Challenges Make Us Better
Things never go perfectly all the time. There are challenges, difficulties, big problems that we encounter as designers. I’m not talking about design problems. I’m talking about the difficulties we face when we are going about our work as designers. It could be demanding bosses, difficult team members, or apathetic business partners. These are the challenges we most commonly face as designers and we don’t necessarily talk about all the time. However, these are also the type of challenges that have the potential to make us more effective designers.
Carving your path is meant to invoke images of toil and friction because it is meant to represent the difficulties we encounter as designers and point to our ability to affect positive outcomes.
I have many stories about all the times I have disagreed with business partners because I convinced my design-fueled point of view was correct. It got to the point where I felt I could do a better job than a lot of the business partners I had to work with. Then, I was given the opportunity to be a product manager. I was asked to join the ranks of the same business partners with whom I disagreed so many times.
I knew I would have to learn in order to be a product manager, but I underestimated just how much I would learn. I immediately gained a new appreciation for the pressure and challenges that my previous business partners had to navigate. Their concerns became my concerns as I adopted my new role focused on business priorities. The product manager role challenged me in that it helped me gain a whole new perspective and vocabulary to communicate with future business partners. When I left that role for a design leadership role, all the challenges I had faced also armed me with a new skill set that made me more effective at building partnerships will all my future business-focused collaborators.
This story is one small example of how challenges can make us better designers, but more importantly, these challenges are opportunities. Challenges are opportunities to ask why and build empathy in order to understand the different perspectives that we perceive to be “difficult”. My own experience of becoming a product manager is a more extreme way to build empathy, but it is still symbolic of walking in the shoes of the people that challenge our perspectives. When we turn our challenges into empathetic moments then we will learn new ways to work as designers, which only makes us more effective. Challenges always have the potential to make us better. It’s just a matter of embracing empathy when we are challenged.
