@shreyas Ironically I find that the people with genuinely good product sense tend to be the cautious ones, as they have enough experience to know they might be wrong. @shreyas While there’s a whole group of hyper confident people who think they have good product sense because they’ve been told they’re amazing from day one, and have swallowed their own hype.

The traditional "Double Diamond" as viewed by designers. The "Reverse Double Diamond" based on how most companies actually operate.

Three reasons why we see tension between designers and product managers 🧵 1. Designers often see themselves as user champions. Most good PMs also care about the user. However PMs are often tasked with delivering business requirements and business outcomes. While there should be considerable overlap here, this isn’t always the case.

The design industry suffers from a “fundamental category error”

Designers believe they are planing a game of chess, where the best player with the best process always wins. In truth business are actually playing multiple hands of poker. The goal isn’t to win every hand, but rather to minimise your losses until you get dealt pocket aces.

A little thread on the future of design in a world of increasing automation 🧵 There was a time when every town and village had a resident furniture maker in order to serve the needs of the local population. They were talented crafts people who would turn our chairs, tables and beds to order.

Hey designer friends. Check out this competency framework for Product Managers. Notice anything interesting?

https://twitter.com/ravi_mehta/status/1253029563522854912

If product managers see research, strategy and UX as primary competencies (which I sort of agree they are) the only thing designers can do that PMs can’t is UI design.

As designers and engineers we’re great at spotting problems. When these problems are interface problems, we also have the ability to solve them. However when they are business, operational or organisational problems we generally pass these on to our managers out of a desire to be helpful.

A lot of people use the term “managing up” as a euphemism to describe “getting my manager to do what I think is right”.

In reality managing up should be more about helping your manager align their goals and the company goals with your capabilities and skill set. A lot of people think they need to be political (i.e. inauthentic and manipulative) in order to meet their own personal goals. Much better to collaboratively help other people achieve their goals (and ideally the company and team goals) through the services you provide.

What podcasts would you recommend to a designer / product manager wanting to feel more comfortable discussing "strategy"? I really like The Bottom Line from the BBC, as it touches on a different aspect of business each week. As such it can help you build up a better understanding of the environment in which strategy exists.

bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00…

Most people massively over complicate the concept of “strategy”. Ultimately a strategy is the general approach you are going to take in order to deliver your company mission/goals. Having a clear strategy is important as it allows people to decide between competing approaches, markets, customer segments, activities and product features.

If you work in an org with a research team, a product management team, a customer success team, a sales team, a marketing team and a growth team, is it any wonder that, as a designer, your role is primarily to design features somebody else has added to the backlog. I think a lot of designers have had their expectations set by models that come from the agency world, and frankly no longer hold water in most large companies.

Most people feel there are too many meetings.

However most people also hate the idea that they aren’t being included in important conversations and decisions. Inclusive work environments sounds great on paper. However in practice they result in managers feeling like they have to include many more people in each meeting than is strictly necessary to get a decision.

I have an Evernote folder with over 400 ideas for blog posts and tweet threads I’ve not found time to write (and probably never will”. As an experiment I thought I’d feed the poorly written notes into ChatGPT to see what came out. The results are actually rather good. 1/8: In the early days of UberEats, the team had a strong bias towards speed. They believed that fast delivery was key to success, just like their ride share model.

In 1911 Scott & Amundsen were in a race to the South Pole. Scott's team was larger, better funded and had a ton more technology, yet Amundsen's smaller team won. Why is that? I think there are two reasons and they tell us a lot about modern startups. The first reason is that Scott's team was over funded. This allowed them to have a much larger team, which required a lot more support. They had to lug too much equipment and too much food with them, almost sinking their boat.

A lot of my coaching clients come to me because they feel stuck and don’t know what to do next. This is often because they got to where they are by pursuing the opportunities that came their way, rather than by having a goal or vision they were following. As a result they find themselves somewhere comfortable but unexpected, and struggle to judge between the range of opportunities presented to them. The best way round this is to have some sort of vision for where you’re heading.

Second from last coaching session of the year. Helped 28 Heads, Directors and VPs of Product and Design in 2022, doing 200+ hours of coaching. Have also been supporting 24 early stage start-up founders. 18 via Seedcamp and 6 privately.

A lot of managers believe that their primary job is to fix the gripes of their team members. Often because they got into management in order to fix what they thought was broken. This often leads to managers loading themselves up with a bunch of problems they sadly don’t have the political influence or power to solve. This ends up pitting them against their org in a confrontational way that damages their standing further.

"Hard" martial arts tend to focus on directing your force at an opponent, while "soft" martial arts focus on directing the opponents force back on them.

I think a lot of the time designers use "hard" techniques to get their way, while a "soft" approach might be more effective. This is because designers rarely have the most power or force in a particular relationship, so are unlikely to win using this approach, and the risk of failure is pretty high.

Really nice, humble article from @JamesDLamming on some of the reasons why @JoinFurrow, his online farmers market, struggled to gain traction.

jameslamming.substack.com/p/furrow-why-w… You see plenty of articles from successful entrepreneurs claiming all sorts of reasons for their success. I remember one such article claiming that having a CEO in Chicago and a CTO in the Nordics was a major part of their success #survivorbias

The world is full of middle managers who are sufficiently far away from doing things that they forget how hard it is, but have an eye for detail and will happily pick you up on the smallest thing. This is usually because when you’re doing a project you’re confronted with dozens of issue that need addressing, and will generally work through them in a systematic manner. With so many problems to tackle it’s easy to miss or deprioritise a few.

Product Managers have taken a huge chunk out of the design teams agency by framing insight gathering as “product discovery”. Product managers have taken research up stream and framed it as a value add to product development. They talk to users, understand their pain points, come up with potential solutions and then had these to design and engineering to implement.