My 5 favorite design posts from 2019
There’s so much great writing going on in the design community these days! Every year I like to summarize the 5 posts that had the largest impact on me.
In no particular order, here they are:
Product Teams vs Feature Teams
by Marty Cagan
In many software companies, the product team (design/product management/engineering) is handed roadmap features from executive stakeholders. Marty Cagan strongly advocates that the best software comes from empowered product teams that are free to set their product agendas based on user research, technical viability and business goals. This post was pretty controversial based on how much it challenges the status quo — Marty advocates giving much more freedom (a.k.a power) to product teams, and that’s why I loved it.
Beyond Outcomes and Outputs
by John Cutler
This was not a post, but an awesome presentation by the ever-questioning John Cutler who nails it when he points out that great designers and developers want to be given interesting problems to solve instead of feature tickets in Jira. Just as importantly, they also want to know that their work had impact, that it meant something to their users and the company. This is closely related to the “Product Teams vs Feature Teams” post above. It’s all about giving product teams broader freedom to solve user and business goals.
Shape up — Stop Running in Circles and
Ship Work that Matters
Ryan Singer
“Shape up” started as a series of blog posts and evolved into an e-book about how Basecamp plans, decides and builds their product. The Basecamp team started as a design agency and then partnered with with the creator of Ruby on Rails to become a Saas company, so they have very strong and informed opinions on building and designing software.
What amazed me about this e-book is seeing how deeply they have designed every aspect of making their product and how well they have articulated this process.
While their methods are clearly not applicable to everyone, it’s obvious we can all be more intentional in our process to find what works within our unique orgs.
Getting to Senior in UX
Cyd Harrell
Ok, this too isn’t actually a post — It’s a presentation given by Cyd Harrell at the UI23 Conference. It’s amazing advice for designers on their path to becoming seasoned, impactful designers. Seriously, this is the advice I wish I had received 15 years ago. Well worth the read… I only wish the video was online somewhere!
Coaching
Theme for the year
Again, not technically a post but a theme. Bear with me :)
While attending the DesignX Design Leadership conference in Toronto this year, coaching emerged as a major theme. Many attendees were very open about using coaching for their careers; as a matter of fact, becoming a design leader can become isolating because we may not have peers or mentors within our orgs.
Whether your company pays for it or you make the investment on your own, coaching can be a great way to get or keep you on the path to the career you want.
To get you started, here’s a few resources:
Products
There are quite a few coaching products and services are available to you and your company. They usually combine some form of metrics dashboard and connections to coaches based on your goals.
Betterup (popular with the SV crowd)
Coaches
I have not worked with either Whitney or Todd, but I’ve heard great things about both. Definitely spend some time to find a coach that resonates with you and you goals!
Whitney Hess — I had quite few folks recommend her
Todd Zaki Warfel — Todd’s experience and background is amazing, I’m sure he would be a great coach
Summary
In 2019, I had two major goals— improve how my product team (design/product management/engineering) works together to deliver impactful software, and become more purposeful about growing my career as a design leader and senior designer. The learnings above were all extremely useful to me, and I hope you find them useful in your path as well.
