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SCENE: AFTER HOURS IN A DARK CO-WORKING SPACE

FADE IN:

INT. DARK CO-WORKING SPACE — NIGHT

A solitary figure sits in front of a laptop, the only light source in the dimly lit room. Our protagonist, an innovative entrepreneur, is determined and focused.

Their face illuminated by the screen, the entrepreneur navigates the treacherous waters of the business world. Each keystroke is a testament to their resilience in facing countless challenges.

Tight deadlines, limited funding, investor expectations, and ever-changing regulations are just a few obstacles our main character must overcome. The market’s volatility adds to the chaos.

But the true test lies ahead as our protagonist faces their most formidable adversary yet: a behemoth competitor with seemingly bottomless pockets.

As tension mounts and stakes rise, our entrepreneur must dig deep, summoning every ounce of creativity and cunning to outsmart their well-funded rival.

FADE OUT

Launching a startup is akin to diving headfirst into an action-packed thriller, where each twist and turn brings new challenges, adrenaline-pumping moments, and the constant pursuit of triumph against all odds. In the dynamic world of startups, crafting a compelling narrative isn’t just about telling a story; it’s about creating an experience that resonates with your audience.

Like the art of filmmaking, entrepreneurship demands a compelling narrative and a deep connection with its audience. The magic of cinema captivates us with diverse stories and experiences; startups must also craft narratives that resonate with their target market. While studio blockbusters rely on massive marketing budgets, independent films thrive on the strength of their storytelling and buzz.

Like an indie film, most startups lack the funding to build and promote a product at a “blockbuster” level. So, they need to be scrappy and creative in leveraging the resources they have at their disposal. In both realms, success hinges on telling a story that engages, inspires, and connects with the audience. Without generous investors or a long runway, startups can still reach the next growth stage with the right strategy.

As entrepreneurs, the challenge lies in crafting a strategy that ensures product-market fit and fosters a meaningful connection with customers — just like a major movie producer bringing their vision to life on the silver screen.

SCENE: Navigating the hurdles of the competitive tech landscape

Startups face an uphill battle, navigating the relentless demands of limited resources, tight time constraints, and the imperative for rapid innovation, underscoring the unique challenges they endure amidst the broader business landscape. Building an experienced team within budget constraints while ensuring efficient product development poses significant hurdles.

Overlooking UX design in the early stages of product development can lead to disastrous outcomes, including negative user feedback, low adoption rates, and difficulty attracting investors. The startup failure rate is staggering, highlighting the critical need for strategic UX integration.

Navigating critical growth stages, startups require seasoned expertise to innovate and develop new products effectively. While entry-level staff may offer fresh insights, their limited hands-on experience necessitates significant guidance and strategic direction, demanding valuable time and energy from founders and ultimately hindering the development of meaningful strategies.

SCENE: Design intentionally to gain a competitive advantage and drive growth

Startups can leverage UX design to gain a competitive edge, attract and retain customers, build brand loyalty, and increase market share. By prioritizing intuitive and user-centric design principles, startups can mitigate risks, accelerate learning curves, and position themselves for success.

These principles include:

  1. An iterative design process that focuses on testing and learning.
  2. Feature prioritization that drives toward focused, high-value delivery for customers.
  3. Rapid prototyping to get continual feedback from potential customers.
  4. A technology approach that prioritizes efficiency and scalability.

Executing against these principles takes intentionality. Startups can start from the ground up by assembling an internal team, which means finding individuals who can design, prototype, code, conduct research, provide strategic insights, and more. Another approach is finding an experienced product design partner who can help companies confidently navigate the complexities of product innovation.

At Design Like You Mean It (DLYMI), we operate like an on-demand film crew, gathering collaborative teams experienced in their respective disciplines to work on projects. With a proven track record and insights from different industries and organizations, we are a special ops team offering extensive UX/UI expertise and years of collective knowledge to propel your company toward its next growth phase.

At DLYMI, we understand startups’ unique challenges and offer collaborative, human-centered design solutions tailored to your needs. We aim to empower startups to create thoughtful digital experiences that drive growth and innovation.

Startups and entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of innovation, job creation, and economic growth. By embracing UX design as a strategic imperative, startups can unlock their full potential, turning their stories into blockbuster successes that resonate with audiences worldwide. It’s time to spotlight the transformative power of UX design in the startup ecosystem.

SCENE: AFTER HOURS IN A DARK CO-WORKING SPACE

FADE IN:

INT. DARK CO-WORKING SPACE — NIGHT

Our protagonist sits hunched over, eyes fixed on the glowing screen. Fatigue is evident as our main character blinks hard, finally tearing their gaze away from the monitor.

After hours of intense research and meticulous review, the brave entrepreneur has an epiphany. The potential cost and efficiency benefits of hiring an “on-demand film crew” will consolidate many skills without the burden of filling each role individually.

