to give meaningful feedback, not just the usual “oh, this looks good” or “make it pop.” 

Given my background, I have a practical understanding of what I’m looking at when designers show me their work. 

I can easily see when something’s going to confuse users or when an interaction pattern doesn’t exactly match mental models.

Now that we’re counting, secondly, I can communicate better with both designers and engineers. When a designer is fighting for something, I usually understand why, and I can help translate that to the engineering side in a way that doesn’t make it sound like arbitrary aesthetic preference.

Lastly, and this one is quite interesting, I think about products visually from the start. 

When I’m planning a feature or when I’m thinking through a problem, I’m not just writing user stories. 

Instead I’m imagining how it’ll actually look and how it feels to use. 

This approach absolutely changed the questions I ask and the solutions I propose.

Give an example of a time when your design thinking fundamentally changed a product decision?

Absolutely. 

This was when I was working on an ecommerce product. We were building a feature for users to review their sales history, and the initial approach from engineering was very data-table-ish. Rows and columns, sortable, filterable, all the standard stuff.

Technically sound. Totally functional. And completely wrong for what users actually needed.

Because I’d spent years thinking about information hierarchy and how people actually consume information, I could see that what users needed wasn’t more data, it was clarity. They needed to quickly understand patterns in their sales, spot anomalies, see what mattered.

So instead of fighting for a prettier version of the same table, we completely rethought the approach. Visual categorization. Progressive disclosure. Highlighting what was unusual rather than showing everything equally.

It performed way better in testing because we weren’t just making something that looked nice, we were solving the actual problem of financial clarity, which is inherently a visual and cognitive challenge.

That’s interesting. So it sounds like design thinking isn’t just about making things pretty, it’s about understanding problems differently?

Exactly. And that’s what most people miss.

When I say I came from design, people sometimes assume I just care about aesthetics. That I’m the person who’s going to argue about button colors while engineers are trying to ship.

But design, real design, is about understanding human behavior. It’s about knowing how people process information, what patterns they expect, where their attention goes, what creates friction versus flow.

All of that applies directly to product strategy. When I’m deciding what to build or how to prioritize, I’m not just thinking about business logic or technical architecture. I’m thinking about the human on the other end who has to make sense of what we’ve created.

What’s something you learned from advertising that most PMs would never think about?

Oh man. The power of attention.

In advertising, you’re constantly thinking about how to capture and hold someone’s attention. You have seconds, literally seconds, to communicate a message before they scroll past or change the channel.

That discipline translates directly to product. Every screen, every interaction, you’re competing for attention. And if you don’t understand how to guide someone’s eye, how to create visual hierarchy, how to make the most important thing obvious, you’ve lost them.

Advertising taught me that if people don’t notice something, it doesn’t matter how good it is. And that’s shaped everything about how I approach products.

What’s the biggest misconception about PMs with design backgrounds?

That we’re not technical enough, or that we’re going to slow things down by obsessing over details that don’t matter.

I’ve definitely encountered that. Engineers who assume I’m going to be difficult because I care about design. Stakeholders who think I’m going to prioritize form over function.

But the reality is the opposite. Understanding design makes me more effective at moving fast because I can make decisions that would otherwise require three rounds of iteration. I can see problems coming before we build them. I can shortcut a lot of the back-and-forth because I understand what’s actually important versus what’s negotiable.

So, what advice would you give to designers who are thinking about moving into product management?

Do it. However, you need to understand that this is a real transition, not just a title change.

Of course, your design skills are going to be a very good advantage, but even at that, they’re not enough on their own. 

You need to genuinely learn the business side, the technical side, the strategic side. You can’t just be “the PM who cares about design” , you have to be a full PM who happens to also understand design deeply.

Also, be ready to let go of control over execution. You’re not going to be making every design decision anymore. You’re going to be setting direction and then trusting designers to execute it. 

And what about PMs without design backgrounds? Should they learn design?

They should at least learn enough to be dangerous.

You don’t need to become a skilled designer. But you should understand the basics of visual hierarchy, information architecture, and interaction patterns. You should be able to look at a design and articulate what’s working or not working beyond just personal preference.

Because here’s the thing, product management is about making good decisions with incomplete information. And if you’re blind to the visual and experiential aspects of your product, you’re missing huge amounts of information.

Last question. What’s next for you? Where do you want to take your career?

I want to keep building products that solves real problems for real people.

The coupling of creativity and impact is what gives me the utmost excitement.

So far, I’ve resolved not to work on products that are just technically impressive or products that are only beautifully designed. 

I want to work on projects that connect and solve both, projects where the craft and the purpose come together.

I’m especially interested in products where good design genuinely changes outcomes. Health, education, financial access, spaces where clarity and usability aren’t just nice-to-haves but actually affect people’s lives.

There’s this false choice in tech between being “serious and strategic” or being “creative and design-focused.” 

The best products come from people who refuse to choose. Who brings both to the table every single day.

That’s exactly the kind of product leader I’m trying to be.

To follow Brian’s work in design-led product management, follow Brian Omoruyi on LinkedIn: Brian Omoruyi.

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