General Advice for Designers

On being a great designer

No matter what role you end up taking eventually, you’ll be most valued for your craft – because you’d be excellent at creation or even more importantly, curation
I’ve rarely seen a pure manager who can command great respect and admiration from their team without being exceptional at the craft
If you’re very senior, you should still try to have 1-2 complex product problems you are directly responsible for delivering - work with your boss / another senior designer on such a problem
Ensure you have a continuous incoming stream of feedback on your craft / design skills – sometimes you’d have to demand this as managers tend to get busy and preoccupied with other priorities
Showcase your excellence in craft visibly across the team i.e. present a killer documentation of a project, show a cool prototype, show a solution to a complex UX problem, contribute a useful pattern to the DS, solve a nagging issue in the product

On managing your time

Make sure you intentionally structure your day - don’t let other people’s priorities dictate your day
Ignore meetings until you’re only added to those that matter
If you’re leading your team, try to review designs first thing in the morning and unblock designers with actionable feedback – this is the single biggest productivity change I made in my schedule that helped me support a very large team
As you get more senior and start to lead a team, you’d be evaluated on 2 key things – What you delivered (quality of the work) and How you delivered (speed of delivery, number of escalations required, amount of design rework it took, timelines adherence…)
Priorities for the Org are never flat & equally distributed across the entire portfolio – understand the priorities that are clearly more important and focus your time & energy on them disproportionately more - you’ll only get the correct info on the org priorities from the top - don’t make the mistake of calibrating your priorities from the hearsay on the floor / the bottom

On taking decisions

Good decisions require confidence – confidence comes from one of the 2 things – Intuition, or Data
Be willing to wait before you make a decision until you feel confident – but know what’s missing in order to get you to the right level of confidence and have that plan in place to get there
It’s okay to ask for more time before you make the decision
90% decisions have no ROI on decision quality by thinking more, 10% decisions absolutely can be made better by thinking more – specific percentages aren’t important but the split is

On communication

Use conclusive & definitive words when you write
Read what you write and try to misinterpret it – assume that that’s how most people are likely to interpret it, and then fix your writing
Use simple words, break down sentences, use bullet points
If someone needs to do something and you’re assigning the work to them, make them acknowledge to close the loop - better yet, ask for a time commitment for completion of that work
If you’re sending something important, schedule the message - gives you time to edit and improve it Figure out the people you need to respond immediately to, and don’t keep them blocked – ideally these can be your direct reports, your manager and cross-functional leads
Group DMs with 2-3-4 people are the best way to drive projects efficiently behind the scenes – bigger channels for large announcements & sharing the agreed alignments, after you’ve achieved alignments in smaller groups

On aligning stakeholders

Conduct opinionated debates in person – the tonality, expressions, emphasis and nuances make all the difference in getting your points across and getting the alignment you seek
Larger decisions need more work, specifically speaking with a lot of important people early on and discussing approaches to get a pre-alignment – taking their inputs early on can help you win the commitment later
Communicate widely the alignment & decision in writing after you align in person – don’t assume the other person took away the same notion of commitment that you did
Any time a written discussion goes on for more than 2 disparate exchanges, get on a call or meet in person

On prioritisation & scoping

Recognise that these are very hard to do well, and hence very few people would be able to do these well
The best way to assess if these are done well is to assume they are not and start there
To understand prioritisation, ask ‘Why is this the most important thing?’ ‘What other things have we considered?’ ‘Shall we review some empirical / concrete evidence that informs us that this is the most important priority currently?’
To understand scoping, ask ‘What’s the single most important thing here to get right?’ ‘What’s the one thing we cannot do without?’ - and then scope the project around just that
Know that prioritisation & scoping get better if you debate them early on – we’ve been able to catch errors through these debates, and save quite a lot of time & effort later

On managing your team

Keep adding responsibilities on their plate until the arrangement breaks - you want to keep the responsibilities just under the breaking point And then keep pushing the breaking point up by coaching + feedback - continuously highlight what they’re doing well and what they need to do differently
Demand more - set very high expectations on quality of work and timelines
Support better - it’s hard to be demanding without providing support by unblocking them, giving them clarity and the focus to do their work well
Never keep internal timelines vague - ask them to turn around work along specific deadlines even at a day-level
Protect your team’s time & bandwidth at all costs - even personal cost
Find every single opportunity to highlight achievements (even if small) and impact - never disregard the importance of a public appreciation
Your goal is to help each member of your team realise they’re capable of way more than they think - highlight this every time they enter this zone of higher performance
Never delay critical feedback - the longer the delay, the less effective or useful the feedback will be
Poor coaching now results in more managing needed later
If your work gradually doesn’t reduce, it’s a useful sign that the team isn’t upskilling quickly enough and we need tons pend more time in coaching
Learn to tell an amazing story to sell a project to your team by getting them excited - an excited + less talented designer is more efficient to work with, than a not-excited-at-all + supremely talented designer
Set up rituals and make the team follow them - simple things like posting daily updates, sharing highlights / lowlights can become interesting repeatable behaviours that bind the team together and help build a subculture
Don’t cut corners - set extremely high standards of behaviour and work
Do small things really well and set an example - don’t tolerate slack in small things like timeline delays (“Oh it was only 15 min late”), detached components, poor file hygiene, grammatical errors in copywriting / messages

On managing up

Senior leaders really care a lot about high priority projects and want to constantly keep their bosses informed about quality & progress - help your boss do this well by communicating the necessary details, updates and designs (when needed)
Never hold back or delay surfacing cultural or team issues – however small you deem them to be
Identify scalable solutions to repeated problems and propose them proactively - senior leaders love efficiency gains through scalable systematic solutions for problems, and will usually be very supportive of implementing them i.e. Notice different pods having different / ad hoc / randomly timed project discussion timings across all pods? Set up a single weekly connect with PM leads to save everyone time

On behaviour

It pays to be extremely optimistic and show it – you become more pleasant to work with, and more attractive for the leadership to involve you into ideas early
Don’t vent or partake in discussing / spreading negativity – as a rule
Be the source of confidence for people around you, your team and stakeholders – this does wonders in a fast and challenging workplace where there’s usually a sense of urgency and panic – in the operational paranoia of a demanding workplace, the calm ones thrive
Don’t respond when angry – you’d realise that people act irrationally or haphazardly because they’re either cornered or pressured into action – be forgiving and supportive, retaliation seldom helps
The best way to establish hierarchy is to occasionally make the other person feel important and powerful – using ‘This should be your call’ or ‘I trust you to take the right decision here’ can go a long way
Understand stakeholders’ role in more depth to develop empathy – you won’t win all the battles by sheer functional authority, kindness will become an invaluable leverage to move work forward
Get extremely good at making and upholding commitments – if you cannot uphold a commitment you made, the apology & revised commitment should come before the timestamp on the current one runs out

– @hvpandya