From Home Economics to Figma: Lovelace Filson on the Real Work Behind Product Design

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+---
+title: "It's Never About You, the Designer:The Real Work Behind Product, Freelancing, and the Long Road There"
+
+description: Product designer Lovelace Filson on transitioning from CS to design,
+  navigating freelance clients, and why communication beats pixels every time.
+pubDate: '2026-06-28'
+interviewDate: 2024-05-28
+guest: Lovelace Filson
+guestBio: Lovelace Filson is a Ghanaian product designer and freelancer who transitioned
+  from computer science and front-end development into UI/UX and product design, building
+  a client roster across the US.
+videoId: bE-mpnLZNh4
+videoUrl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE-mpnLZNh4
+tags:
+- product-design
+- ui-ux
+- freelancing
+- career-transition
+- ghana-tech
+- diaspora
+heroClip:
+  mp4: /clips/from-home-economics-to-figma-lovelace-fierce-on-the-real-work-behind-product-des.mp4
+  webm: /clips/from-home-economics-to-figma-lovelace-fierce-on-the-real-work-behind-product-des.webm
+  poster: /clips/from-home-economics-to-figma-lovelace-fierce-on-the-real-work-behind-product-des.jpg
+  alt: Lovelace Fierce speaking about her product design journey
+draft: true
+---
+
+# It's Never About You, the Designer: The Real Work Behind Product, Freelancing, and the Long Road There
+
+"I remember being depressed, broke, and everything," Lovelace says, without a trace of self-pity. "It was not like it was smooth." She pauses, then adds something that reframes the whole confession: "But as long as I don't give up, I will succeed. It doesn't matter how long it takes."
+
+That quiet certainty, earned, not assumed, is probably the most useful thing Lovelace could say to anyone eyeing a career in product design and wondering whether they have what it takes. She is proof that the path rarely looks the way you expect, and that the detours are often the point.
+
+---
+
+## What Even Is a Product Designer?
+
+Before we get to Lovelace's story, it's worth clearing up a question that trips up a lot of people, including, honestly, a lot of developers who work alongside designers every day. What's the difference between a UI designer, a UX designer, and a product designer? Aren't they all just… the same thing?
+
+Not quite, Lovelace explains. The terms UI/UX and product design are often used interchangeably, but there is a meaningful distinction. A UI/UX designer's work is centered primarily on the user: how something looks and how a person moves through it. A product designer, by contrast, holds two things in mind at once: the user *and* the business. "The product designer looks out for the business goals, the resources they have, and also the user needs," she says. That dual accountability means product designers tend to be embedded across the entire lifecycle of a product, collaborating with marketing, sales, and engineering, not just handing off polished screens.
+
+The UI versus UX split is its own conversation. In large companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, these are distinct specializations. A UI designer owns the visual layer: typography, color, grids, the things that make something *look* right. A UX designer owns the journey: how a user moves from point A to point B, the logic of the flow. Smaller companies and startups, working with leaner headcounts, typically want one person who can do both, and sometimes everything else besides. It's the design equivalent of a job post that asks for a "junior web developer" and then lists requirements for someone who also builds rockets.
+
+---
+
+## The Road from Takoradi to Figma
+Because Lovelace and I go back a long way, I almost forgot to do the thing I always do: pause and let her paint the picture of how she got here. So we rewound.
+
+She grew up in Takoradi, Ghana. As a kid, she cycled through the usual aspirations, doctor and lawyer, without landing on anything that felt truly hers. When she finished junior high and moved to senior high school, the institution assigned her home economics. "I was like, you know, I'm gonna do general arts, what am I gonna do with home economics?" It felt like a wrong turn. She had no idea it was the first of many that would eventually lead somewhere surprising.
+
+After SHS, she still had no clear direction. Then her parents stepped in, in the very African-parent way of stepping in. They consulted people they trusted, and those people recommended IT. "I know African parents kind of tend to push their kids in certain professions," Lovelace says, laughing. "But I'm glad it's not those like conventional professions like law." She enrolled at Ghana Telecom University (now GCTU), started a diploma in IT, and something clicked. The subject matter actually interested her. The people around her were good. A path was forming.
