Increase your UX Influence and Courage in Product and Design

I got to be on my A game for this. That's going to take a lot of influence. I need to build my confidence so I can reduce the uncertainty of what it's going to take to ship this experience to solve this certain problem and build towards a certain outcome. All right, so let's jump into this influence and courage. Like, let's build this right now. Let's do it together. Let's have some fun. So we're going to open up the doors and we're going to talk about the mission, right? To accelerate growth, foster clarity, and help you connect to your greater purpose through intentional design. Right on the right side. We always talk about, like, well, what are we trying to do here? We're trying to lead net new experiences, build remote teams, optimize approaches for business and design impact, digitization of critical business objectives, maintaining consistency and connectivity across larger portfolios, developing execution strategies so that you can work with product, business and design and engineering all in a very cohesive way. Right? All these things that we do as professionals and design product and just as makers, we do this, but how do we do this? How do we show up? You know, we talked about this in week one where we're saying, like, well, I want to, you know, what does success look like? How do you want to interact with other people and how do you identify? Like, what are you known for? I want to be consistent. I want to be passionate, I want to be enthusiastic. I just want to be caring for how I show up. So if I'm doing that, how can I also do it in an influential way? Well, I'm going to have to present things. I'm going to have to help engineering understand how things work. I'm going to have to navigate challenges and adapt to certain situations of business requirements and things that I didn't even expect were going to happen. I got to be on my A game for this. How am I going to do that? That's going to take a lot of influence. It's also going to take a lot of courage because I need to build my confidence and all the new things that we're building so I can reduce the uncertainty of what it's going to take to ship this product or to ship this experience to solve this certain problem and build towards a certain outcome. So that's what we're trying to do. So let's just talk about how to do it. Right? So first step of this is living an authentic, authentic life and connecting to your true inner self so you can reach this every single day. You need to be able to connect to your most authentic self. You want to feel a sense of just identity. Who are you and what does it mean to be in your shoes? And how do you want to show up? What do you believe in? What is your design stance or your product stance? And how do you want to show up? Right. Your inner authenticity, like, really connect to it. Then it's thinking about that intention, and that intention is manifested from the consistent reflection. Consistent reflection is like journaling, connecting to your thoughts, thinking about, how did the day go? How did the meeting go? How could I prepare for this certain meeting that's coming up? It's important to me, how could I show up for it? So intention is manifested from consistent reflection. Right? That consistent reflection leads you down the right path. No, reflection means everybody else is making the decisions for you. And you don't want that. You want to make your own decisions. Because consistent reflection increases intentionality. And we want intentionality as a creative, as a maker, as a designer, because we want to connect to empathy. We want to be empathetic to the people that we serve, to the team that we build with, to the product that we're trying to build. Like how intentional is it? Is it thought through? People really think through all those little details. Yes, they do. And we should always, always be striving for a higher level of intentionality in our life. And how do we do that? Well, it starts with this big six. The big six is a great starting point. If you need a quick refresher on this, go to week one and go through the homework. Right? Understand what your purpose is. Understand what your critical kryptonite is. Understand what your priorities are. Understand how you identify, right? Who are you and what's your legacy, your interactions? How do you want to interact with other people? And then what success looks like? Success for meetings, success for your month, success for your year, success for your career, success for your job. It could be success for anything. Just define it and start with that reflection. Believe in you. I know you can do this. But that's the first thing that you can do to drive really true influence and courage into your soul, into your life. The second thing we need to do is we still need goals. We still need a marker in the sand that's going to help us understand, like, what is our passion goals, what are our project goals, what are career goals, what are our personal goals? Got to define these things, get super, super focused and take responsibility for what these things are. Like you just taking a little bit of time to understand what these Things are every single month. Yes, every single month. New goals, new priorities, new things coming in. So you got to recalibrate and reshift around. So we're going to get you to that point. Third thing that you need is those rocks, right? Like I was just saying, you got your goals, but now what happens with these goals? Which ones are going to get your time and effort? You know, we talked about time and effort, commitment and confidence. Which buckets, which colors are going to get your time and effort? Because your time is money, your time is valuable. Your time is something you're not going to get back. So spend it wisely. All right, Hope you're enjoying this conversation so far. So now what I want to do is switch into confidence, connection. How do we build confidence? How do we connect to it? Right. We do it through our daily, weekly, monthly. Rhythm. Right? When I talk about rhythm, I've talked about rhythm for the last seven or eight months. Rhythm is how you flow throughout the week. You're not a cog, you're not a robot, you're a human. And humans have needs. And how do you flow with your need? How are you gonna surf the wave? How are you gonna mountain bike down the hill? What's your flow? And now is a great time to. To get a refresher on how we do this. So this is gonna also help you with building your influence encouraged. So let's do it. All