Determinedly, the protagonist identifies the perfect partner to bring their vision to life, setting the stage for the venture to become a blockbuster success.

In a moment of triumph, our main character peaks the story’s climax, gaining a crucial competitive edge against the behemoth competitor with bottomless pockets.

In relief, our protagonist closes the laptop, knowing that experienced designers will help accelerate the learning curve.

FADE OUT

Three years ago, I couldn’t stand for any period of time without my lower back seizing up. I had chronic nerve pain running from my left shoulder to my left wrist. It was bad enough that I couldn’t sleep. I was at least 20 pounds overweight and more out of shape than I had been in a decade. I was 35 years old. My physical condition was not what I would call optimal.

I had fallen into the hustle trap. At the time, I was head of product for a tech company, and the long hours had caught up with me: 80-plus-hour weeks, with late nights on my laptop, sitting hunched over on my couch. A complete lack of exercise and poor nutrition. Things had gone south surprisingly quickly and without my full awareness.

The nerve pain was the tipping point that sent me to my primary care doctor, mostly out of fear that I had some significant neurological issue. Before sending me to a neurologist, the doctor suggested physical therapy. So that’s where I started—and I started slow: basic exercises, some stretches, and some walking. I put six months into therapy, and it eventually fixed the nerve pain. But the journey had just begun. Physical therapy was over, but the factors that took me to the breaking point were all still central to my life: long work hours, impending deadlines, constant computer work, and “tech neck.”

The culture of tech pushes people harder and harder, but we don’t think about the physical effects of that labor.

My experience is not unique. An anecdotal survey of my immediate professional network of designers and engineers came back with 50% of them suffering from some level of repetitive stress injury. Similarly, 50% of the people on the product team I was leading at the time were simultaneously in physical therapy for back and shoulder issues. While hard stats aren’t easy to come by, a study in Sweden corroborates my anecdotal data, showing that “around half of those who work with computers have pains in their neck, shoulders, arms, or hands.”

The culture of tech pushes people harder and harder, but we don’t think about the physical effects of that labor. If we were athletes, where physical health is vital to success, the thinking would be completely different. Sports organizations have entire teams dedicated to physical training and support for their players. But while it’s easy to understand why this investment is critical for an athlete, it’s much harder to make that connection for knowledge workers sitting in an office. We aren’t frequently required to tackle co-workers in the hallway or run 40-yard dashes to determine who gets access to a conference room. (Though maybe you do if you work at ESPN.com.) This makes it easy to ignore the long-term physical toll of our work.

Culturally, we view the physical requirements of a job through the lens of how strenuous the individualized actions are to complete, like lifting boxes, running laps, digging ditches, or hitting jump shots. We don’t think about it in terms of aggregate impact. As a result, these sorts of injuries aren’t really discussed. When no one perceives what you’re doing as physically demanding, it’s embarrassing to talk about being injured. It’s like telling someone you hurt yourself getting out of bed. Add to that tech companies’ expectations around their employees’ time, and this becomes something few people want to announce to the world.

The roots of this issue sit deep down in the way we approach work in many sectors, but especially in technology and its surrounding industries. A recent AdAge article found that 65% of employees at ad agencies are suffering from burnout. Similarly, in 2018, a piece in Forbes put 57% of tech employees in the same boat. Fixing this means rethinking our ceaseless drive for efficiency and output, and worksite wellness programs aren’t going to cut it.

When my back fell apart, the company I was working for had lots of wellness amenities. A two-story gym on-site offered several weekly classes. Chiropractic, including an on-site chiropractor, and massage were included in our benefits package. Nonetheless, half the product team was in physical therapy.

While these options were available, finding the space and time to use them was a different story. For sports organizations, there is a clear path from injury to lost revenue. Physical health is critical to getting the job done, so those organizations are built around it, and activities related to maintaining physical health are simply part of the work. In tech, health and wellness is just another carrot used to recruit prospective employees, no different than a foosball table or kombucha tap. It’s a fancy add-on available if you have time, but good luck finding that—we’ve got features to ship. But while the path from injury to lost revenue is not as clear in tech as it is in sports, that doesn’t mean it does not exist.

A 2012 study from the Liberty Mutual Research Institute ranked the top 10 causes of workplace injuries and their resulting economic impact. Repetitive stress injuries came in ninth, with a $1.8 billion annual cost for companies. You can’t pin all those losses on the tech industry, as the study pulled data from injury reports across sectors, but given the evidence that 50% of those who work on computers report pain issues, coupled with the tech sector’s growth since 2012, it is very likely that the economic impact of these issues has grown significantly. There is also a good chance the number has been grossly underestimated. Because of tech’s culture, my guess is that many of these issues go unreported and potentially untreated. The tech industry is the epicenter for the world of GaryVee-inspired hustle porn, where temporarily embarrassed billionaires kill themselves to earn some kind of social badge of honor. In that world, there is no room for sleep or a social life, let alone physical injuries. And companies hoping to move fast and break things embrace and reward this mentality with gusto.

