12 Pillars of Growth in Product and Design

Do you want to grow in your product and design abilities this year? Do you want to get into a career of user experience design, or even just into technology? And you want to build products and services for your career, and you want to sustain growth over the long term, and you don't want to burn out, but you also want to be able to sustain happiness and joy and creativity along the entire journey. Well, today I wanted to give you 12 core pillars of growth in product and design, and we're going to get started right this second. Let's go. All right, so the first thing that I wanted to share with you is sustained growth over the long term is not about working harder. It's about working smarter. So when we dive into these 12 categories, I want to remind you that these are about practicing these 12 categories. And there's probably going to be more categories if you were to go ask somebody else. But these are the top 12 categories of focus that I would recommend. If you're going to be jumping into product design and you're going to be trying to focus on, like, what do I focus on first? Because there's so many different abilities and services and skills that you can build in your practice as a product designer, as a product maker. But where do you say? Where do you focus? And today I wanted to share those with you. So, number one, let's just dive right into it. Number one is clarity. What is clarity? Well, it's the ability to have an understanding and awareness of the most important things in your life, the most important things for yourself. How do you identify? And when I say how do you identify? I mean how do you truly understand who you are and how you want to show up and what that feels like? How do you interact with other people? And also, what does success look like for you? I think it's just about understanding clarity, and that's something that you'll come back to every single week, every single month, every single year as a product designer. So I want to encourage you to start thinking about what clarity means to you, and then how can you practice building clarity on a consistent, consistent basis every single week? All right, cool. Clarity is number one. Number two is goals. As a product maker and as a product thinker, you are going to be consistently having goals being thrown at you left and right. You know, from your team goals, from your project goals, from your personal goals, from a career goal to your passion goals to your project goals. You have a lot of different goals. And it's really important to know how you intake and execute your goals consistently. Now I think goals are really core to the growth, to a growth mindset and being able to set goals so you have something to shoot for, so you have some ambition to go and jump into some something that you're really passionate about. Goals are important, so you got to be able to master and understand how to write goals, but you got to understand how to execute in an accomplish goals. So that's number two. All right. Number three, pillar of growth is action planning. Action planning is one of those things that a lot of people take for granted because taking a plan and be able to execute a plan is not that simple. It is hard to do. And as a product maker, as a product thinker, you got to be able to, you know, come up with a plan, share with your team, collaborate with your team on that plan. Whether it's your personal plan or it's your team plan, you got to be able to plan exceptionally well and you got to be able to break down the big rocks into smaller rocks into smaller action items. And that's what action planning is. And I think that's one of the core things that you need literally on a daily basis to be able to execute your weekly milestones, to be able to execute your weekly monthly goals. So action planning is number three. Number four is you got to be able to practice, practice, practice, practice. Number four is practice. Like when you go through your clarity sessions, your goal sessions, your action planning, this is like, you know, happening on a weekly basis. And you might be doing this already naturally a creator as a maker in any of your disciplines, any of your roles. But when you think about how you show up every week to practice and get a little bit better, 1% better, week over week over week, that's going to be really important. You also need to know when you're going to be practicing. You need to know what you're going to be learning and what you're going to be growing in. And then you can start building a growth loop where you can reflect and you can plan and take action, then you can learn and then you can go back and do some practice again. And then you get better, better and better. You know, this is a similar thing in sports, what we call like muscle memory. You want to practice how you're going to play and you want to be able to practice, practice, practice as a, as a consistent practice in your life. So that's number four, and that's training map number one. For my program, next level ux, we're going to go to training map number two, which is number Five of this list. So number five of the list is design energy. So why do I need design energy as a creative, as a maker, as a product professional? Well, design energy is the ability for you to stay in flow, for you to get into flow if you've never been in the flow. Flow is that state of mind where you actually can produce so much more work. You can actually not just produce more work, but better work because you're you, you can get into that zone, that creative spirit. And you need those two to three hour windows to be able to do that. But design energy is also being aware of, of all the roles, responsibilities within your team so that you know what it is that you need to show up for and what those expectations are and then dialing in your effectiveness across yourself. So when is, when are you most effective? During the day understanding that, but also understanding like, okay, how am I going to get motivated about what I need to design? How am I going to