Elevating the perception of design, part 3: Be a leader
This is the 3rd and final Part of a 3-part chronicle on how I’ve been working towards changing the perception of design at Uniplaces in Lisbon, Portugal.
Disclaimer: this here is a story. My story. Told in a way that is as relatable and actionable as possible. By showing real-life, day-to-day examples, I’m hoping you’ll be able to extract valuable insights that you can carry out starting today.
Don’t sell pixels, sell trust
“Show me the money!” — Rod Tidwell, Jerry Maguire (2006)
As a design lead, as a creative in your organisation, if you want to change the perception of your work, what you need to do is sell trust and confidence. Regardless of how good you are, or how much your team’s skills and creativity excel, if you can’t sell it, all you’re doing is giving stakeholders an opportunity to comment on the pixel layer of your team’s work and tell you what’s wrong with it. As opposed to selling, which is coming in with a recommendation and a story on why said recommendation and opinion is the way to go. This is a very important skill to have, just as important as knowing Sketch. You have to be able to explain your work in a way that a business person can see the value in it.
A manager says “Go”, a leader says “Let’s Go”
“There is a difference between knowing the path, and walking the path.” Morpheus, The Matrix (1999)
As a design leader in the world of digital, where the medium evolves so quickly, and new technologies, devices, platforms and interaction models appear overnight, it’s important to get your hands dirty. If there’s a new product or a new feature that you need to ship, but your team is stretched thin and you don’t have the budget to hire more talent; or if you’re nearing the end of a roadmap and design is bottlenecking a release. In either case––in any case––it’s on you to either manage expectations with stakeholders and possibly take the hit, or take it upon yourself to do the work––most often it’s the latter. So if you need to participate in the task, do it, don’t let the medium pass by.
Same goes to feedback. As a leader you should break the fear of giving and receiving feedback. Focus on constructive, yet direct feedback. Remember that your D1’s (most often interns and Juniors) will require more constructive feedback, prescriptive if you must, while your D4’s (in a lot of the cases your senior/lead designer) need more direct feedback. D2’s and D3’s require a bit more scrutiny––but this is not the post to go deep on that. Feedback is always important, crucial even, just remember that the way it’s delivered needs to be adapted depending on the person and situation.
Don’t build the house without the schematics
“Together, even the smallest can achieve the greatest goal.”––A Bug’s Life (1998)
If you ever want to democratise the process of defining a product vision just go around your product team and ask why they joined your company. “What is it about this company that gets you excited to get out of bed in the morning and come to work everyday?” You’ll find that a lot of the answers will be similar, things will clearly skew in a direction. At Uniplaces, for example, I found that to be building a kickass post-booking experience. Although our focus today is on creating the best booking flow possible, what really gets a lot of the engineers, PMs and designers excited is what our, i.e. Uniplaces, role, will be after the student makes a booking––the post-booking experience. The point here is that everybody has an idea, a vision, for what we should do next as a company and what their role is going to be on the path towards achieving it. Set as a personal goal to, as a creative leader, work towards (i) solidifying a singular road, a North Star and (ii) point everyone on its direction.
Having said that, it doesn’t mean you have to do it alone. The relationship between design, engineering and product management needs to be 1:1:1 in virtually all aspects of building digital products. You need to be like Donny, Walter and The Dude, or like Harry, Ron and Hermione. Inseparable. Not only at a leadership level, but also down in the trenches, the folks that actually research, explore, and create need to be close to the people building it, debugging it, and doing QA. As a start look to offer as much visibility as possible into the work you and your team do, the way you go about doing it, and why, and I guarantee they’ll be open and transparent in return. After all, openness begets more openness.
Whenever possible, look beyond the roadmap
“To infinity… and beyond!”––Buzz Lightyear, Toy Story (1995)
I firmly believe that designers are the dreamers in companies––or can be. By this I don’t mean that we, designer folk, spend all our days at the office doing nothing but daydreaming. Rather the idea is that as a designer you have the creative chops and skills to make a lot of dreams come true. Yours and your team’s. Meaning that a lot of what might seem unreachable at first––what’s well beyond the roadmap––might actually be closer than you think.
Thomas Edison’s said that his “real measure of success” was “the amount of experiments” he could run in any given day. How many times have you been in meetings where, at some point during a discussion, someone says “oh, what if we did X?”, or “bummer, this is all that time/tech allows us to do this year/this half/this quarter/today, wouldn’t it be awesome if we did Y?” As a design leader I love to record these and find ways to make them mine and my team’s little Thomas Edison’s experiments. As in, literally type them into a “What if”/”Idea Backlog” Excel sheet and update it as I go. I’ve mentioned earlier how at Uniplaces the idea of investing our time and resources on defining a post-booking experience is something that gets a lot of folks excited. But we can’t do it today because (i) we don’t have the research, infrastructure or product strategy to proceed, and (ii) there’s a ton of other fires that need to be put out before. What we can do however is dedicate a small amount of our design and creative team’s time t0 start some good ol’ design mastering (which, remember, never goes by uninterrupted) and try to put a lot of these “far out” ideas into discernible and soldable mock ups. Just put thoughts, ideas and explorations to paper and/or screen based on those “what if’s”, and as a design leader you should look to foster these initiatives.
Having this will allow you to sell a story, a recommendation, of something that seemed rather unattainable at first, but that now, through design, we can prove to be closer than they appear.
When it’s all said and done, aim to be a zero
“Aim to be a zero.”
This is a quote from astronaut Chris Hadfield from his book An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth. It describes in the utmost simplicity what I believe to be the continuous pursuit of what a great leader should be. Chris Hadfield believes that, in any given situation, as an individual you can either be a minus-one, a zero or a plus-one. You don’t want to be a minus-one, it doesn’t even sound right. As a minus-one you’re someone that’s creating problems and considered harmful in the situation. A plus-one is the opposite of that, as it is someone that constantly adds value to any situation. As a zero your impact is neutral and doesn’t tip the scale one way or the other. So why a zero and not a plus-one? It’s not easy to manage being a plus-one in a situation, a good dose of your time will be in trying to prove how special you are, which can have a negative effect. It can, and most likely will, take you from a plus one to a minus one. The “trust me, I got this” mentality might easily clash with others and prove hurtful to the team dynamic. So that leaves us nothing else to do but to “Aim to be a zero.” Andrew Tipp from the The Huffington Post sums this up perfectly: “[as a zero, it’s your role to] Listen. Observe. Offer advice. Don’t try to take control of everything. If you know what you’re doing, you won’t need to tell people you’re a plus one. They’ll know it.”