+
+She went on to complete her degree at Coventry University's GTUC Accra campus. It was around that time that Codetrain (now Codetrain Africa), widely regarded as one of Ghana's leading coding schools, came to her campus. The visit cracked open a window. She had taught herself some HTML and CSS, but hadn't gone deep. Hearing what was possible made her want to go deeper. She joined Codetrain's developer training program, intending to become a software developer, specifically a mobile app developer.
+
+That plan didn't survive contact with Figma.
+
+"I remember the first time I was introduced to Figma," she says. "I didn't know how to use it or anything. I didn't know anything about it, but like when I started using it, I realized that something that I actually did enjoy more than the coding." The realization was almost accidental. She hadn't known product design was a whole career. She just knew she liked it more than what she'd been doing. She went to her mentor, Awal, and told him she wanted to pivot. He was a software developer himself, but he didn't push back. He told her to go for it. He found her courses. He believed in the direction before she fully did.
+
+Codetrain also brought Kevin into the picture, someone who helped Lovelace understand the mechanics of freelancing, a world neither of them had much precedent for in their immediate circle. "I remember him hopping on calls with me and kind of like telling me what I need to do, stuff I need to put in place to be a successful freelancer." That scaffolding mattered enormously. Not because it made everything easy, but because it gave her structure during the stretches when nothing felt easy at all.
+
+---
+
+## The Community That Holds You
+
+It's tempting to read Lovelace's journey as a solo hustle story: self-taught designer figures it out through grit and YouTube tutorials. The reality is more communal than that, and she's deliberate about naming it.
+
+"I would always say like, I'm grateful to Code Train and I'm grateful for Code Train bringing me to all the people that like I know from Code Train." The community of Awal, Kevin, and fellow learners functioned as a kind of distributed support system. When the learning got hard, when the depression crept in, when the money wasn't there, there were people who had been on the same road and were willing to talk about it honestly.
+
+This matters especially for self-taught learners, who often miss out on the peer cohort that a formal program provides. Without that community, the moment things get hard, and they will get hard, there's no one to normalize the difficulty or help you see the next step. "Most people give up," Lovelace says simply, "because it really helps when you have someone who believes in what you are doing and they are willing to kind of like help you actually get there."
+
+Her mentor's words stayed with her: *if I don't give up, I will succeed.* She still carries them.
+
+---
+
+## The First Client, the Second Client, and What She Learned
+
+Lovelace's entry into freelancing came through Upwork, a platform many freelancers use to find remote work. Her first interview, she got the job. That part, she says, was the easy part.
+
+Working on the project was another matter. "I felt like I was even cheating the clients because it felt like I was not doing enough." Fortunately, that first client was patient; he held her hand through the process, and she made it to the other side. A learning experience, but a survivable one.
+
+The second client was less forgiving. Lovelace had opinions about how the project should go. She voiced them. The client disagreed. And then the client removed her from the project.
+
+Her first instinct was to feel wronged. But sitting with it, she arrived at a more honest assessment. "From where I am now, I would not repeat that mistake. It was my fault, it was not the client's fault." The issue wasn't that she was wrong about the design. The issue was that she didn't yet know how to *show* a client why she was right. A senior designer brings evidence: references, comparisons, visual proof. A junior designer says "I think it should be this way" and expects that to land. It rarely does.
+
+"Every client has a vision of what they want," she says. "You can't just swoop in and come and go. You need to show proof that you know what you're talking about." And critically: "It's not about you, the designer." The project belongs to the client's business. The designer's job is to serve that, not to win an argument.
+
+---
+
+## What a Product Designer Actually Does All Day
+
+Readers who've never worked closely with a designer might assume the job is mostly sitting in Figma making things look nice. Lovelace's description of her actual workflow suggests otherwise.