sustain that motivation throughout my entire project or my entire life cycle of my career? You gotta be able to sustain energy. And there's also ways to get that physical energy with healthy eating, healthy mindset, working out, really practicing healthy relationships. Design energy is something that kind of flows throughout your entire self. This is about you and performance, like how you show up. All right, that's number five. Number six is design clarity. This is something that design clarity helps you with, work through projects really clearly and helps you understand what it is that you need to build and why is it important. And then how are you going to unite the entire organization, the entire team, yourself, into executing this work in a proficient way and executing this in an excellent way? What does that look like? Well, design clarity is how you set your team up for success with rituals, routines and habits. And those sorts of elements will help you build in a cohesive way. So you can have a little bit of design clarity around what it is you're executing. I like to think that when I'm working with product designers and engineers and product makers, if you can increase your design clarity within the whole entire team, then they know what they're working on, they know why it's important, and they know how they're going to execute it on a continuous basis. Pretty cool stuff. If you're a product, if you're a product manager or even an engineer, you could be like engineering clarity, that's totally fine. Engineering clarity or product clarity, it's going to help you know what it is you're building, why it's important, and then be able to see how it connects to the overall business goals, the outcomes impact. Okay, that's really important. The next one right after that is number seven is design productivity. So we have design energy, we have design clarity. Now we have design productivity. Design productivity is really understanding how you can optimize your systems. Like we start learning about what systems, rituals, routines and habits. But productivity is about learning those systems, mastering those systems so that you are doing the highest priority work. You are showing up and you're optimizing the. The path of how you close the gap in the uncertainty of what it is that you're building. So design productivity, you know, it could be literally using the same tool versus using three or four different tools for something. It could be how you optimize your meeting schedule because you have a lot of choppy meetings throughout the week. How can you simplify it so you have more block time to do the work? Design productivity could also be making sure you're more effective and efficient with your tools so that you can perform a little bit better and put more time into thinking and less time into how do I move this mouse? Where do I need to go? Like, just the other things that don't actually add too much value. So design productivity is another major thing that you can practice in your career that's also going to lead to way more growth and way more just overall happiness because you're focused on the right things, not on things that just, you know, cause you a lot of time. Cost you time. All right, the next one number, let's just see. This is number eight. And this is design impact. Design impact is really important because you want to be able to measure and benchmark success inside your companies, inside your projects, inside your teams. You got to be able to understand the things that you're doing and how they lead to an actual impact. So you got to be able to benchmark things. You got to be able to learn how to. Oh, yeah, this is where we're currently at. This is where we want to go. How do you bridge the gap? How do you test? How do you learn? How do you benchmark? How do you start working towards those goals? Design impact is about understanding all the things that you do as a product designer, all the things you do as a product manager, all the things you do as an engineering leader. What are the things that are going to stack up to get you that impact that you need in your organization? Design impact, it could be building design systems, it could be implementing new processes and team and practices that are going to help your team be more efficient. And effective. So saving time it could be in that also ties back in the design productivity, the things you do in design productivity, the things you do in design clarity, the things you do in design energy are going to impact the design impact or the overall impact of what you have inside your business. So you want to be able to move those things and benchmark where you're currently, like how you're performing, how your products performing and benchmark those things. And these are typically, they could be considered okrs, objectives and key results. How are you measuring things and how are you working towards the bigger. The bigger picture. Right. Design impact. All right, now we're going to shift into the next one, which is one that I think is one of the things that brings you back to when we're talking about clarity in the beginning, like who you are, how you identify what success looks like. After you've been able to work through and establish yourself in your career or even just getting started, you start to learn about what areas of the business or what areas of the industry you want to focus on, where you want to work. And that, my friends, is purpose. Purpose is so important because once you can understand your purpose, then you can actually put a lot more energy and soul behind what you're doing and why you're doing it. I strongly believe that purpose is one of those things that helps you get up in the morning and it helps you give, get excited, helps you, it helps motivate you. So finding your purpose can be a journey, but it is a journey that we all are on. And understanding how to get there is just about finding clarity, about building goals and figuring out what you like and what you don't like and why, and having conversations about it. And finding your purpose is such a