The Best Podcasts and Newsletters for Product Designers
I don’t want to read about product design
I want to listen to product design podcasts even less.
I’d rather listen to a dumb comedy podcast, play video games, or wash the dishes. But I’ve been blursed with an ever-changing career with seemingly infinite things to learn and ways to improve. That’s what makes it fun and rewarding! It might also contribute to why I’m always tired.
Look, I’m sorry. I say all that,but here I am writing a design thing. And now you’re reading it—you must be miserable!
Most of my 10+ year career has been spent in a 2-step cycle where I was either:
- Not reading or listening to any design content and feeling bad about it
- Reading and listening to a stupid, unsustainable amount
Naturally, one phase feeds into the next and it’s tricky cycle to break out of.
Making cutbacks
Let’s say you eat 3 mealsa day, and maybe some snacks here and there. Then you hear about intermittent fasting, and cut it down to 2 meals. If you’re suddenly eating 1/3 less food than you’re usedto, you’re probably gonna find yourself hungry. What you eat in the 2 remaining meals instantly becomes more important.
I don’t want my brain to be starved of the design insights it craves.
That was a metaphor! While I want to read less, I don’t want my brain to be starved of the design insights it craves. Just like with food, it’s about cutting down the total amount consumed without forgoing the nutrition and insight-dense content.
So where’s the nutritious design content?
The cream of the crop
In this article, I’ve put together a small number of podcasts and newsletters that I find to have the highest density of neat insights regarding topics product designers like myself gotta know, primarily:
-
- design craft
- product strategy
- user research
- design systems
- product design trends (right now that pretty much means “AI”)
- fields and roles adjacent to product design
If you’re interested in the stuff from that list, too, then I bet you’ll find my recommendations helpful. Read on for:
- The best product design podcasts
- The best product design newsletters
- The best tools for listening, reading, and retaining what you’ve gleaned
My favorite product design podcasts
Dive Club by Michael “Ridd” Riddering
Focus: Product Design, Research, Leadership, Trends
Frequency: Weekly
Michael recommends: All of ’em, starting with The art of designing for delight
Each episode brings a new guest from the digital design landscape. They tend to be designers, researchers, and leaders at companies and apps you’ve heard of, but there’s also the odd engineer and CEO. The guests bring unique perspectives and are often great storytellers. I always come away from an episode of Dive Club with a lot of new brain wrinkles and ideas that linger at least for the rest of the day.
⭐ Of everything I’m recommending here, this is my personal favorite and something I’d recommend to anyone in the field today.
Design Life with Charli Prangley & Femke van Schoonhoven
Focus: Product Design, Leadership, Processes & Methodologies
Frequency: Every other week
Michael recommends: Episode topics that interest you
Design Life is the most ground-level project here. The hosts share experiences from their day-to-day jobs as product designers and dole out practical advice. Each episode is centered on a core topic with the hosts sharing their perspectives from the trenches. Because they’re both product designers, this is a great podcast for applicable tips and insights into how other companies and designers approach projects and problems. Beyond that, they also get into frank discussions around career growth, earnings, and decisions.
👩🏻🏫I was in the first cohort of Femke’s Product Strategy for Designers at Maven! It was a great course but I got COVID part way through so overall those weeks were a mixed bag.
Other great podcasts
Design Better
Focus: General Design, Creativity
Frequency: Every other week
Design Better is interested in all areas of design and anywhere a creative process is involved. Product design does pop up, but they’re not afraid to get into topics like graphic design, ceramics, and music.
Lenny’s Podcast
Focus: Product Management, Strategy, Business
Frequency: Sundays and every other Thursday
Commonly seen as the best Product podcast. If this was a post about product management and not product design, this would be in the top spot.
Design Details
Focus: Product Design, Craft
Frequency: ??? (Presumed dead)
As you might expect from the name, Design Details was centered on the fine details and focused on design craft in software design.
