Influence and Courage in Product and Design

Let's think about. You want to have more influence in the world. You want to get people to really follow your mission, your vision, your ideas, your designs, your product direction. But think about, well, what about you? You still need to prepare, you still need to be incongruent with what you need to do so that you can show up better for those. Mom. Alright, so let's get into the weeds here. We're talking about influence and courage, right? Authenticity, preparation, confidence. So what does that mean? Actually, let's just like dive into it. I want you to remember that our mission here is to accelerate your growth, foster clarity, help connect the makers of the world through a greater purpose through intentional design. Right? We're trying to be more intentional with how we approach design and also how we approach this problem solving and setting up things and getting going and over on the far. Right, right. Remember, we're trying to lead net new teams, we're trying to build remote environments, we're trying to help digitize and optimize business processes and things that can drive more business impact. And you know, the list goes on in here. But remember, like all through all of these big giant needle moving activities here on the right, we need to show up with influence and we need to show up encouraged. So what are the things that we can do to show up more influential? Right. Being prepared, understanding the context of where you're at, but where you need to go. And really just working all those things into your weekly rhythms, right? Your weekly rhythms for your growth loop. Your weekly rhythms for how you maneuver through things on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Right? Your rituals and routines. And then we're going to start talking about habits and the habits that you form as a product designer, as a product maker, so that you can show up more courageous and show up with more influence. So we're talking about that today. So let's just keep going. So what does this mean? Living with authenticity is letting your true inner self reach the surface every day. What does that mean? To reach the surface every day with your true inner self? So when you go up and you wake up in the morning or you go to bed at night, what is something that you think about that warms your heart or what is something that makes you remember? Like today, Today I got outside. I got to do what I love to do. I got to connect to my dream. I got to connect to my family, I got to connect to my loved one. I got to connect to a project that means something to me. Like how do you connect to your authenticity? Is it through art? Is it through writing? Is it through journaling? What I want to encourage you to do today is think about what that is for you and how are you doing it. Are you doing it in the morning? Are you doing it in the evening? For me, I. I journal throughout the day after meetings. I journal throughout the day after when I'm trying to set intention for an event or something that I need to do. And I like to consistently have, for example, growth day open so that I can be journaling throughout the day about meaningful things. It helps me flesh out ideas, it helps me flesh out my feelings and my emotions so I can stay balanced and ready to go and ready to act and ready to get after it every single, single day. Alright, so another part of this is that intention is manifested, like created from consistent reflection. So I was just referring to journaling. But it doesn't have to be journaling. It could be writing on piece of paper, it could be taking a piece of paper and writing out your three intentions for the day or your top three priorities. And it's like, what do I want to do? How do I want to show up for those moments? And if I'm going to do that, what are the counterparts or what are my peers going to need from me to help advance that session? And if I can prepare those moments, if I can anticipate those questions, then I can have more influence when I show up, because I can show up with a detailed list of what it is that we need to talk about, what it is we need to do. And I can build influence that way. Now, if your role isn't a lead role, you can still have influence by how you prepare and how you support the leads in the group or in the call or in the team. You can also be able to be a support system for them. Now the intention right from that consistent reflection that you need that intention builder, think about how you can do that. You can go to your journal or you can go to a notepad and just write out top three things that you need to do for the day. Or maybe it be for that meeting or it could be for a lot of other things. But the key here is to reflect and to build that into your DNA, to build that into your weekly, your daily, weekly and monthly rituals. And that's gonna be really key for you. Alright? So let's keep going. So consistent reflection increases intentionality. Let me say it again. Consistent reflection increases intentionality. What does it mean to be intentional? It means being really incredibly thoughtful about what you're doing, about what you're designing about the interactions that you're having and about like the intention you're putting out there for your team. So this consistent reflection allows you to be congruent and to recalibrate when you might be off track or if you're trying to get super aligned on one thing or the other. Like this is going to be incredibly important part for you to build influence and build courage. Is that consistent reflection. Alright, so how do you do this? I'm going to drop down. We've gone through this for the last couple months, but we really need to build clarity. So I was talking about that big six going back and answering these questions and understanding what your big purpose is, your big why's your kryptonite. You know, the thoughts, feelings and habits are standing in your way. You know, the priorities, what's most important, the identity, who are you and what is the legacy you want to leave? The interactions that you have, what, how do you want to show up and inter gage with people? Do you want to be like low energy or do you want to be like straight up ready to go focused, aligned and ready to have a huge contribution to your team, to yourself, to your days, to your life. You can advance so much more by just having these questions answered and knowing and connecting to them every day. And then of course, like what does success look like for you? What does it look like for your projects, what does it look like for your future? And really nailing and dialing those things in. We're also going to be building clarity by having a very clear idea of what our goals are, project goals, our career goals, our personal goals, our career goals, right? Career passion, project. All of these things are so critical. And those actually like having the clarity plus the goals mixed together, you can really start building an idea of what it is that you're going to be accomplishing, right? And that is preparation. That is preparing for your future and preparing for the current moment so that you can show up in a greater light. And that's high performance design, that's high performance product management, right? And then taking those things and just continuously preparing for the things that you're, you know, the big rocks that you have in front of you and knowing what those are, knowing how they all interconnect and play. And the big key thing about being a product designer or product maker is about connecting those dots, connecting those experiences so that you can bridge the gap for your consumers, or you can bridge the gap for your enterprise customers, or you can bridge the gap for the solutions that you're trying to build inside the product. This is what we do. And this is building clarity, right? That clarity leads to preparation, that preparation leads to influence. That preparation also can counteract with courage. It's helping you form higher level of preparation then that confidence connection. Well, what is the confidence connection? Well, that confidence connection is what your daily, weekly and monthly rhythms are. So if you don't have checkpoints