Drew Bridewell breaks down design clarity: how teams align on projects, priorities, and outcomes. He covers five areas including quality standards, knowledge sharing, and communication, then walks through a simple exercise where you draw a circle with your name and teammates to map clarity across roles.
Foreign. Hey, what's up? We're gonna dive into a training today and it's about design clarity. So you might be wondering, what is design clarity and how do I get it? How do I manifest it? How do I create it? Design clarity is about how you understand and visualize and see all the projects and priorities and the work objectives and the outcomes you're shooting for. What problems are you trying to solve? Design clarity is about helping the team understand how to learn more about those things. It also is important for you to have a space where you can bring people together and start learning about those things. For example, we have this thing called a Design Clarity Wednesday workshop. You can create anything that you want as far as any meeting or any topic. But think about what you bring to that meeting. What is everybody going to contribute to that meeting? So let me give you a quick, easy thing that you can do as you head into your next meeting or your next kind of collaboration session. Put yourself in this context for just one second. So the context is your designer, your creator, your maker, and you have a big project coming up for the next week. So what do you need to do to prepare for that project in this upcoming week? What plans do you have already ready to be able to explain what you're thinking, your process, and how you move through this project? Like, what's your plans look like? The second thing that I want you to think about is how you're going to show up with the creative things like creating craftsmanship. Whether you're an engineer, product manager, designer, whatever your role is, you have to think about what's the quality bar that we're shooting for, what's the craftsmanship level that we're being tackling? So that's number two. Number three is we have to think about the knowledge sharing abilities for the team. So how are we going to be sharing knowledge back and forth? We've got plans, we've got, we know how we're going to level up our craftsmanship for these things. But how are we going to share knowledge? How are we going to move through these things? So that's the third thing that you need to understand. The fourth thing that you need to understand when working with your teams building extra design priorities, you need to understand what your priorities are. So as a product designer, as an engineer, as a whoever, you have certain priorities for your projects that you're working on. So can you define those product priorities? Can you understand how you're going to interface those with your plans? Because your plans are going to constantly change or they're going to be constantly iterated on as you learn about the things that you're building and the things that you're working towards. So if you can do these four things, it's great. But this fifth one is the really where you get that multiplier effect. So really, the fifth one is just about understanding how you're going to communicate and collaborate with your team. So how do you communicate and collaborate with your team? Let's take that down to the really important next step. So when you're thinking about designing and collaborating with your team, there's a couple things that you have to start thinking about right out the gate. And every team has a different communication and collaboration workflow, or how they're going to work through things. So it's really important. Just understand your team. So if you're an individual contributor and you work with a product manager, an engineer, designer, whoever your roles are, draw a circle. Put your name inside that circle, and then draw all the other names of the team members that you work with on a weekly basis and put their names around the circle bin. Start thinking about the four things that I was just telling you about, plus communication and plus collaboration, which are five things. Bring all those things together and start thinking about each individual person on your team. How are you going to support them in their craftsmanship? How are you going to support them in their plans? How are you going to support them in their knowledge sharing? How are you going to support them, how their craftsmanship is going to be for the things that they're responsible for? So as you take all those things together, it's what we're going to do to create incredible design clarity. So it's a little exercise, takes a little bit of work. The multipliers and the things that it can really do for your team and company are tenfold. So go check that out and go give that a shot. This is your design clarity homework. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to build harmony and clarity across the things that we're designing and building. So whatever it is that you're doing this week or this upcoming month or this upcoming year, think about the people that are involved in projects, think about them, and think about how all the things that you need to do to be able to move these things forward, build that design clarity. There's so many different ways to do it. So get started by just answering some of these questions, and I think it's going to set you up for an ultimate success. Have a beautiful rest of your day. And I'll see you in the next one.
