’Tis the Season
Amidst the annual LinkedIn posts about Figma’s Config and its related “please stop having only shallow conversations about tools” debate kickstarters, I came back to a note from a catch up with Laura Summers.
She said to me, I’m “not desperate for a new tool, [I’m] desperate to understand how to use what’s already out there.”
While Laura is Berlin-based these days, the sentiment is similar to what I heard from several conversations across the ocean amongst United States-based tech folks, mainly in design.
Specifically, besides echoing Laura, I heard about struggles with:
- maximizing value of a purchase
- integrating a tool into existing workflows
- convincing procurement teams to let teams buy the tools they feel strongly the need
As distracting as Config might be, nine out of ten designers love Figma because it is interesting, useful to — and usable by — as many teams or domains in a business that want to use it.
On the contrary, it seems (albeit from a limited qualitative data set) that it is getting harder to justify the thousands of dollars that a single, let’s say “niche use” tool costs. Our observation is that if the people who use these tools are subject to multiple rounds of layoffs, it checks out that “The Business” would not feel inclined to spend money on their tools either.
With these market conditions in mind, Laura’s comment to me seemed to hold not just an opinion, but a way forward: you must learn to use what’s already out there.
This is what Unlikely Connections, a consultancy and incubator, is here to help you do. And this piece is an introduction. Hi. 👋
At Unlikely Connections, we operate with the assumption that your business executives do not care one iota how great Figma is. They care if you are saving them money, or making more money with better profit margin. (Your manager unhelpfully will call this “having impact.”)
Your job is, of course, not to be a business executive, but if you want to negotiate or advocate for your craft, your tools, your team, and your budget, we assert that you should feel comfortable speaking the language of the people you’re negotiating with. (Would you agree with the United States sending a chief diplomat to France who didn’t speak French?)
It isn’t just Laura hinting at using what’s already out there as a way forward.
Yesterday’s 3–2–1 Thursday newsletter from James Clear included an idea from James which pointed out that having a particular strength isn’t necessarily that useful for standing out — it’s the combination of strengths that is what helps you stand out.
This morning, Nature Daily Briefing’s quote of the day (highlighted from this article reporting on opinions for overhauling UK science in light of preparation to install the next government) added its voice: “Something magical yet tangible happens at bridges between disciplines.”
Both of these speak of the skill of working with what already exists. Indeed this is all the iPhone is: a bunch of existing parts and tools, combined in a new, impressive way. You could say this magical combining was the result of bridged disciplines and learning to use what’s already out there.
Another hint lies right inside a design team: we know that creative constraints are often the best catalysts for interesting ways to solve problems. Procurement teams who don’t want to spend more money on a tool they don’t understand the purpose of, for a team that they also don’t quite understand the purpose of, are a compelling creative constraint.
This is the essence of Unlikely Connections: both in its purpose and its practice, it seeks to help design and product teams learn to combine, bridge, and better understand what’s already out there. We focus on helping you gather, assess, and organize all the data available to you, to realize, leverage, and then maximize what you’ve got.
Why? Because we know how to combine, bridge, and better understand what’s out there ourselves, and we want to show you how we do it, to your benefit.
We have ourselves been through the struggle to earn recognition for the value and impact of design and product work.
We have been through the jaw-dropping, this-must-be-satire-did-someone-actually-say-this-and-get-away-with-it scenarios at tech companies that you might think only happen on that one HBO TV show.
We know how hard it is to get new tools or keep the ones you have.
We know that low-level anxiety of being “revenue-adjacent” (our term for “not sales or engineering”) and knowing that no one actually knows how to measure what we do. (And we’re pretty suspicious another re-org won’t fix this.)
When you’re done debating about how great Figma is, or isn’t, we are here and ready: to be your Peik Lin, your Philadelphia Museum of Art stairs, and yes, a teeny bit your Regina George.
Stop trying to make the tool happen.
