Thread by @cwodtke

A mistake a lot of us in tech make is thinking everyone is like us. Twitter makes this worse because we follow people like us. I'm going to call them "Product people" like we did at LinkedIn in the old days. It includes designers and engineers.
We are people who like new things.

https://twitter.com/cwodtke/status/1492508877002211333

Product People are never satisfied. We believe something could always be better.
We don't like being told what to do, but we enjoy being challenged.
We don't mind ambiguity, because it is a space of opportunity.
And it's hard to imagine any other way to be.

When I was a new design manager at Yahoo (gosh, in 2002?) we had to do "interesting" work like figuring out what a search interface should be and "boring" work like making banners.
I decided to rotate designers from role to role so they could have fun sometimes and rest sometimes

When I moved the woman who made banners into the visual design role for the search product and rotated the vizd working on search into her role, I made them both miserable.
I'm lucky people were willing to talk to me honestly, despite my being the boss.

I learned that the banner designer just wanted to make pretty things and go home at 5 to her family. Meanwhile, the search designer wanted really hard challenges like figuring out how search could be pretty and effective. Not all designers enjoy AB testing. He found it fun.

I've never forgotten that mistake, and try to avoid it. Some people just want work to be a job.
Some people feel more comfortable with a clear hierarchy and being told clearly what to do
(though no one likes micromanaging, in my experience anyhow.)