If you’re a designer, especially mid to senior in your career, learning how your company works helps you build better experiences & have better discussions with x-functional teams.

Here are three teams you can schedule conversations with in January & some questions to ask! 🧵 1. Marketing, especially product and customer marketing.

You will likely be most successful by finding out the product marketing leader dedicated to your product area to start.

A few questions to ask:

If you’re a manager, there are few things that could super charge your career and help you build happier more engaged teams. They require some work though!

It’s the things that separate great managers from good ones (not a conclusive list). 🧵⬇️ 1 / Listening:

If you’re used to being listened to, it’s time to switch that up.

Much of management is about your ability to listen, ask good questions, and provide clear direction.

If you’re not carefully listening, you’re not truly helping.

Startups often struggle with hiring their first designer.

Designers often struggle defining their role in a startup.

More startups are realizing that a designer as an early employee is an advantage.

Here are ways startups & designers can think about this challenge. 🧵 1 / Having a designer as an early employee isn’t just an advantage on the user experience side of the product, it’s an advantage to the culture of the company you’ll build.

Designers bring a user-centered approach to problem solving that balances the engineering-centered view.

A thread of my most popular threads 🧵: On the presentation format to follow when presenting to your leadership team trying to convince them to make a call or decision.

https://twitter.com/jaffoneh/status/1376945166771056641?s=21&t=5XXsGXI5sHs5nekPHooSrw

Design leaders who want to improve visual design in products should spend as much time advocating for better UI eng practices as they spend focusing on practices within their team.

Here are questions you can ask to diagnose & fix any gaps to shipping high quality UIs: 🧵⬇️ 1 / Are you designing high quality interfaces?

High quality doesn’t just mean visually appealing. It means UIs that are possible to implement from where you are today & within the constraints you may have.

This is the easiest part to fix, it’s fully in your control with design.

Most designers look at their manager to provide coaching, direction, and clarification.

Most companies, however, don’t equip or train managers to effectively do that.

As a manager, your team is looking at you for coaching and clarity in five key areas.

🧵⬇️ 1 / What are your expectations of them and their role?

This is not just about their level, although that’s important, it’s about your continued expectations of them and your overall evolving expectations of the projects they’re working on.

Few visual design tips and tricks that are always in the back of my mind when thinking through a user interface.

By no means a conclusive list.

Short thread 🧵 Tip #1: on where to place buttons.

The F-pattern is a natural way to go through content in an unconstrained container, such as a form on the page itself. The user will go through the content line-by-line, arriving at a call to action at the end.

How do you decide what’s the right next role for you?

Framework I find helpful:

If you had $10 to spend on your next career choice and you can spend them in $1 increments, how would you do it?

There are four core categories: compensation, work, feeling about work, & people. 🧵 1 / Compensation: if you spend no dollars on this category, you’re not being honest with yourself.

Do you care about total comp? Total chance of making $ X in Y years? Cash up front to cover a big purchase? Cash home to cover expenses?

Not every conversation with a customer or a user is user research.

Asking users what they want or what problems to solve vs. having skills to understand that is different.

Here are a few phrases & situations that might seem like doing user research but they’re likely not 🧵 1 / “We talked to five customers and they love it”.

Do they represent the right customer segment targeted for this experience? Did you ask if they love it or did you get the problem they’re trying to solve first? Did you show the right personas or execs at that company?

The shift to a subscription revenue model is changing how B2B companies think about UX.

This shift, alongside the shift to SaaS, are critical for design leaders to understand & use to help drive focus on UX in these companies.

So what can design leaders know and do?🧵 1 / Successful design leaders are the ones focused on how design can contribute to and better facilitate the continued delivery of better customer and business outcomes.

Many orgs are hiring their first-ever design leaders.

There are more VPs & execs leading design than ever before.

The more I chat with leaders across the industry, the more a specific question comes up: what is the difference between a VP of Design & a VP of “anything else”. 🧵 1 / It’s difficult to differentiate a role vs. all other roles in the industry so I am going to focus on roles these leaders need to interact with frequently. Namely, the difference of a VP of Design to a VP of Product Management, Engineering, and Product Marketing.

