Design leaders need to advocate for their teams and their practice on a near-constant basis. My perspective on accomplishing this has really shifted in the last couple years. For a long time, I’ve talked about how close we are to our customers, push for aspirational levels of design quality, and execute a robust process. I …
Category Archives: Business and Strategy
Where would you begin with this team?
Let me know if you’ve worked on a project like this. Think of a product team that’s working on some kind of online platform, we’ll call them TechSite. Someone on the TechSite team, a leader of some kind, decides that an initiative is important and declares it a priority to launch a new product. The …
Managing risks beyond the product
Without risk, there is no opportunity. Any business, any organization–even any individual person–will face their own responsibility for identifying risks, assessing the probability and consequences, and managing the risk to the best possible outcome. Some people are better at it than others, and some firms are better at it than others. Designers can find themselves …
I’m going for an MBA
Well, here we go. Why would a designer get an MBA? Early in my design career, I was the only interaction designer at a burgeoning ecommerce startup. I found myself pushing pixels around my computer screen after hours in the latest of a string of late nights. I was in the process of transforming our …