There is nothing fun about slowly losing your quality of life in the machine of iterative product development.

We become culturally conditioned to think of these issues as just the price of doing the work, not as an occupational hazard or some abnormal outcome that should be reported. I didn’t report my issues through workers’ comp, and my guess is many others do not as well.

In this way, the issue takes on a different flavor than you might see in other industries. For much of the manufacturing world, health and safety is a big part of the conversation, with labor groups, OSHA, and other regulatory bodies working to ensure a safe environment for workers. In tech, it’s a silent epidemic. And while the consequences may not be as outwardly dire as losing a hand in a piece of industrial machinery, there is nothing fun about slowly losing your quality of life in the machine of iterative product development. Additionally, research from Harvard suggests that health issues related to workplace stress and burnout represent an additional $190 billion of health care expenditures each year and contribute to 120,000 annual deaths. So there’s that.

My physical burnout moment became a forcing function for me to keep myself at a certain level of physical fitness. I’ve since developed a routine that helps me keep things under control, but it requires time, effort, and conscious intention. If I slip for too long, issues creep back in.

What if we recognized that time and effort as a requirement of doing the job in the same way we recognize the need for athletes to take care of themselves? Instead of a nice-to-have perk (if you can find the time), we could acknowledge that wellness is foundational to individual success, even for jobs that might not be considered “strenuous.” Like an athletic organization, the health and wellness of all employees should be a central pillar of organizational structure.

I’m not saying tech companies need to have massive training facilities or two-a-day workouts, but we need to get real about creating work schedules that prioritize breaks and create space for actually using those wellness perks. This means establishing realistic expectations of employee hours and, most importantly, structuring deadlines that support those expectations. This may sound crazy or expensive, but I would argue that a lot of our ideas about “what works” for business are flawed, grounded more in archaic traditions and outdated beliefs than actual data. Case in point: this recent experiment from Microsoft where the company shifted to a four-day workweek in Japan and productivity jumped by 40%. Turns out taking care of people is good for business. More of that, please.

—

“Tech Workers Are Suffering From a Silent Epidemic of Stress and Physical Burnout” was originally published in Medium on January 15, 2020.

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman discusses the psychological phenomenon of loss aversion, which he, along with Amos Tversky, first identified back in 1979. At its core, loss aversion refers to the tendency of the human brain to react more strongly to losses than it does to gains. Or, as Wikipedia puts it, people “prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains: it is better to not lose $5 than to find $5.” This phenomenon is so ingrained in our psyche that some studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains.

In his book, Kahneman describes a study of professional golfers. The goal of the study was to see if their concentration and focus was greater on par putts (where failure would mean losing a stroke) or on birdie putts (where success would mean gaining a stroke). In an analysis of 2.5 million putts, the study found that regardless of the putt difficulty, pro golfers were more successful on par putts, the putts that avoided a loss, than they were on birdie putts where they had a potential gain. The subconscious aversion to loss pushed them to greater focus.

If loss aversion is powerful enough to influence the outcome of a professional golfers putts, where else could it be shaping our focus and decisions?

Loss, Gain, and Iterative Product Development

Iterative product development is a process designed to help teams “ship” (get a product in front of customers) as quickly as possible by actively reducing the initial complexity of features and functionality. This is valuable because it gets the product in the hands of users sooner, allowing the team to quickly validate whether they’ve built the right thing or not. This makes it less risky to try something new. The alternative process, waterfall, asked teams to build in all the complexity upfront and then put the product in front of customers. A much riskier and potentially costlier proposition.

Iterative product development achieves its speed through a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach. MVP means taking the possible feature set that could be included in a product, or the possible functionality a specific feature could deliver, and cutting it down to the minimum needed to bring value to the end user. As a simplified example, imagine you are designing the first music streaming app (like Spotify). It could have lots of potential features beyond just streaming music. Things like playlists, search, recommendations, following artists, sharing, offline mode, dark mode, user profiles and so on. Building all of that would take a lot of time and effort. So an MVP streaming app might just have music streaming and search. The goal is to build something quickly that can validate if users even want to stream music in the first place before you go invest in all those other features.

Once the MVP of a product is live, a team can then quickly assess if it is successful or not, and with minimum time invested, can move rapidly to build on the initial functionality.

It is this step of the process where things can start to go sideways.

The problem starts with the concept of an MVP. We aren’t geared to think in terms of MVP. In fact, our mind takes the opposite approach. When we get excited about an idea our brain goes wild with all the possibilities (see our list of music streaming features above). We imagine all the possible value a product could deliver and then we have to lose a significant portion of that value by cutting it down to the bare minimum. It’s never easy. The unintended psychological consequence of this process is that we walk into the first version of our product with a feeling of loss. Even if our MVP is successful, that feeling sticks in our brain.