There is so much about moving into management that’s learned on the job.

If you’re a new manager or thinking about management as a career choice, here are 11 things I wish I learned earlier in my career (in no particular order)! 🧵 1. Recognize that your job has changed. You are no longer an individual contributor. Let that sink in.

This sounds simple. However, when the players are the same, it’s sometimes easy to assume so is the board game. The board has changed!

I wish I learned earlier, especially as a designer, the number of diff roles involved in building, marketing, selling, & making products useful to customers.

If you’re a designer/PM early in your career, here are diff roles within your org you should learn from next year. 🧵 1/ Who’s the Product Marketing specialist positioning your product?

Here are some topics of discussion:
- Buyer personas they’re considering.
- Market research they’re looking at.
- Why is your product positioned externally this way?

Analogies are super useful in making a complicated subjects relatable and beginning familiarity to a discussion.

We don’t use analogies enough. We should use them more.

Here are 8 of my favorite analogies in product development. 🧵 On good user onboarding followed by bad user experience:

“It’s like we pick our customers up in a limo then drop them off in a dark ally to fend for themselves”

H/t @merwanhade for sharing this one.

Growing a team & recruiting can be difficult & time consuming.

I learned a lot growing teams by hundreds of people over the last few years.

Here are a few learnings on how to make recruiting talent and growing teams better for you, your team, and candidates. 🧵 Recruiters are your best friend.

A good recruiter finds good candidates, a great recruiter can help understand and refine the profile of candidates you’re looking for, help with initial screening, and even help you better understand the market.

mynameisjehad.com/scaling-design…

I often see design teams, especially in enterprise, lacking solid user research programs.

They rely on the field, sales, & PM for user research.

Many designers spend zero hours with customers a week.

Here’s why it matters to build a user research program for all designers. 🧵 The #1 way for you to up-level your team is to help them live in the customer’s mind.

There is no shortcut to true empathy. You need designers to spend hours with customers every week to do this right.

It’s powerful for designers & has amazing impact on experiences they build.

Many designers ask: should I move into management?

A key question is: are you moving to management because of the frustrations of your existing role or true aspirations for a career in management?

Here are a few things to think about as you make your decision.

Short thread 🧵 Note: this is not a fully conclusive list of all the things you should be thinking about and every company is different. However, those are helpful initial threads to think through.

Over the last few years, I’ve learned a lot about accessibility & the role a11y plays in making better products for *all* users.

Here are four thoughts that shifted my mind on the importance of building accessible software hoping they shift your mindset on a11y too.

(Thread 🧵) (1) Accessibility is about building for all users, not specifically building for the disabled ones

Instead of thinking of a11y as an expensive process to enable a small percentage of users, you need to think of it as a reasonable expectation to *empower all of your users*.

If you’re presenting to your manager, leadership team, or an executive trying to convince them to make a call, I have a presentation format for you to follow.

It's battle tested so you get to avoid my earlier mistakes.

Here's a short summary

(Short Thread 🧵) (1/9) Start with the conclusion.

I used to think TED talk-like presentations that lead you to the conclusions are the way to go. Not in this case.

Be clear about why you’re there, what are you expecting from them, and what problem are you solving. That’s slide #1.

One of the best partners designers can have are *engineering architects*.

This might seem a bit counterintuitive but here is a bit more on why this is the case & how designers/design leaders can help transform user experience by partnering with engineering architects.

Thread 🧵 (2/ 15) Design architects have similar goals to many designers: solve complex problems by thinking through the use cases, build scalable systems, and ensure that these systems aren't necessarily always limited by today's tech (or that we can draw a line from here to there).

Design teams often ask for a metric that they could own, improve, and use as a way to demonstrate the value of design in a certain company.

In my experience, there isn’t a single metric but there are ways to evolve a set of metrics that show the value of design.

Short thread 🧵 First, how you measure the value of design depends on the maturity of the team.

Early on, as you build credibility, the most important metric is how your *internal* stakeholders view you. Especially engineering and PM leaders and teams.