Solving Rubik’s Cube — Articulating Design Decisions by Tom Greever
Product or Design Leads are often caught into thinking about goals and numbers too much, while what will really enable our success may be something quite different. Tom Greever shared his take on that at our Product People community event.
Tom Greever is VP of Product & Design and Author of O’Reilly Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience.
As a Desing or Product Lead, your ability to be thoughtful about a problem and articulate a solution is more important than your ability to deliver the perfect solution every time.
Here are three main things to remember that will help you:
- Stakeholders are people too.
You need to understand your audience and empathize with them. Understanding your stakeholders is key to the successful communication of your design decisions. The good news is that as a designer you already have the skills to do that — the same ones you use to understand your customers.
2. Our leaders represent our work — give them the tools and vocabulary they need.
Set your leaders up for success, and they’ll be on your side. Remember, that your Manager will need to present the results of the team’s work to upper management on a regular basis. Do they have the necessary understanding, vocabulary, and items to show to do it successfully?
3. Visibility gives people confidence — document everything, make it accessible to everyone.
While this seems ordinary, this tip is too often neglected or underestimated. Here are some additional examples and non-trivial ideas about documenting from Tom:
- have meeting notes include not only decisions but also reasons why these decisions were taken — this helps to have everyone on the same page and integrate new people faster;
- if you need to keep a big team on the same page and don’t want to repeat yourself on endless meetings, be creative in finding an alternative solution to share information — Tom started recording weekly 5–10-minute video to demonstrate the recent updates to the whole company.
Eventually, Product and Desing Leader's job is not to only thinks about deliverables, OKRs, and roadmaps, but to connect bits and pieces of the organization and help people to collaborate.
Being a Design Lead is like solving a Rubic’s cube — you need to see dependencies and establish communication between stakeholders and team members to facilitate win-win design solutions.
Watch the full version of Tom’s talk and check out his book “Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience” for more insights and tips.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel. And join the next Product People meetup for more inspiring stories from Product Managers from around the world!
