I made it another 90 days. Plus some. Here is more stuff I learned.

Earlier in the year I sat down and wrote out a few lessons learned in the first 90 days of my role as Director of Design at Treehouse. It was an exciting post to write. New position! New influence! So many opportunities! All the shiny things! SUCH POWER 💪! At the end of that post I said I would follow up in the next quarter… and well, that didn’t happen. Q3 was tough. Stuff happens ok? Q4 isn’t really a thing in the tech world from what I can tell… So here we find ourselves in the early days of 2017, and I finally have another post ready.

So, without further ado, here are the lessons I have been learning over the last few months. It’s a smaller list that last time, but I think the contents are just as valuable. I hope you find it helpful!

The dirty work? That’s all yours.

Here we go. First item. When I say dirty work, I am not referring to things like producing display ads, building out slide-decks, or anything along those lines. Yes, you get your fair share of that (management is a support role after all!). Instead I want you to think hard conversations. Think bad news. Thnk accountability. Think “uhhhh… HR, I need help here.” We had to lay off a far too many amazing people in Q3 of this year. It was heart breaking. Terrible. Depressing. I wish that experience upon no one. That’s dirty work.

When you manage people the responsibility of those situations now sits squarely in your lap. When someone’s found a better opportunity, you are the person they tell. When things aren’t going well, you are the person that gets to shoulder that message. It’s not easy.

It drains you. But it’s what the job calls for at times. It’s what you signed up for. Yes, there are loads of good things that happen. Giving a promotion, extending job offer, shipping a big project. But those things don’t make the hard things any easier. Even with the good stuff, your hands will still get dirty.

The lesson here that I am trying to learn is take care of your emotional and mental state. Find a release. Exercise (I like to run). Get a therapist (spouses counts right?). You can’t help others if your own house isn’t in order. Some advice my mother gave me is to try and not live in the midst of the problems, rather live above them. Can’t say I have that one figured out yet. Still working on it Mom 😏.

You need to learn other languages.

Hold on, slow down. Before you go out and sign up for Duolingo hear me out. I am not talking about learning another language in the literal sense, although I am sure that’d be a good thing. When you work in a company or with a team, effective Design is more about relationships than actually designing things. We have all met the person who communicates in a highly technical or complicated way. And it’s frustrating to be on the receiving end of that because you can’t respond. You just don’t have the language to contribute. It’s an alienating experience.

What I am learning is that anyone, in any trade can be guilty of this. We all have our own forms of language, often quite specific to whatever we are good at. The folks who are able to grow in their abilities, and work effectively with people outside that skill set, they know how to communicate in a way that other people can receive. They can do it in a way that builds shared understanding.

Learning how to speak another person’s language will improve your ability to work together. It will also build a bridge of good-will. No one wants to admit they don’t understand something. And it’s pointless to communicate with someone if they don’t understand anything you are saying. Do the work of helping them understand by learning how to speak their language.

Design has to impact the bottom line.

We ran a test earlier in the year that was decent size. Actually it was huge. Put in a lot of time planning, exploring, etc. The team pushed the brand, honed new styles, set up layouts and patterns to re-use going forward. It was a lot of work and a lot of fun. From a design standpoint it was a big step forward. Unfortunately, from a business standpoint it flopped. No way to spin it or slice up the metrics. A total bust. It was painful to watch the data come in over the course of the test. We’d put so much time, effort, energy, ideas in to it. But we failed to truly understand the bigger goal: help grow the business.

In hindsight we learned some really important lessons. The biggest one being that if Design doesn’t help the bottom line, we’re not doing our jobs.

There are all kinds of ideas that come to mind when I hear about a design lead or design first company. Early in my career I equated this to meaning that designers had free reign to do whatever they wanted. “We’re Design, we have a feeling OK? Trust us. Go with it.” Design called the shots. They ruled the roost. That assumption — that mindset — is not only patently false, it’s flat out dangerous/dumb. Design is not a oligarchy. It’s not a dictatorship. If or when it is, trust erodes. Walls go up. Important voices and perspectives get shut out. It’s absolutely not how design should work.

Here’s the cold truth of the matter. At the end of the day, Design answers to the same master as everyone else in business: the bottom line. You can be a design-lead or design-first company ‘till you’re blue in the face, but if you don’t have a business that is viable, it’s just a worthless label. Want to be an influencer? Want to have impact? Don’t just concern yourself with the interface, UX or brand. Get your hands dirty trying to understand how to grow the business. If you don’t know how. Learn.

I don’t know enough about business.

This one is hard for me to admit. Being a senior leader in a company, sitting in regular meetings where we go over slide decks and charts that are so terribly designer. All the numbers. Lots of acronyms. It’s overwhelming and often times disorienting. Number fatigue is a thing right? I am not formally trained in design, nor do I have an MBA from anywhere. But what I do have is a deep hunger to learn and a strong commitment to figure something out if I don’t understand it.

Reality is this: if I am going to be effective in my role. If I am going to be able to contribute ideas, design perspective, create value at the level where it helps the bottom line. I have to be able to hang with all the folks driving the business. That means I have to get more comfortable with walls of numbers. I have to know how to get over how poorly the slide deck is laid out. I have to admit that I don’t understand something and ask for help.

What I’m learning here is that I have more to learn. This is the new frontier personally. This is where I am focusing my efforts in 2017. I feel a lot of frustration because of how little I truly know about business. There are meetings that happen that I want to contribute to. Strategies I’d like to have a voice in. But when I am honest with myself, I know don’t have the understanding at this point to hang. That has to change.

This lesson isn’t about learning business (yes it is). It’s about getting over my ego and doing the hard work to be an effective designer and leader.

Alright folks. That’s it for this round. Thanks for hanging in there. Been reading a few books that may or may not have influenced this list: Sprint, Designing Products People Love, and Design Leadership. Here’s to a great 2017 🍻!

Have feedback? I would love to hear it. You can find me on Twitter if it’s short, or just drop a response below. 🙏 Thanks!