Weakness-based Product Development

The MVP process primes us to want to regain the value we believe we’ve lost. As soon as the product is live, we fall into a weakness-based, additive strategy, where we are compelled to add new functionality in order to win back our lost value (real or imagined).

This weakness-based mindset gets further reinforced when we start analyzing data and feedback. Because loss aversion causes us to focus on losses more than gains, we are more likely to gloss over positive signals and areas of strength and focus instead on the areas of the product that “aren’t working.”

Think about the amount of effort you put into understanding why something is not working versus the effort you apply to understanding why something is working. It is rare to hear someone say “how do we double down on this feature that’s working?” Instead, we strive to deliver value by fixing what we perceive to be broken or missing.

In the worst case, we even [subconciously] go looking for signals that corroborate our underlying feelings of loss.

To go back to our music streaming app, if you believed that playlist was a critical feature, but it was cut in the MVP, you are primed to put a higher weight on any feedback where a user complains about not having a playlist because it validates your own sense of lost value. Even if that feedback goes against the other signals you are receiving.

We focus on areas of weakness because they represent potentially lost value, but weakness-based product development is like swimming upstream. Areas of strength are signals from your users about where they see value in your product. By focusing instead on areas of weakness, we are effectively ignoring those signals, often working against existing behavior in an effort to “improve engagement” by forcing some new value. This is why many product updates only garner incremental improvement. Swimming upstream is hard.

Strengths-based Product Development

Strengths-based product development means leveraging the existing behavior of your users to maximize the value they get from your product. It’s about capitalizing on momentum, instead of trying to create it.

Instagram is a solid example of a strengths-based development approach. For starters, they have kept their feature set very limited for a long time. Especially early on, they did not focus on building new things but instead focused on embracing existing value. They prioritized things like new image filters and editing capabilities, faster image upload processing, and multi-photo posts. Instagram knows that the strength of its product is in sharing photos from your smartphone. They didn’t spend a ton of time enhancing comments or threads. They’ve made minimal changes to their “heart” functionality for liking posts. They never built out a meaningful web application. When they did create significant new functionality they often made it standalone, like Boomerang and Layout, as opposed to wedging it into the core experience.

Arguably the biggest change they’ve made over the years was the addition of stories. However, even that feature, while copied from Snapchat, was still an extension of their core photo sharing behavior. And, ultimately, stories increased the value of feed-based photo sharing on Instagram as well. Before stories, all your daily selfies, food shots, workout updates and so on all went into your feed. Now, much of that lower quality posting goes into stories, and feed posts are reserved for higher quality photos, creating an enhanced feed experience.

In contrast, take an example from my previous job. I was head of product for a streaming video service for almost seven years. As a subscription-based service, our bread and butter was premium video. However, many competitors in our space focused on written content, which we did not have. As an organization, we saw this weakness as a potential value loss and prioritized implementing an article strategy.

Written content did not enhance our core user behavior, but we built up justifications for the ways that it could. This is actually a key symptom of weakness-based product development. When something enhances your core strength, its value is obvious. If you find yourself needing to build a justification, it’s a sign you could be on the wrong track.

Articles never gained significant traction with our paying subscribers. They did, however, drive a high level of traffic from prospective customers via platforms like Facebook. But, the conversion rate for that traffic was extremely low. The gap between reading an article and paying a monthly subscription for premium videos was just too big of a leap. We were swimming upstream in an attempt to fill in perceived holes, but never really enhancing our core value.

On the flip side, we also developed a feature that allowed subscribers to share free views of premium videos with their friends. Capitalizing on our core strength and an existing behavior (sharing). Like articles, this drove organic traffic but also had a significantly higher conversion rate. The effect of swimming with the current.

Shifting Your Mindset

The good news is that if you find yourself in a weakness-based mindset, there are a few straight forward things you can do to break out.

  1. 1. Analyze what works


    When you see areas of strength don’t just give yourself a pat on the back and move on, make those areas the key focus of your next iteration. Be the one to ask, why is this working and how can we accelerate it? Stop chasing new value. You are already delivering value. Build on that.

    1. 2. Move from addition to subtraction


    When you look at metrics, stop looking at weak performance as something to be improved. Instead, look at it first as an opportunity to simplify. Instead of immediately asking, how can we make this better? Make the first question, is this something we should get rid of completely?

    This is especially powerful in existing products. If you’ve been practicing weakness-based development you potentially have a bloated, underused feature set that’s dragging down your overall experience. What if every third or fourth development cycle you didn’t build anything new and instead focused on what you were going to get rid of? How quickly would that streamline your product and bring you back to your core strengths?

    1. 3. Understand your strengths


    Do you know what is valuable in your product? You have to be able to answer that question if you want to step into a strengths-based mindest. If you’re not sure about the answer that’s ok, you can start with this simple matrix.


