While developers are the ones coding and building websites, there are other roles in the tech ecosystem that are also crucial! We'll explore a few of them in this chapter.
UX and UI designers
"UX" stands for user experience, and "UI" stands for user interface. This makes the two job titles we'll discuss here into "UX designer" and "UI designer." They're two different jobs but often work together a lot!
UX and UI designers are responsible for creating visions that results in a pleasant experience of a website or app. Developers can write code, but they definitely aren't always the most aesthetically-driven!
Consider working your way through a checkout flow. You're on a website, you add an item to your cart, and then you start going through checkout which requires entering your payment details and shipping information.
A developer can write the code to allow you to do that, but the UX designer will make sure the experience is good. They'll make sure the process is intuitive and effortless so the user doesn't waste time clicking around everywhere. That just ends in confusion and maybe even a lost customer at the end of the day! UX designers often talk to customers themselves in order to understand how they're using a particular site in order to better improve the experience.
UI designers will make sure the interfaces of websites themselves are aesthetically pleasing. It's not uncommon to have a UI designer design an interface in Photoshop or Sketch and then pass it over to a front-end developer to actually code the thing.
Designers are a really important part of the tech ecosystem because they bring a focus on aesthetics and usability to any site or app (let's call those two things "products" for short). However, who brings a focus on workflow that results in the best products being built and when? Enter the product manager!
Product managers
The product manager is the glue that holds developers and designers together. They'll set developer workflows, like which developer works on which feature and when. They'll coordinate with designers too make sure that interfaces have been thought out before the developers start coding them.
Product managers also have reach that expands beyond tech teams themselves. For example, they'll coordinate with marketing or finance teams in order to ensure the tech team is working on projects that make the most sense for the business as a whole.
Check out our course on product managers if you want to know more.
This is just a short overview of all these careers. They're all available to you, though, and are a way to get into tech without being a developer! All together, developers, designers, and product managers collaborate to build strategic, good-looking projects with great code written behind them. The tech circle is complete!
