Can I do more? Can you do more?
This post serves as a reminder to myself to do more and as a call-to-action for tech and design professionals AND aspiring product managers, designers, and engineers to get in touch with me and each other. Write, speak, talk. Help each other out.
Experienced professionals: If you’ve been fortunate to have had a long career, you undoubtedly have a wealth of stories of how to navigate professional growth, what it’s been like working on different types of teams at different companies, overcoming challenges, and what you’ve learned from managing projects or people. …
Product, Design and UX Research
Following up on my previous product reading suggestions, I have five new recommendations. Notably, I took a break from digital reading — a few of these have illustrations and formats best experienced in physical book format.
- Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace by Gordon MacKenzie: I serendipitously read this book while off-the-grid camping for a few days. What fun to read this with trees, hills, and animal sounds as a backdrop beyond the physical book in my hands! Why? Because it is full of whimsical illustrations and personal stories that really make you take…
Design, Marketing, and Productivity
Like you, I typically read dozens of design and technology articles and listen to several podcasts a week. This year, I decided to catch up on a few books that I’ve always meant to check out (or thought I had!). Here are my top 5:
- Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams by Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner: Since I haven’t had a very traditional career path, I’ve never risen up the ranks of any org, let alone a design org. Although I’ve often had responsibility for assembling teams, including design, hiring had pretty much been…
Suggestions on talking about you and your work.
I was recently invited to attend Portfolio Night for design students at a local college. There were about 24 designers presenting their work on laptops, tablets and printed materials at tables set up like a trade show. The affair was informal — guests wandered through talking with students about their illustration, graphic design, web and mobile projects. The room was abuzz with energized conversations and activity.
Since there was limited time to meet everyone, here’s a short follow-up to the students that I met and those that I did not get a chance to speak with.
Dear Design Students,
Thank…
A case study on building and launching a consumer AR mobile app
Us: Wouldn’t it be cool if people could post messages around the real world, but virtually?
People: You mean like comments?
Us: Yea, they could be comments, but also stickers and photos.
People: You mean like Snapchat or iMessage?
Us: Yea… but this is different, this is using live augmented reality — you can put stickers, text, animated GIFs and photos on things at places in the real world. And then others can see them when they view the virtual spaces in the app.
People: Oh, augmented reality…. like Pokémon Go*?
Us: Sigh, yea, but these are virtual 360° spaces…
Kevin Flores
Product and Design Leader. Thoughts are my own. Find me @kflores.
