Drew Bridewell introduces design clarity: a system for aligning teams by making goals, values, timelines, and responsibilities explicit. He walks through cataloging projects and priorities, defining values to avoid complacency, documenting rituals, and running structured project kickoffs where stakeholders understand roles and decision points.
You can create design clarity not only for your overall project lifecycle, you can create it for yourself with how you're showing up as a team member. Right? For example, let's say you have project 1, 2, and 3. You have project okrs, pokers, and 1, 2, 3. These are like, what are you trying to achieve in each of these projects? And then you have timelines that you need to be mindful of and work towards. So you got three different tracks, and you could even have four or five more different projects or four or five more different OKRs, or even another timeline that you need to manage. So these are things that you need to know, because if you know these, then you know where to focus your energy. You know where to put your energy and time. And your priorities will also be very important to this as well. Passion, personal, career and project. So these are like your goals that we've set up in week two of the program. So now you have these and you're understanding where these things are at. Then you have your values and principles, your values and principles for what you do as a team member, what you do as a company, where you, how you show up, how you're going to move through all these things. Because when you're not being present with your values and principles, then it's really easy to kind of go through the motions and get complacent with how you're showing up. And, and that's what I see a lot. You know, you'll have a really strong three to four months or even like a two to three months, and then you dip. But what we don't want to do is we don't want to have those dips in our performance. We want to be able to know, like, these are our values and principles. We're going to look at these things and we're going to understand how we're going to show up. We also are going to understand our projects, our OKRs, our timelines, and we're understanding how our goals are going to intersect with all these projects, project work that we're doing. And then that leads us to, like, the actual actions that you take take. The actions that you take are the things that will actually move the needle for each one of these things. So write all those rituals and routines that you have, making sure that you have a very clear, very, very clear idea of what you need to do before you head into the week so that you can actually go in and crush each one of these things, depending on where they're at in the current life cycle of the product. And remember, the goal here is to create a collective mastery of awareness around your design and development paths. Like what are you designing, what are you developing and what is the design clarity needed for? Not only how your team is going to know what they're building, but how you're doing it and what you're learning along the way and how you're going to adapt based on what the team needs and what the gaps are, and based on the timing, based on the objectives, based on your values and principles, all of these things are collectively coming together. Right, you're building an ecosystem map of how you approach and build clarity. But, right, we're not just building any clarity, we're building design clarity. And we come back to these things. These are going to be really helpful for you because they're also going to be used as you go through each of the processes in the process, in the project. So when we talk about preparation, and I showed you this last week, right, we're not just talking about energy and how we show up now. We got to think about how we architect the things that we prepare for each one of these sessions. So when we're preparing, like for example, we're going to be kicking off a new project at growth Day, a new project that nobody knows about. It's a new project. So I have to prepare with the. Prepare the team. To prepare the team, we need to know priorities. We need to know the core goals of that project. We need to know who's going to be involved. We need to know when are we going to kick start. We need to know who's going to be accountable for it. And, and then we'll get all those people together. We'll do a big giant kickoff meeting. Everybody knows what their role and responsibilities are. They know when the decisions are going to be made and they can start working towards that effort. Each discipline that's a part of this, like marketing, content, design, research, all of those parties are coming together to really critically think through how they're going to contribute to the project. So as a lead, you want to make sure that you are supporting and creating an environment so that each of them can have a really successful understanding collecting phase. The same thing goes, once you do that, what's the mechanism that helps everybody come together and say, this is where we're going to focus. This is what we believe is the right path forward. And then we generate ideas, we generate all these new things, right? We'll go through the process. So I want the reason why, I want to elaborate on this. This this phase is because as you go through each of these stages, you have the opportunity to deliver and to bring design clarity to the session, right? How you're communicating on these things, how you're collaborating on these things and how you're elevating what you're doing, what the team is doing, you're posting about those things, you're communicating consistently throughout the week and consistently throughout the project lifecycle so that people can know, your team can know what to expect and what you're gonna deliver. Super fun stuff when you can get these things dialed in because you start to see like, oh, yeah, my team's not frustrated, they know what to expect. My team's not angry because they were included. My team is on board and we're all working congruently together towards these principles, values and or with these principles and values towards the main okrs and objectives of the business. Hope this is making sense.
