About one year ago I joined GitLab as a Senior Product Designer. I already had experience working remotely before, but mainly as freelancer.

Working together with an amazing team over these last couple of months has taught me what skills designers who want to work remotely in larger teams should focus on. All of the skills I’m going to list below are also important for designers working in offices, but even more crucial for the challenges you will face when working as designer in a remote position.

1. Communication

Honestly, this could have been number 1, 2 and 3 on the list. If you want to become a great remote designer, focus on your communication skills.

Communication is a highly underrated skill in general, but the way you communicate your ideas and your design vision is even more important in a remote company. You will have less chances to get everybody to stand in front of a whiteboard with you and go over things together.

Instead, you should become a master in breaking things down into smaller pieces. Focus on writing and speaking in ways that your team members can easily make sense of it.

If parts of your team are in other time zones, a feedback loop that would usually be completed in 1–2 hours can take a day or two instead.

Our team has the general rule that if a discussion already went back and forth between team members three times, it’s time to schedule a call. This can be tough when multiple people from different timezones are involved, that’s why we invest a lot of time and effort into asynchronous communication and avoid these meetings.

But it’s not only about efficiency, it’s also important that you feel comfortable with it. Different communication channels offer different amounts of cues that people can use to interpret, and the ones you most often use in a remote setting just don’t give you the same amount of feedback as you are used to when standing right next to somebody else and being able to observe their body language. It takes some time getting used to it and feeling comfortable with it.