right, so remember, the rhythm is not just for, like, all the things you've gotta do, but it's like how you show up, like the energy that you bring into the session or into the meeting or into anything. And it's not only that, but it's also during these big moments. These big moments, like, feel feedback. Something that I think is something that's not talked about enough in the industry. But feedback is one of the most important things that you'll need to set up inside of your core systems. How do you get feedback? How do you give feedback? How do you get feedback across the entire company? Right? When you think about the builders and the engineers, the designers and the creatives, the product thinking and development that's happening, the leadership in the business, all the teams, you know, the 50 or so people that make up the core essence of what a company needs to do. And then you have a lot of individual contributors across the company that do a lot of other things, but you've got core builders and engineers thinking through things. They need context, they need maps, they need designs, they need time to reflect, they need time to give you Feedback. They need to be prepared so that they can build and work with designers and creatives in a meaningful way. So what do designers need? Designers need to know what the business needs. They need to know what problem they're trying to solve. They need to understand the responsibilities and the actual talent that they have to work with. They need to know how long things take. They need to understand the pacing and the respectfulness of what engineers really, truly need. And then you got the product thinking, which is like, you know, you're thinking about how something should work in the product, you're developing those ideas, you're fleshing things out, but you're also working with designers and builders and leadership and everybody else to be able to make it happen. Right? So the product thinking and development is kind of like, you know, a product manager's role and discipline. And down at the bottom left, when we're thinking about business, that's like CEOs, the finance team, operations, like how do things work in the business, making sure that all of these have a really good growth loop. They all have a really good figure 8 of connectivity and how they all interact together so really quickly. When you think about feedback, you know, it's always going to be about context. What's the context of the feedback? What type of feedback are you looking for? Where's the location? Is it early or is it final stages? Where are you at in the timeline of the life cycle of the development? And what kind of a type of advancement are you looking for? Like, are you trying to just get a little bit of information so you can push it forward a lot faster, or you just want a little, little feedback about, you know, the visuals or the interaction design or it could be open ended, but you really don't want to be open ended. You want to really get to the point of what you're trying to do or else you'll just turn, turn, turn, turn, turn. But you want to get through these things very, very quickly. So you have good, solid, weekly advancements. Then you have the progress of the teams, you have the values of the teams, you have the principles of the teams. And then each of the teams understands that they're advancing certain things forward. So when you think about feedback, you think about the needs of all the people and what they need. That's going to help you have a lot more influence because you're preparing for the situations. People will trust you, they'll build confidence because you, you're bringing to the table the most important things that they are gonna need to make decisions. So, so Critical. And then, right then they have success metrics, you have needs, success metrics, and you're just getting it done. So it's one example. Another example is the growth loop, right? I showed this earlier as well, from when we were talking about design, productivity and being very efficient with your days, thinking about how you reflect, learn, train and take action. These top four things are the things that you're gonna do every single week in your career, right? You got to reflect and see how things are going so you can course correct. You got to learn so you can continuously grow. You just don't want to learn one thing and be done for the rest of your career. You won't advance, you'll just be stagnated. And you don't want to be stagnating in this career because you won't enjoy what you do. So we want to align all those things. Then we're going to train, right? How are we going to get better at this stuff? We're going to take action. So this is my growth loop and I want to encourage you to define and make your own growth loop so that you can get a little sharper, get a little bit more intentionality in your path so that you can start building up more influence, more courage for how you get things done. Right? All these things together create that courage. And this is another really important part. This other aspect of this is like, kind of like the life cycle development process of our roles and our responsibilities. We have the business, we have the engineering, the design, product, content, marketing teams, right? Then we have our processes. Now each one of these teams is gonna have these different levels of process. They're gonna have plans. The business and engineering, marketing content are gonna have plans. Now they'll have bigger themes and goals as a company. However, they are gonna have individual plans for how they manage their teams and get things done. The craftsmanship is also something that is, you know, a global need for a company. We have knowledge transfer, collaboration, communication, all these things. So, right, if we're thinking about how we need to plan and what the needs are for each of our stakeholders, then we can be better prepared to have a little bit more influence when we go to those meetings and set those things up. So you know what you need to do and you know what everybody else is responsible for. This is a really good way to kind of zoom out and look about like, do I know how to best collaborate and knowledge share and collaborate with all these disciplines? And if you don't, this is a great time to start thinking about how you currently do it in your company or how you could actually, you know, work towards learning more about these things so that you can be more prepared. More preparation leads to more confidence. More confidence leads to more influence.