    Plot your features in the matrix. Features in the upper right quadrant represent your core value. How many of your product cycles in the last three months have focused on the elements in the upper right? If the majority of your work is not happening there then there is a good chance you are practicing weakness-based product development.

    If you are doing any work in the lower left quadrant you are wasting your time. Don’t waste cycles propping up weak features. Kill those features, move on and don’t fear the fallout. We get worried about upsetting users who have adopted features that aren’t actually driving our success (there’s that loss aversion again :)). It’s ok. Users will readjust, and yes, some might leave. But if you are clear on your product’s strengths and focus your efforts there, the value you gain will more than make up for anything you lose by cutting the things that are holding you back.

    —

    “The hidden bias in iterative product development” was originally published in Medium on June 19, 2019.

    Motion does not always translate to movement. Think about a car stuck in the mud. Press the gas and the engine revs, the wheels spin. There is motion, but the car is going nowhere. It might feel like you are making progress, but all you are really doing is digging a deeper rut. To get the car moving you need to get out and push.

    Day-to-day it can be easy to get stuck spinning your wheels in the mud on things that feel urgent, but are ultimately not important. Effective leaders are able to push things forward by quickly determining which tasks are important and which should be ignored.

    Important things create real forward movement by facilitating decision making, and keeping a team focused on their goals.

    In any job, it’s all but impossible to stop things from coming up. So being able to make a quick assessment of new tasks is a skill worth practicing.

    My process starts with answering a few questions to help determine if something is worth my time. Answering affirmatively to any of these is a good indicator that it deserves some focus. (Note: these questions are assuming the activity is in line with the goals of the team/org. If not, it’s most likely a non-starter.)

    1. 1. Will this allow me, or the team, to finish something or make a final decision on something?
    2. 2. Is this critical to inform a future decision I need to make?
    3. 3. Will this remove a roadblock for me or the team?
    4. 4. Will this result in clear action items for me or the team?
    5. 5. Could this provide some critical insight or data point?
    6. 6. Will this help communicate something critical to a key stakeholder?
    7. 7. Will this truly help us do great work?


    While not perfect, this heuristic can be a quick filter when prioritizing tasks. It has also helped me identify some habits that I’ve come to realize were more about motion than real movement.

    I used to feel the need to “zero” my email inbox. I‘d tell myself that if I had a “clean slate” my mind would be clear for the other things I had to do. But, after running through the questions, having a clean inbox didn’t standup to the “is this important” test. In fact, for me, checking email in general turned out to be a mostly unimportant time suck. These days my unread email count is at an all time high, but so is my ability to focus on critical things.

    Another thing that came up for me was around design feedback and iterations. It can be easy to get in deep as a team and nitpick design details, because details matter (see question #8), but there comes a point of diminishing returns. Eventually you’re just wasting design cycles. Creating motion for yourself, and a roadblock for everyone else. Sooner or later you just need to call it good and ship it.

    Being a leader does not require you to be a manager or have a lofty title. You can lead from anywhere. The key is that you work hard at creating real movement for your team by understanding your goals and focusing on the things that truly matter.

    Before you jump into anything, ask yourself: is this creating movement or motion?

    —

    “Leaders Create Movement not Motion” was originally published in Medium on January 10, 2016.

    There is so much that goes into pushing great design out into the world. A good place to start is getting the right personalities on your team. Now, no personality is without it’s downsides, but here are a few that I think can be pretty helpful. Keep in mind that these may not be individual people. Depending on the size of the team, they might be all rolled up into one.

    1. The Perfectionist

    No detail is too fine, no nuance too miniscule. The Perfectionist is the purveyor of consistency. The pusher of precision. They can spot a 2px spacing issue from three desks away, and lie in bed at night sweating about line lengths and font sizing.

    Why you need them: Things can get crazy over the course of a project. As the number of files, layouts and versions grow the details can get sloppy. The Perfectionist is there to keep it all on the rails. If they aren’t doing the work themselves, include them in as many reviews as you can. I guarantee they’ll catch things no one else will.

    2. The Visionary

    The visionary is convinced you should be designing an Oculus Rift experience to control a 3D printed drone. They live on the bleeding edge and watch the latest trends. You may have trouble pulling them away from the latest Chrome experiment in order to get some actual work done.

    Why you need them: A team’s energy ebbs and flows. The more you can keep people excited and energized the better their creative output. While a lot of ideas may not be feasible, the Visionary brings a steady dose of creative energy, inspiration and excitement to the table that can push the team to think outside the box and encourage people to go out on a limb.

    3. The Closer

    Designing is only half the battle. The rubber meets the road when it’s time to get a design from prototype (or comp) to actual living, breathing creature in the wild. That’s where the Closer comes in. The Closer is all about the nitty gritty. They have a deep, unending love for specs and annotations, and the technical know how to wade into detailed conversation with engineers. They are tough and persistent, with enough passion and dedication to push until the very end.

