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Proving Cross-Functional Collaboration as a Junior Designer 👥

How to Showcase Cross-Functional Collaboration Before Landing Your First Design Job

Author

Florian Bölter
March 05, 2025

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Hey and welcome back to a new week! 👋 

In this issue:

  • Working With Other Functions: An essential skill mentioned in almost every job description. How can you showcase it as a junior?

  • Level Up Your Portfolio 10x: Aneta put together the best course on portfolios I’ve seen to date. Get a big discount with Open Doors!

  • Join Me Live Next Week: I’m going live with the one and only Jeremy Miller next week for a Q&A session! Submit your questions upfront and RSVP here.

  • Howie’s Portfolio: Check this stunning & results-oriented portfolio with me

  • Today’s Question: How can I start learning about design systems?

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✨ Top Jobs This Week

📅 JOIN ME LIVE WITH BEYOND UX DESIGN

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Join us for a no-nonsense Q&A where we'll explore what it really takes to succeed in UX design – no shortcuts, just straight talk and actionable advice from someone who's been in your shoes.

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Proving Cross-Functional Collaboration as a Junior Designer 👥

Cross-functional collaboration is a requirement in almost every design job description. But for junior designers—especially career changers—this can feel like an impossible ask.

“How do I prove I can collaborate with engineers and product managers if I’ve never worked in tech?”

Good news: You don’t need prior design experience to showcase this skill. Cross-functional collaboration is more about mindset, communication, and problem-solving than it is about job titles.

This article will break down what cross-functional collaboration really means, why it’s so important, and how you can prove you’re ready for it—even before landing your first design role.

What Is Cross-Functional Collaboration?

At its core, cross-functional collaboration means working with people from different disciplines to achieve a shared goal. As a designer, this typically involves:

  • Product Managers – Aligning on business objectives, user needs, and prioritization.

  • Engineers – Ensuring designs are feasible, handing off work smoothly, and problem-solving constraints.

  • Data Analysts – Leveraging insights to inform design decisions.

  • Marketing & Sales Teams – Understanding positioning and messaging.

  • Customer Support & Operations – Gaining insights from real user feedback.

Even if you work in a solo designer role or freelance, you’ll still collaborate with stakeholders across different teams or clients.

Why Is This Skill So Important?

Being a great designer isn’t just about creating polished UIs. It’s about:

  • Navigating ambiguity – Designers rarely get perfect briefs. You’ll need to ask questions, facilitate discussions, and co-create solutions.

  • Influencing decision-making – You won’t always have direct authority, so collaborating effectively is key to getting buy-in.

  • Avoiding unnecessary roadblocks – Poor handoffs to engineers or misalignment with product teams can derail projects.

This is why hiring managers prioritize cross-functional collaboration—even at the junior level.

How to Demonstrate Cross-Functional Collaboration Without a Design Job

You may not have worked in a design team yet, but chances are, you’ve collaborated across departments in a different setting. The key is framing your past experiences in the right way so they resonate with hiring managers.

1. Find Relevant Experiences in Your Background

Think about moments in your career (or even studies) where you worked across teams.

Examples of transferable experiences:

  • Project management: Worked with marketing, sales, and finance to execute campaigns.

  • Customer support: Partnered with product teams to report issues and improve features.

  • Event coordination: Aligned with vendors, operations, and logistics teams.

  • Freelance or side projects: Managed multiple stakeholders while delivering a project.

2. Reframe Your Resume & Case Studies

Many juniors list responsibilities without highlighting impact or collaboration.

Instead of:

“Conducted user research and created wireframes.”

Try:

“Worked with cross-functional teams, aligning insights from marketing and customer success to design a more intuitive checkout flow, reducing drop-off rates.”

Even if you haven’t collaborated with engineers or PMs directly, you can simulate cross-functional thinking in your case studies:

  • Mention key roles – Reference how you would have collaborated with product or engineering if the project had been real.

  • What-if scenarios – Explain how you would check feasibility with engineers or align goals with a PM.

  • A ‘What’s Next’ section – Show awareness of what a real-world implementation would require.

Bridging the Gap: Gaining Hands-On Experience

If you’re still unsure about showcasing cross-functional collaboration, here are tangible ways to gain experience before landing a job:

1. Collaborate on Side Projects

Join hackathons, volunteer with nonprofits, or work on open-source projects where you’ll interact with people in different roles.

2. Conduct User Research for a Live Product

Instead of working on hypothetical projects, conduct user research on an actual product, then reach out to the team with insights. You might even spark a conversation with the company.