inside your day or inside the moments, inside your experiences, how are you going to really know? How are you going to really know how you're doing? So what I want to encourage you to do is use the next couple of things that I'm going to show you to start building that daily, weekly and monthly rhythm. All right, let's do it. All right. So for how you show up, right, that daily, weekly, monthly rhythm, we're going to do this during our feedback sessions is one example. So what you're seeing here is kind of like an overview map. So I want you to think about as a product designer, as a maker, as a professional in the field. We have builders and engineers, we have designers and creatives, we have leadership in business, we have product thinking and development. All these things that are constantly getting feedback. I mean constantly, like they need to get feedback so that they can be advanced, so that maturity of these, of these moments can be advanced. What does it mean to raise the maturity of something? It means having way higher intentionality as far as how things get done, how they are prepared, how they're executed, and how you're measuring success. Right? Raising maturity across your organization about how you do all these things. Things, right? By setting clear context, by understanding the type of feedback that you're looking for, by understanding the location and where at in the project. It is. Is it at the beginning of the project life cycle or is it ready to get shipped? Like today we have a big release happening. So our types of reviews are a little bit different than they were, you know, a couple months ago. Then we're analyzing the progress. We're analyzing and bringing together our values. We're understanding and bringing principles into the equation so that we can advance, we can advance the project in a meaningful light with high intention, with high level of purpose, just like we came off of last month. Purpose, right? And now we're going to build it in an authentic way. We're going to build it and be prepared and we're going to do it with a high level of confidence. Right? So all these things, right? We need to think about the needs for each of these people. So if we Think about the needs for our builders and engineers. What do they need to make better decisions? Well, they need UX diagram maps, they need design logic maps that break things down. They need time to review this with product engineering and design together. They need prototypes, they need examples, they need ideas and where it's currently at and where it needs to go six months a year, two year, three year down the road. They need to know high level what that is. And so the designer would be able to help fill that need for the builders and engineers. And on the counteract, the builders and engineers need to be able to support the designers and creatives with giving that feedback. Right? How does something work? How could it be simplified? How could you work on it together? And then we go down to product thinking and development. That's really for product design, content strategy, you know, business stakeholders, you know, how are things happening, what's going on in here? And then we have leadership in business, right? The same thing like what does the business need to be successful? What does the leadership team need to be doing in order to really pass information and have really successful knowledge sharing inside the organization and company? What is moving? And this is all about thinking about operations, but it's also thinking about, right? Number number two, what we talked about. Preparation. Preparation leads to influence. Preparation leads to more courage. You show up better for your team and imagine having a pile of makers and a pile of high performers that are all working towards the same principles and values and they're progressing these big ideas. This is a magical thing. Take a screenshot of this and this will help you think about how you can set your team up for success. If you're a leader or if you're trying to build out a team and thinking about, oh well, I need to be thinking about how I manage and facilitate the feedback across all these things and what presentations can I create to be able to help manifest all these things, right? Building things for engineers. They need certain artifacts, designers need certain artifacts, product managers need certain artifacts. Think about it, talk about it together and if you have questions about that, we can always do a further deep dive on just feedback in general. Alright, so that's more about the team, right? But now let's think about you. Let's bring it back to you now. Influence, encourage. It might seem like it's something that you're doing for, you know, for the outer world and what the world is seeing. You want to have more influence in the world. You want to get people to really follow your mission, your vision, your ideas, your designs, your product direction. But think about, well, what about you? You still need to prepare, you still need to be in congruent with what you need to do so that you can show up better for those moments that we were just showing up before with, you know, with feedback. So what are we doing here? Well, we're introducing the growth loop. Right. How do you reflect, how do you learn, how do you train and how do you take action? How do you do this? And as a leader in, you know, in Silicon Valley or wherever you work, you still gotta be able to teach and coach your team, but you still need to be able to take care of your wellness and execute and model that incredible behavior so that your team is not burning out and so that you're not modeling that sort of behavior. Really great stuff here. If you haven't yet tried to fill in yours, I would encourage you to try to do this. Try to see when you're connecting with each of these little pie pieces and go through and figure out what your growth loop is. All right, let's keep going. The other side of this is now we talked about ourselves with the growth loop. Now we're coming back where. All right, well, that feedback that I was just having a second ago is important, but what about what's happening across the entire org or the pod that I have? You know, we have the people that make up the team. Business, engineering, marketing, content, product design, but we also have all the processes that make up those teams. Right? How are our plans, how's the craftsmanship, how, how's the knowledge transfer, how's the collaboration going, what's the communication look like? And do we have clarity about what we're building? Now these sorts of things over on the far right are going to help also build preparation, build up your preparation skills, build up your courage abilities to know what it is that you need to do, because you can anticipate the moment you can anticipate. We're going to need some plans for this project. We're going to need to show up and deliver craftsmanship. When we implement this, when we build it, when we organize our figma files, when we organize the engineering docs that explain what's going to happen and what this is going to do. You know, these things aren't going to go away, but the maturity of these things can get better and better and better and better. Now if you're a startup, you don't have to have everything perfect because you're trying to figure things out and you're trying to build up a team and build and model all those different practices, and you might have, like a ginormous corporation that you've been a part, they might have had a design team for 10 plus years. They've had time to establish their norms, they've had time to establish some things. So you might be in a team or a startup that hasn't yet had these things defined. And if you're the first designer that gets the opportunity, then thank goodness that you're in this program, because you're gonna be able to use all these frameworks to help set up your organization and the operations inside your organization to be set up for success. Right. How are you doing these things? When are you doing these things? And how can you model the best in class for each of these things? So this is another example of, of that process and of that life cycle of building a product.