+
+The process begins long before any design tool opens. Once she lands a project, the first priority is making sure she understands exactly what the client wants, which is almost never the same as what the client *says* they want at first. Many clients, she notes, don't know what they want; they only know what they don't want when they see it.
+
+Her approach: gather references first. She goes to platforms like Dribbble, Behance, Muzli, and Pinterest, pulls a range of examples that seem to match the client's vague description, and presents them on a call. "You show them, and they will tell you which one they are going for. You never assume with clients, do not assume." From there, she builds a mood board, a shared visual reference point rather than a template to copy, and gathers requirements by asking the client questions until a user flow emerges naturally from the conversation.
+
+For small projects, that's often enough to start designing. For larger ones, there's more: user research, personas, detailed user journey mapping. And when the client is a company rather than an individual, the whole operation scales up considerably. She's using their Figma instance, their Slack, their Jira. She's in meetings with developers, marketing, sales. She might be one of several designers on the project. "If the company is big, your process becomes kind of like bigger because you deal with so many people."
+
+It's a lot of stakeholder management. A lot of alignment. A lot of communication. The actual design work, the part that shows up on a screen, is, in some ways, the most straightforward piece of the whole puzzle.
+
+---
+
+## Why Freelancing, and What It Actually Takes
+
+Lovelace didn't set out to freelance. She wanted a full-time role. She interviewed for several and didn't get them. Freelancing was the door that opened when the others stayed shut, partly because freelance clients, especially those hiring for smaller projects, are more willing to take a chance on someone without a long track record.
+
+What she found on the other side surprised her. "Freelancing provides you with much more flexibility," she says. You set your own schedule. You can work on multiple projects simultaneously. You're running a business, which means you have to *think* like a business: proactively communicating with clients, keeping them updated even between calls, managing your own time with enough discipline that no one feels the need to micromanage you.
+
+That last part is key. "Those are the things that makes you a senior," she says. "Not when someone does not micromanage you, they feel like they can trust you with their work." The title doesn't come from years of experience alone. It comes from demonstrating, consistently, that you can be trusted to move a project forward without hand-holding.
+
+On the question of pay: yes, there's money in design. Lovelace is direct about it. "A lot of designers, including myself, make more than some developers." The determining factor isn't the discipline; it's the value you can demonstrate you bring. Charge accordingly.
+
+---
+
+## On Designers and Developers: A Peace Offering
+
+There's a running grievance in the developer community about designers who create beautiful, elaborate interfaces that are an absolute nightmare to actually build. Lovelace, who came up through front-end development before she switched, has some sympathy for both sides.
+
+Her background in coding shapes how she designs. She catches herself asking, mid-design, whether what she's making is actually buildable. "I sit back and I'm like, can I code this?" she says. "I think about it that, hey, let's see, can you code this? Then I'm like, nah, I can't code it." When that happens, she adjusts.
+
+She's not unsympathetic to designers who push the limits of what's possible; there's a legitimate impulse there, a desire to show the full range of what the craft can do. But she offers a gentle note of caution: some designs will take forever to code, and that slowness ripples through the entire project. "I would say they should kind of bring it down, turn it down like a little so that like businesses can move on like faster."
+
+Consider it a peace offering from one side of the handoff to the other.
+
+---
+
+## One Last Thing
+
+Before signing off, Lovelace offered a piece of advice aimed at anyone standing at the beginning of a tech career, unsure where to start: reach out to people on LinkedIn. Don't be afraid of rejection. If someone turns you down, she said, "you just move on to the next available person you think can mentor you." There are people out there willing to help, often for free. You just have to ask.
+
+And for the anime fans in the room: Hunter x Hunter. She's firm on this. "I don't care what anyone says, everyone should watch Hunter x Hunter."
+
+---
+
+Lovelace Filson is a product designer and freelancer based in Ghana. You can find her and connect with her on LinkedIn: search **Lovelace Filson**, or find the link in the description of the original video. If her story resonates, the winding path, the community that made the difference, the hard-won lessons about communication and craft, the full conversation is worth watching.

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