    Why you need them: With all the demands on a design team it can be easy to “finish” a design, pass it over to engineering and move on to the next thing. But the best design teams put as much emphasis on shepherding their work through development as they do on designing the thing in the first place.

    4. The Straight Shooter

    Honesty is the best policy. The Straight Shooter believes this to the core. If they think something is good, they will tell you. If they think something is crap, they will tell you. Feelings be damned, they are going to give you their honest opinion, especially if they think it’s going to make the work better.

    Why you need them: Honesty and critique are key to getting great design work out the door. Sometimes design teams can fall into a habit of sugar coating feedback and letting things slip through that might not be at the level you want. The Straight Shooter helps keep everyone accountable and makes it less likely that the team will develop bad critique habits.

    5. The Wolf

    “I’m Winston Wolf. I solve problems.”

    Cool, calm and collected, the Wolf excels in high pressure situations. Creative workarounds and decisive problem solving are the Wolf’s forte. They are reliable, dedicated and level headed, with a killer instinct for cutting through drama to get to the heart of a problem.

    Why you need them: Over the course of a project it is inevitable that something is going to blow up. Files get deleted. Scope creeps. Deadlines shift. If not addressed quickly, those things can completely derail a project. Fortunately, if you’ve got a Wolf on your team, you can rest easy. When the shit hits the fan, the Wolf knows how to keep the ship on course.

    6. The Producer

    Heads down, headphones on. When the Producer is in the zone, everyone knows to give them their space. The Producer is a wizard with their software of choice. They know all the shortcuts and are almost obsessive about streamlining their workflow. They are never more comfortable then when they are churning through work.

    Why you need them: Sometimes you just need to get a lot done. Maybe you have to create a ton of content images to fit a new design, or you decided to make a change that now needs translated to all your templates across all your breakpoints. This is the Producer’s sweet spot. Just point them in the right direction and let ’em go.

    7. The Politician

    The Politician spends more time in meetings then they do in Sketch or Photoshop. But, the Politician thrives at doing the dirty work to sell the design vision, generate buy in, knock down barriers and shield the team from everything rolling down hill. Their ability to design is matched only by their ability to sell it. They manage up and down, carrying the flag of design to the highest levels and inspiring a shared vision throughout the organization.

    Why you need them: The process of design is messy business. There are stakeholders to satisfy, a creative vision to maintain, deadlines to hit and expectations to manage. The Politician knows the playing field and the players and is adept at navigating the system. Without them, great design may never see the light of day.

    FYI: If you are a team lead, this is probably you. If you haven’t yet, I’d suggest setting aside the next few days to binge some House of Cards :).

    —

    “7 Personalities You Need on Your Design Team” was originally published in Medium on December 28, 2015.

    “You know, that’s a desk for a fifth grader.”

    Two days ago I moved offices from one side of the building to the other. I had a plan for the new space but I didn’t have all the stuff yet. So I set up a small Ikea table in the corner of the room. It’s all I needed to do my job. No big deal, right?

    What happened next was a little unexpected, but was an insight into human nature that put a fine point on one of the challenges we run into every day trying to create great products.

    In the 48 hours since the move that small room has drawn more attention than anything else in the entire office. Hardly a single person has been able to walk by without stopping to comment.

    “You know that’s a desk for a fifth grader.”

    “You could us a little more stuff in here.”

    “Is that all the furniture they’d give you?”

    “Maybe some wall art?”

    “Interesting. There’s a lot of potential in here.”

    I’ve received literally 30 comments in two days. Given the size of our org, that’s well over a 50% comment rate. Some people have stopped multiple times. One person insisted she get a picture of me (as seen above).

    It freaks people out. There is a palpable tension every time someone stops. People clearly think it’s weird, or I’m weird, or whatever. They are uncomfortable. But what’s most interesting is that, inevitably, the conversation steers toward how I’m going to fill the space. What I’m going to add. When I assure people that more stuff is coming they visibly relax. All is right with the world once again.

    There is something a little off-putting, but also compelling, about empty space. Honestly, sitting at that little desk in that empty room does make me feel weird. Nature abhors a vacuum and people abhor unused space. We feel a deep need to fill it.

    “Interesting. There’s a lot of potential in here.”

    We see potential in unused space. Not potential for the sake of it’s emptiness, but potential for what we can put in it. However, great products keep things simple. They solve problems in the clearest and most concise way. The challenge comes in keeping it that way.

    A new product starts out with the core features needed to solve the problem. But then that feeling of discomfort starts to creep in. There’s still room for more stuff, why aren’t we filling it? We start to see potential in the empty spaces. So we add features. We extend. We expand. And before we know it our simple, clear product is bloated, overcrowded and confusing. On top of that, you’ll probably find that all those additional features didn’t really add that much value for the user.

