How can I get a product designer (software) job with no visual design experience at my current job?

First, I would ask whether you are distinguishing between interface design and visual design. Have you wireframed a UI before, but not done a high-fidelity Photoshop mockup? You're much more employable as a product designer if you've only done IxD + UI, and lack a portfolio of visual design work, than if you've been purely IxD/IA at your current role. I often find that product companies will have a style guide with standard patterns and assets, so as long as you know how to adhere to those standards in your mockups by using a tool like Photoshop, Illustrator, or Sketch, you'll be fine. If the roles you're looking at are with earlier stage startups that require you take a more creative lead, then that role might not be for you. I've been actively seeking and interviewing product designers to join my team for the past three months. If you haven't been in a position where you're evaluating other designers' skills and interviewing them for a role at your company, I can tell you that it's incredibly difficult because people often don't know what they're looking for, and if they do, they might not be on the same page with their team members. So even though companies say they're looking for product designers with visual design skills, that might not be the case. The difficulty with hiring a product designer, as with any digital designer, is that digital media projects are often complicated and require lots of sophisticated skill sets, and it can be difficult for hiring teams to prioritize those skill sets and then apply a framework for evaluating aptitude in those prioritized areas. My company has been in the process of re-articulating it's vision, redefining it's product strategy, aligning it's management team, and redefining it's product development processes—which has implications for how we want to hire. A larger, more established organization, might want to hire a designer who is skilled in high-fidelity prototyping, or detailed specification documents, or at producing standardized production-ready assets for engineering to use. But given where my company is (not having achieved product/market fit), I want us to hire a designer who can thinking holistically about our product and how feature-level decisions fit into our strategy and help effect our vision. I want a designer who can push back when a PM asks for a particular feature. If a PM were to ask for a community feature with design criterion requiring community leaders, I would want a designer who would push back on that requirement if it wasn't in line with our vision. I also want a designer who can be a peer to a PM, setting expectations about how design fits into the product development cycle, and how design should be QAed during sprints. I don't want a designer who churns out deliverables for feature requests. Above all, I'm looking for a person who is an excellent problem solver, communicates their ideas well verbally, and understands how to manage a project. I start by looking at a designer's portfolio—if they're an experienced product designer, I expect they will be quite capable at solving the problem of how to convince me that they're an excellent problem solver and that I should be eager to reach out to them. When looking at a portfolio, that means the designer starts with the problem to be solved. How the designer frames the problem actually says a lot about their abilities and past experience. "We needed to figure out how to keep people engaged in an online campaign" indicates a higher-capacity for creative problem solving than "We needed to design a feature for posting photos, video, and articles". One of the design principles at my company is "breadth before depth", which is somewhat adapted from Apple's philosophy of 10-3-1. Breadth is emphasized because multiple and varied design explorations are the practice and output of critical and synthetic thinking. Besides framing, I also look for a succinct narrative about process. I commonly find that designers will describe a project by reflecting steps, such as research, usability, information architecture (often reduced to a site map), visual design, and maybe prototyping. This is problematic because every designer uses these steps/tools and this tells me nothing about why they decided to approach the problem with a particular tool or who they worked with to employ the tool and interpret the output. What I like to see is a narrative of how each tool in their process was employed as a means for arriving at a decision about what will be shipped. A section of this narrative might be about interaction design: It's not helpful to me when evaluating your design skills if you just show me a wireframe or a sketch; I need to know why you arrived at that wireframe. Given the project criterion, what consideration did you give to copywriting, and interface elements like buttons and forms? Why did you decide on that particular flow as opposed to others you might have recommended? Finally, the absolute best way to impress your future product design team is to show them an example of something you've shipped. At the very least, show them a prototype. If you have something you're proud of, can explain how you arrived at that solution, and how you'd improve on it given another go at the problem, then you've a great chance of getting that job you want. If you haven't shipped anything that demonstrates your product-level thinking, then I recommend you act on 's advice and pair with a developer to make something. Good luck :)

Take on some personal projects. Apply your design / development knowledge to those projects. Put them on github, behance or dribbble

Move to a company mature enough to have specialists. Most savvy hirers are looking for "T-shaped" designers who have broad general skills but a strong specialization such as interaction design or visual design. If they're looking for someone who's a specialist in everything, they either don't understand design or they aren't willing to pay for it.

Learning design basics is good, either by taking a course or simply by just diving into a design project. But first, train your eye, get inspired and learn how to define a good taste. There are many inspirational outlets including Behance, Dribbble, Creattica and award/agencies websites. Also try to find inspirations in the real world such in fashion, furniture, magazines architecture and so on. Another important element is to completely read interface guidelines, apple's for instance if your product is an iOS app. It will teach you the basics of design and elements such as deference and affordance. You can also download a pre-existing visual design file and start modifying it. Review it as though a client is reviewing it, then start designing other iterations of it. A good design is consistent and should have well documented layers. So go ahead, no one is stopping you, start designing and building a portfolio for yourself.  As an employer, I would definitely hire someone who is hungry, ambitious and wants to learn. Best, Khalid