Drew Bridewell outlines seven focus areas for design clarity: set goals and vision, rally your team with champions and visible visuals, ground priorities with timelines and KPIs. He stresses team norms, feedback loops, and meeting debriefs, plus personal basics like sleep and exercise to sustain creative energy.
At beginning of the project, you're setting expectations that goals, missions, vision, and why, like, you know, you're just setting expectations. You know what it is you're doing. For each of these individual projects, you're needing to generate excitement and inspiration, like, okay, we're doing this and get the team rallied. You know, you might have somebody on your team that, that is kind of champion the project. You know, think about how you can support that person or that could be your, that could be you. But oftentimes there's, there needs to be some sort of motivating factor to help increase your energy. And if you feel like you lack of energy, like physically and mentally, that might mean like some very basic things. Like you gotta get more sleep, you gotta eat better, you gotta eat more whole foods, more greens. Like it, you know, might sound like, oh, of course I need to do that. It doesn't mean you're doing it. Drinking more water, exercising, walking, getting sunlight, getting vitamin D. Those things all help with your energy. So it's not just about design, it's about designing outside of the screen. Design your life outside the screen. Right? So important. Understand your timelines, KPIs, OKRs, business tasks, these are again, knowing if you know what these things are, it helps inform your priorities. If you don't know when your timelines are, if you don't know what your KPIs are, if you don't like OKRs like your, your goals, your, your quarterly goals, or how the business is doing, it's hard to know what your priorities are going to right. So continually ask for your priorities. Even for my team, I'm trying to constantly share things that are happening in the business, priorities for the business, so that my individual like I season leads can actually go and set their own priorities for their work. We have a very small team, so we've had to take a lot more ownership and responsibility for execution. I encourage these things pretty frequently. And then we have a team visuals that help with expressing these things and showing these things off. What do we know and what do we need to learn are always really good questions that you can ask. You need to understand your team norms, like your rituals, routines, your rhythms of the team. You need to understand their product, touch points, feedback, culture, retrospectives, like when are these things happening? How are you giving feedback after a meeting happens that you know, it's a pretty big meeting. Debrief that meeting. Understand with your team. How could it have been better? What kind of feedback do you have? Give your team some feedback immediately, directly after the session and asking questions and gaining clarity. Right? If you're unclear about your priorities, if you're unclear about how to be more efficient, start asking the more difficult questions, like why? And really break it down. Do some reflection. Sam Ra.
