Farewell InVision: The exposure, learnings, and a few insights from my last year
“Life is like a box of chocolates, but with tech, you now know what you’re going to get.”
Forest Gump had the famous line “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get” but in 2019 you can pick from a hundred brands of chocolate, pick exactly what type of chocolates you want and even plan to get that box delivered.
Shoot, they might even be biodynamic!
Experiences have most definitely improved over the last 25 years since Forest Gump was released.
Today, we don’t get to choose 100% of everything we get in life, but I definitely believe we can impact it, manipulate it, have a change of course, and pivot. We can keep our life moving in a direction that feels good, that’s fulfilling, and that drives us to be better for ourselves, our family, and the community we’re apart of.
This past year and a half I‘ve been working at InVision as a Senior Design Specialist.
My role was to be a strategic partner to help elevate design through coaching, workshops, design talks while sharing methods and practices around design thinking, design systems, and collaboration.
The Exposure
It was fascinating to get exposed to hundreds of customers and learn that the majority of teams were experiencing very similar challenges around scale, product complexities, and collaboration.
It’s not at the fault of these individual teams. Their companies have exploded in growth and they’ve inherited many of the problems and rituals that were already formed before their time.
The silver lining is teams are aware of it.
They’re working hard to detox all of the annoying, frustrating, and soul-sucking traits, practices, and systems out of the company. They all have good intentions and are genuinely trying to do better. This I believe.
Many teams are investing in a platform like InVision where collaboration is at the core, the new makers of the world need to remember that these platforms didn’t always exist.
Collaboration was face to face, and work was flying through over email experience. Now you have dozens of tools that focus on solving the collaboration workflow.
The point is, companies care about making that creation process better. It just sometimes takes time to do this and we all want, expect, and need this to happen.
Remember that behavioral changes take time, patience, coaching and positive intentions.
The Learning
The truth is, working in the tech industry has taught me that some things can change immediately. We can make a decision and change the course of hundreds to millions of people in a matter of a day.
Whether it be a new deployment, a new round of funding, or a new decision about how you onboard people into your company.
It simply requires the right intention and shared expectations as a group to generate new experiments to try.
We could get into a debate about needing it to be from the CEO, managers, or individual contributors but to me, change can come from any level. I believe that it can happen faster if you have respect from your peers and you’re in a leadership role.
However, it can still happen at the IC (Individual Contributor) level.
The Insight
I’ve gathered new perspectives and skills from shifting my role from a lead designer and manager at LinkedIn to a specialist at InVision.
But my true love for design is in the maker space. I love the expression of design. The art of understanding that uncertainty has a means to an end.
The understanding that you get to work through problems, experiment your way through challenges, pull from your memory vault of history, articles, methods, rituals, past challenges, debates and connect those learnings into a new proposed solution.
I also love the concept of teams. I love working with a group of people, focused on creating a better outcome for another group of people. It’s fulfilling, infectious, and enlightening.
What’s Next
So with all that said, I’ve decided to jump back into the maker space with one of the biggest technology companies in the world.
I’ll be joining Facebook as a Product Designer in Menlo Park, CA. I’ll be focused on the Enterprise side of the business, but I’m confident whatever I work on my primary mission will be to make it better.
Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. The people and community are what I’m excited to have an impact on and that’s exactly why I love being a human on planet earth in 2019, building a better future for you, our kids, and future generations.
Big shout out to Clark Valberg and the team at InVision for building an inspiring business that is improving the way we build, ship, and develop products. I’ll always bleed pink and be a supporter.
See you in the hallways, the streets, at conferences, the Bay Area, at meet-ups, on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn at @abridewell, and on my weekly series #practicaluxweekly on LinkedIn Learning.
All the best,
Drew
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