    Sometimes a tiny desk is all you need to do the job. The more I sit in that empty room, the more comfortable I get.

    The more comfortable we can get with the existence of empty space, the more we can understand the significant value it holds. It’s simple, it’s clean, it lacks distraction. There is room to breath in there. One key to great product design is resisting the urge to fill all the empty space. The features you say no to are as important as the ones you say yes to. It feels uncomfortable and it will meet resistance, the urge to fill the space is strong, but if you give your products room to breath your users will thank you.

    —

    “Perils of Product Design: The Empty Space Trap” was originally published in Medium on March 27, 2015.

    Coming out of school as newly minted designers, we often aspire to the heights of master craftsmanship. We envision ourselves creating expertly designed, meticulously implemented products that inspire awe with their beauty, artistry, and execution.

    Then the real world promptly smacks us in the face.

    Craftsmen spend untold hours creating their masterpieces. They sweat the details and pour their souls into the work. Their final creations are as much art as they are products.

    Somewhere in our industrialized rush, we’ve lost our sense of craftsmanship.

    We, on the other hand, find ourselves saddled with impossible deadlines that require us to compromise on features and details. It’s all we can do just to get the project done. Our final products are minimum viable. They’re driven by the invisible hand of the market, which relentlessly demands speed so we can squeeze out a few more sales for the quarter. Getting a product out is considered better than getting it perfect.

    The craftsman is not worried about speed. The craftsman is worried about the quality and value of the final product.

    Somewhere in our industrialized rush, we’ve lost our sense of craftsmanship. To succeed in the future, we’ll need to find it again.

    Do We Need Speed?

    Speed is cancer to craftsmanship. But the idea that speed is a positive quality runs deep. Like, primordial deep. In the book Metaphors We Live By, authors George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explain that our positive association with speed dates back to the dawn of humanity, when early man observed that healthy humans walked at a quicker pace than those who were not healthy. The rest, in our primitive lizard brains, is history. Fast is better than slow.

    We haven’t evolved much past that.

    We assume first to market is best. Yet, according to researchers at Northwestern, late entrants to a market are more successful than first-movers 70 percent of the time.

    When a startup does win, it’s often not because they were fast, but because they were focused.

    We mythologize the fast, nimble startup that disrupts the lumbering, established market leader. But, like the plane crash that makes us question the safety of flying, these rare, widely covered stories do not represent the full picture. The average startup does not win the battle, regardless of how fast it moves. When Richard Branson weighed in on this, his advice for entrepreneurs was littered with words like long-term, carefully, and wisely. Those words don’t sound fast at all.

    When a startup does win, it’s often not because they were fast, but because they were focused. Just as when a larger company is disrupted, it’s not necessarily because it was slow, but because it lacked focus as its business grew to multiple markets and products.

    Focus, therefore, is more important than speed.

    The Hare was faster than the Tortoise, but the Tortoise won because the Hare lost focus.

    The Changing Complexion of the Market

    The driving mantra of fast-moving tech companies is out is better than perfect. However, a seismic shift is happening in the way consumers think about products and what they’re willing to pay for. The shift means we may need to rethink that mantra.

    Josh Allan Dykstra laid it out in his Fast Company article, “Why Millennials Don’t Want to Buy Stuff.”

    To ‘own something’ in the traditional sense is becoming less important, because what’s scarce has changed. Ownership just isn’t hard anymore. We can now find and own practically anything we want, at any time, through the unending flea market of the Internet. Because of this, the balance between supply and demand has been altered, and the value has moved elsewhere.

    I’d take this a step further. I don’t think this change is just about scarcity, I think it is also about quality. The world is flooded with worthless crap. Speed drives quantity over quality, and the durability and lifespan of our stuff has been steadily declining.

    In the digital space, quality does not necessarily come from how long something lasts. Quality is a combination of utility and design. A great product needs to solve a real problem in a thoughtful, simple way.

    So much of what we create does not solve a real problem. And even if it does, it likely wasn’t created all that thoughtfully. How could it be, when the main goal is to just get something out there? This quote from 2010 in Apple’s app review guidelines sums it up nicely:

    “We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don’t need any more Fart apps.”

    As Dykstra put it:

    Humanity is experiencing an evolution in consciousness. We’re starting to think differently about what it means to ‘own’ something. This is why a similar ambivalence towards ownership is emerging in all sorts of areas, from car-buying to music listening to entertainment consumption…the big push behind it all is that our thinking is changing.

    Couple this ambivalence with growing concerns about environmental and social impact and you’ve got yourself a consumerism revolution in the making.

    “The biggest insight we can glean from the death of ownership is about connection,” Dykstra writes. “This is the thing which is now scarce, because when we can easily acquire anything, the question becomes, ‘What do we do with this?’”

    We no longer care about acquiring — we care about connecting. With each other, with ourselves, and with our environment.

    Creating a product that drives a true connection with a person requires thoughtfulness and a relentless obsession. It requires craftsmanship.

