Drew Bridewell argues that individual performance sets the pace for product and design teams. He identifies five gaps that slow teams down: lack of planning, weak communication tempo, insufficient collaborative problem-mapping, infrequent asynchronous updates, and unclear connection to purpose. He recommends rituals, clearer planning, frequent sharing, and inquiry-based work to fix them.
So how does individual performance affect speed to market? Well, if you think about, if you've ever played in a sports team or in an organization where you play with a lot of really good players, the quality of your output and the quality of your performance is a lot better because you're playing with A players, if you're playing with C and D players and people that haven't yet been in the industry, they haven't worked at the high performing teams, they are operating at a different tempo, they're operating at a different performance. It's the same thing if you watch Ronaldo and Messi play and their two teams or if you watch the warriors play with, you know, in the NBA finals and they're at the peak of their performance. So you want to perform at the highest level and create the tempo and learn how to what that looks like for communicating, for collaborating, for, for executing, for communication management, for planning management, for operational and design management, all the things that it takes to build really high functioning teams and organizations. We're going to talk about what that looks like and what that feels like and that energy because that will absolutely have a dramatic impact on your team, your impact and your personal impact as an individual contributor or if you're managing a team, how you're managing all of your players on the team because you want to raise up the bar of everybody in your organization. But it absolutely has a dramatic effect on how quickly you get things done, how quickly you make decisions, how quickly you solve problems, how quickly you can iterate on the things that you're already, you know, you have in flow and you're already working on so they dramatically affect it. And we'll go into a lot more detail, but I would love some questions, some deeper questions around this. But individual performance, absolutely. You got to set the tempo, you got to set the, the quality bar, you got to model the behavior, you got to model the communication behavior, you got to model the execution behavior, you got to model how you document things, how you communicate your things, how do you update your team on a weekly basis? Like what are the rituals and the routines that you have inside of your week that help set that tempo up so that you are moving, you're moving things forward versus just sitting on them and waiting for somebody to tell you or waiting for somebody to help move that needle? You got to move that needle. So we'll talk more about that in the session, but I hope you enjoyed this quick little chat about it. We've been going for like a couple minutes, but let's dive into the next question. Common gaps. Common gaps. Oh boy, common gaps. Well, first off, probably the biggest common gap is the gap of not having any, any consistent rituals, routines, habits as an individual contributor that are setting you up for weekly success. One of those would be like no plan. Like I mentioned earlier, like one of the biggest things I wish I would learn is planning. Because designers don't plan, they just start working on a thing because they have a timeline that's been given them. But planning is a big common gap that we see in high, in low performing teams. Another one would be communication tempo. And a lot of this time is designers are not sharing enough. Soon enough they're, they're kind of holding onto their ideas and their thoughts and their challenges versus communicating and facilitating the challenges with the group of people to help shepherd the information faster, quicker, smarter, together. Right? You want to be together when you're sharing these problems and challenges. The also the third probably common gap is this lack of speed on mapping out problems. Like you can map out a problem in like an hour with your team if you're together versus trying to like boil the ocean and do so much mapping work separately and not together. So bringing people together, getting on a whiteboard, writing out exactly what you're trying to do. Same thing with figma, same thing with figjam. Getting together or Freehand, whatever tool you like to use, getting together and mapping those things out is a huge, huge time saver. And I see that's a big common gap. I think another common gap is just communication excellence with frequent posts. You know, we work in an asynchronous world these days. So frequently posting inside of a Slack channel or another area of what you're doing, what you're working on. You know, you push two, three hour sprint into something and sharing it with your team so they can see what is you're doing, that's a really other. That's a huge other. Well, the opposite of that. Not doing that is a common gap where people aren't sharing their work. More like they're not sharing their work frequently enough. And I think those things dramatically have a impact on lower performing teams and lower performing individuals. And also the, the lack of ego or the, the lack of, not the lack of ego, but the, the ego that's getting in the way of like saying this is what I'm working on, this is my territory, this is what I'm doing. Versus looking at the bigger, the bigger experience, the bigger intention, the bigger purpose of what it is that you're trying to do. And connecting to that. And I often see a lot of designers not connecting to the true purpose or the true mission or the true, like, thing that they're trying to that true outcome of what they're trying to drive. So I would. I would encourage designers and creators and makers to really, when they're building something or when they're starting a new project, to really get super clear and just incredible amount of clarity on what it is, why it's important, what problem is it going to solve and what is the desired outcome? What does success look like? And knowing that every single time you start something new. And I think that's one of the big challenges. That younger designer just is going to take orders and they're just going to get things moving in the direction that they were told to. But they. They gotta understand the business impact, they gotta understand the design impact ahead of them, and they really need to understand the needs of their teammates. They're not asking those questions. They're not discovery in discovery mode. They're not in inquiry mode. They're in reaction mode. We wanna get out of reaction mode. We wanna get in to intentional mode. So that's it. That's it. Ben, I will see y' all live and we'll talk way more about this in the sessions. And I. I'm just really curious about some of the challenges that you're all facing. We can talk about this live in person. It's going to be so much fun. Y' all have a beautiful rest of your evening, your day, your morning, whenever you're checking this out, and we'll see you in the next one. All right, later.