3. Shadow or Interview Professionals in Other Roles

Set up informational interviews with engineers or PMs and ask them about collaboration challenges in their teams. Use those insights in your case studies.

4. Learn the Basics of Development

Understanding developer constraints and business objectives makes you a better collaborator. For this I recommend the amazing course by PG Gonni’s ‘Intro to Coding for Designers’ which will benefit you way beyond learning how to collaborate cross-functionally. I took this course myself and it’s one of the lowest entry bars to coding I’ve ever seen in a course.

As an Open Doors reader you get 30% off with the code opendoors30 at checkout too!

Final Thoughts

Cross-functional collaboration is not just about experience—it’s about how you think and communicate.

By framing past experiences, proactively thinking about collaboration in case studies, and gaining hands-on exposure, you can prove this skill before ever landing a design job.

Strong collaborators grow faster in their careers. Start building these skills now, and you’ll stand out as a designer who’s truly ready to work in a team-driven environment.

⁉️ Q&A

Today’s Question
How can I start learning about design systems?

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👀 Portfolio Showcase

Today: Howie Gong

Howie’s portfolio came in through the post I made a while ago asking for people to submit their (junior) portfolios and while I’d say Howie is on the verge of not being a junior anymore, his portfolio was way too good to take a pass here.

Let’s see what makes it so special to me.

The Good:

  • Showing Impact Right Away: At this point you probably know that impact & results are one of the best things to include in your case studies next to stunning visuals and proper storytelling. Howie received this message loud and clear. For his first case study in the list he is going in hard with those metrics already showing them in the preview card of his homepage. You could almost say he is getting too detailed here already but I’ll take this every day over no results. Inside of his case study he gets really detailed and let’s metrics be his north star throughout the whole case study. This helps his storytelling but first and foremost shows his analytical approach and business-awareness.

  • Engaging Presentation & Interactions: What drew me in initially wasn’t Howie’s awareness of metrics and business-context though. This is stuff that only becomes visible on second glance usually. To make visitors want to check out your work in the first place you’ll have to engage them. This is exactly what Howie did. His hero section is a smart use of micro interactions and a great example of how to loop someone in from the very first moment. You literally want to spend a little bit in that section to see what else he’s got to say. I rarely experience this. This continues in his work previews. Hovering them doesn’t just elevate the card or something else generic, it plays with the visuals, breaks them out of the screen and shows me that I can expect good product design inside of these case studies—a promise kept if you take a look at the visual presentation inside of the case studies.

After my first high-level review of his portfolio I didn’t know what I should follow-up with here. While that is certainly a good problem to have, I went in deeper and ended up finding a few things that are definitely worth addressing for Howie’s portfolio to go from great to absolutely stellar.

The Potential:

  • Cut Down Projects & Double Down: Scrolling through his work I noticed not 5, 6 or 7 case studies but 8 🤯 ! If you read the newsletter regularly you know I see the sweet spot at 3-4 well-polished case studies. Now two of them seem to be work in progress so if you subtract them you still land at 6 which is a little bit of an overload still. But going further I noticed that some case studies—unlike his first, really great case study—are actually linking back to PDFs of academic paper-like documents that are the case studies. While I found LOTS of good things in there, they would massively benefit from the treatment his first case study received rather than sitting in a (too long) PDF. My recommendation is to cut down to 4 projects and doubling down on those by giving them a good on-site and interactive treatment just like he did for the first one.

  • Case Studies Could Use A Trim: Now this is connected to my first point. Not only the amount of case studies could be cut down, actually the content of the case studies too. I’m mainly referencing his first case study here since this one is built out in the actual portfolio and the other ones are in long PDFs but if Howie was to turn them into similar style case studies, I would recommend trimming them right away too. While Howie definitely has storytelling and is not purely listing deliverables without connection, it becomes hard to follow the story. There are too many details that make it hard to keep a high-level look at his work. I always use this to visualize what a case study should feel like: imagine you are flying with a little plane across a nice landscape. You have some binoculars with you to look at the special landmarks. The landscape is your whole case study, you see and describe it from the a top-level view. For the special pieces you use your binoculars to zoom in though but you have to make these count. No need to zoom in on a random tree.

Overall Howie’s portfolio is a stellar example of how to reel a visitor in with engaging visuals and interactions as well as a mind for the metrics. I urge you to check it out especially if you feel that your portfolio feels a bit bland.

That’s it for this week—thanks so much for the support! ♥️

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Keep kicking doors open and see you next week!
- Florian