key thing. The next thing is something that you will do every single week, every single month and every single year of your career as a product maker, as an engineer, as just as a maker. And that, my friends, is influence and courage. You're going to need to build influence because you're going to be sharing things. You're going to be able to like, have the ability to build up courage to share your work and not feel like even if you're going to get. Even if it's not going to be the best presentation of your life, you got to have the courage to show your work, get the draft out there, get people to see it, and you're going to do this every single week. You're sharing your code reviews, you're sharing your design reviews, you're sharing the Work that you need to do and to your customers. You're always going to be presenting things, you're always going to be showing what you've done. And that takes a lot of courage. And the influence comes the more you do it, the more knowledge that you can share with your team, the more experience that you can share back to the people that you teach, the people that you coach, the people that you love, the people you know, that's, that's, you're building influence with all of them. And that takes building confidence, that takes building prep, you know, preparing for the moment. And influence encourages just one of those things that you got to keep practicing, get better and better and better. And it also makes and helps you perform and take more bold actions because you have courage to take bigger leaps and have more encouragement to go do those things. All right, the next one, let's go. Is tools, people and tactics. Understanding your tools, understanding your people and understanding the tactics you need to use to be more effective and efficient inside those organizations. So a lot of people don't really think of the tools and the people together, but the thing is the people that you work with need to engage with these tools. And you've got to understand like, okay, what are the norms for our team and how are we going to be working inside these tools? So if you're just starting a new company and you're just starting a new team or you're kick starting something, think about how you all, how you all in your team can know what tools we're going to be used to do this and then what people are going to be involved and what their responsibilities are inside of that work and then also what tactics you're going to use. Like you're going to do weekly stand ups or daily standups, you're going to do weekly rituals where you show off some work. It's to going, going to be every Wednesday or it's going to be every Tuesday, or you're going to use email for this and you're going to use Slack for that and figuring it out and understanding your tools, people and tactics. Because believe it or not, a lot of people will use multiple tools and it will slow down so much your effectiveness across the board. If you're working with a bunch of agencies and everybody's using different, you know, Photoshop and Illustrator and then Figma and then Vision, you have fragmentation. And if you have fragmentation that it really affects your growth and it really affects how fast you can get things done. So tools, people and tactics is a really important element of growth. The last one that I want to give you today, and this one is something that you will also come back to every single day, every week, every month. And that, my friends, is reflection. Reflection, the ability to reflect and learn how to self regulate, learn how to manage your emotions, learn how to journal and learn how to reflect back what you're seeing, what you're feeling, what you're hearing, what you're learning, what you're growing in and being able to write it down and document it so that when you come back to it, you are not just boiled up or you don't have a whole giant amount of emotion just sitting in your gut. You don't want that. You want to be able to release a lot of that tension. You want to be able to release a lot of the things you're learning and growing in so that when you take the things that you're learning and you can keep building on it, Building on it, building on it, building on it, building on it. So reflection is one of those things. So I'm going to go through the 12 one more time really quick. So if you were taking notes along this, these are the top 12. All right, the top 12 pillars of growth. We have clarity, goals, action, planning, practice, design, energy, design, clarity, design, productivity, design impact, last for purpose, influence and courage, tools, people and tactics, and reflection. And those are your top 12 pillars of growth in product and design. Those are so critical. You can practice these things over and over and over. They're never going to get old because these are things that literally make up the entire, your entire consistent life cycle of a product or designer. You're going to be doing these things over and over and over. So it's about learning these systems, learning these practices so that you can get better at least 1% every single week. And if you want to practice more and you want to get better at these sort of things, you can visit next level UX me to learn more about this and you can sign up for a whole full year of training with me and you can get these things. And really where I go down, I go deep into each one of these categories and have decks and presentations and homework and just assessments and things to help you practice these things. Because these are the things that we're going to be doing every single day, every single week, every single month of our design career. And it's. There's always going to be another level. There's always going to be another level. So take your time, have some, give yourself some grace, and have yourself a beautiful rest of your day and go crush it out there and let me know if you have any questions in the comments. Please subscribe if you haven't yet done so, and I will see y' all in the next one. Have a beautiful rest of your day, and we'll see you later. All right, See you.