My favorite product design newsletters & blogs
Proof of Concept by David Hoang
Focus: Product Leadership, Design
Frequency: Weekly
Michael recommends: All of ’em, starting with Writing a POV doc (I shared this one with my team when we working on a shared team vision for an area of our product)
Proof of Concept brings some high-level entrepreneurial and leadership to the mix. Hoang’s perspective as a designer, investor, and product leader has brought some whole categories thought to my brain that I wouldn’t have otherwise encountered. And he always does it with charming sketches and metaphors like “the minestrone of talent” to drive his points home.
Design Lobster by Ben Strak
Focus: General Design
Frequency: Every other Monday
Michael recommends: All of ’em, starting with 4 questions I ask myself when designing
Design Lobster is the newsletter that makes me most feel like I’m in school—but in a good way! Issues are typically (but not always) broken into 2 main sections: Question and Object, each ending with a thought-provoking “Design takeaway.” In Question, Strak dives (concisely) into an interesting topic from anywhere on the design spectrum, digital and traditional. Some recent ones include “Fidgetability” and music visualizers. Without issue Design Lobster, I’d never have learned about the Ocular Harpsichord, and my life would be that much less neat.
user-interface.io UI/UX Tips by Victor Ponamariov
Focus: UX & UI Design, Craft, Trends
Frequency: Weekly
Michael recommends: All of ’em
Each letter from Ponamariov is a highly specific dive into the nitty gritty of a specific UI element or pattern. It’s a quick and easy read, and has been a great asset for keeping me sharp with the basics of good, clean UI design. Can’t recommend this enough if you’re interested in upping your UI chops.
📕 I can also personally vouch for Ponamariov’s ebook Hundred UX/UI Tips, which is a rarely great resource of applicable, thorough, and well-vetted UX/UI examples and advice.
Other great newsletters
Dive Club
Focus: Product Design, Research, Leadership, Trends
Frequency: Weekly
The newsletter version of Dive Club is best thought of as a companion piece to illustrate interesting insights from or inspired by the podcast interview that week. They’re always written concisely and presented well, making this a quick and easy but impactful read.
Nielsen Norman Group
Focus: UX, Research, Practices & Methodology
Frequency: About twice a week
The NNG email subscription sends new NNG articles straight to your email. It’s on the dry and academic side of things, but it’s a great source of well explained best practices and recommendations.
UX Collective
Focus: UX + anything and everything relevant
Frequency: Untenable
UX Collective is a great source of varied content. Not all of it is useful all the time, but it’s worth keeping an eye on for topics that interest you or are timely for your work. For your sanity, don’t try to keep up.
My favorite apps for listening & reading
Readwise Reader
$: Paid App
Platforms: Android, iOS, Web
Readwise makes two apps, the eponymous Readwise, which is a repository for your highlights around the internet and eBooks, and Reader, a central place for all your newsletters, emails, PDFS, eBooks, whatever. Reader is my favorite platform for reading stuff; it’s very nicely designed, available on all platforms, and has a ton of nice features. My favorite part is just having a searchable repository of pretty much everything I’ve read. If I’ve got something on the tip of my tongue, it’s usually pretty easy to pull it up in Reader, because that’s probably where I read it, because I love it.
Snipd
$: Paid App
Platforms: Android, iOS
Snipd is the handiest and most useful integration of AI junk into my daily life thus far. It’s a paid podcast app, but it brings some cool and innovative features that genuinely enhance the listening experience, especially for the purposes of this post. It analyzes podcasts and breaks them into chapters you can easily jump between. If you hear something that you want to remember, you can press a button on your phone or your connected headphones to make a quick note and summarize the immediate piece of conversation. It’ll then email you summaries periodically of things you’ve highlighted to remind you and keep ideas fresh. Plus, you can sync these highlights to Readwise. Synergy!
That’s it! You’re free to read your next article.
Before you go, sign up for a couple of the great newsletters and subscribe to some podcasts, you probably won’t regret it.
Did I leave out your favorite newsletter, podcast, or tool? I bet I did. Get in the comments and tell me about it