    What Do We Do With This?

    Speed is not an advantage anymore. In the digital space, the technical playing field has been leveled by open source tools and frameworks. Everyone now has the ability to move quickly. Advances like 3D printing are likely to bring similar change in the manufacturing world as well. Being first is now more irrelevant than ever.

    Magic takes time. Magic takes craftsmanship.

    More importantly, the consumer mindset is shifting. People are becoming more and more selective about what to spend their money on. Apple understood this before almost anyone else, and they’ve led a design revolution that has changed the expectations of every consumer who chooses to buy a product. Thoughtfulness and great design matter.

    It’s no longer enough for a product to simply exist. To succeed, future products need that thing, that je ne sais quoi, that magic. And magic takes time. Magic takes craftsmanship.

    Craftsmanship is the new advantage.

    Companies have to sweat the details. We can’t be afraid to push our timelines to get something right. As designers and developers, we’re doing ourselves, our companies, and our end users a disservice by cutting corners to hit deadlines and striving for minimum viable products.

    We have to stop selling ourselves short.

    —

    “The Case for Slow Design” was originally published in Medium on February 23, 2015.

    Great design is driving business success. Soon, being a design-driven company will be table stakes. But building a company that values the innovative power of design is not an easy task. For startups, the challenge is creating a design-driven culture from the ground up. For established companies, it’s even more arduous. Replacing the old status quo with a whole new mindset and process. No matter what stage your company is in, there is one decision you can make today that will put you well on your way to design-driven success:

    Hire people who make things.

    From the person who checks in guests at the front desk to your chief executives, to your customer service reps, engineers and your designers. Hire people who make things. Not just make things for their job, but make things on their own time because they freakin’ love to. Fill every single role in your company with people who actively participate in the act of being generative.

    To be design driven doesn’t just mean hiring the best designers you can (though that is part of it), it means creating an organization that understands and embraces the struggle required to create something.

    People who make things get the creative struggle.

    It doesn’t matter what they make. If they crochet dollies, or code applications, craft with their kids, write music, blog or bake pastries. Makers understand the creative process. They understand the anxiety, the excitement and feeling of ownership that comes with creation. They grok ideation and iteration and the self-confidence required to ship something they created.

    Why does this matter?

    Empathy

    One of the biggest challenges I have as a designer is deciding when to show work to people in the organization. The challenge is that many people have trouble wrapping their heads around early stage work. They can’t look at it for what it is and give constructive feedback based on that. They tend to view all design work as they would a final product. Because of this, you hold off showing. You do more “polish” work than problem solving work. And when you do show it, and changes come up, you’ve put in way more time than you should have and you now have a compressed timeline for iteration. You pay the price in organizational speed and efficiency, and ultimately work quality.

    If you fill your organization with people who possess empathy for the creative process, then everyone understands early stage work and it’s easier to work through rough concepts constructively. Work moves faster, feedback comes sooner, less time is wasted and the end product is better for it.

    Pride of Ownership

    Makers know what it means to attach their name to something. To pour themselves into something and then sign their name at the bottom for all to see. This takes self-confidence and pride of ownership. They won’t sign their name to crap work and they won’t sign your company’s name to crap work either. If your organization is staffed, wall-to-wall, with this mentality then everyone will hold each other accountable for what goes out the door.

    Innovation From All

    Makers are explorers. They are actively looking for inspiration, new ideas and watching cultural happenings. Ideas can come from anywhere in an organization. If you hire a diverse group of makers, ideas will come from everywhere. Just be sure you are ready to listen.

    Appetite for Risk

    To create something is to be willing to take risks. To take a risk on yourself (putting yourself out there), as well as to take a risk on an idea. The scale of the risk varies, but it is the underlying mentality that is important. One key to disruptive innovation is the willingness to take risks. Established companies are often upended by small upstarts because they are unwilling to risk something new. Being a company that is willing to take risks is not just about having one, or a few, “brave” leaders. Companies create real value when people at all levels are willing and empowered to take risks. If people are able to take risks in their day-to-day job then a system of diffused innovation can grow, impacting everything from daily processes to major product initiatives.

    Great, but why does my front desk person need to make things?

    Ultimately, this is all about culture. The more pervasive the innovative, maker mindset is in your organization, the deeper it is engrained in your culture. In the end this translates to a more empathic process, more ideas, greater individual initiative, shared accountability and a higher appetite for risk. All of which are fundamental ingredients for design-driven success.

    The next step is harnessing those ingredients. But that’s another post for another time.

    Maker culture is in full tilt, explosion mode. This is an important trend, not just because of the possible impacts on the future, but because it is expanding the population of people who create. This means you have more opportunity to bring those people into your company.

    Go get ‘em.

    —

    “Want to be Design Driven? Hire People Who Make Things“ was originally published in Medium on December 9, 2014.