Product Design Energy Fundamentals - LEARN and CRAFT your systems
Drew Bridewell explains a "design energy" framework for product designers centered on four categories — priorities, efficiency, speed, and skills — and applies them across common disciplines (visual design, prototyping, project management, research). He emphasizes documenting decisions, connecting ecosystem components (via workflow and ecosystem maps), and creating integrated design systems that cover components, processes, people, and content strategy. He also recommends rituals and routines (standups, product reviews, squads, weekly status updates, design jams, celebratory rituals) and regular reflection to improve clarity, speed, and career progression.
Chapters
This still goes with design energy, right? All these things you're responsible for in product, you know, from documenting things to ideating the wireframing, how what's the energy look like when you step into these roles and you go through and you start doing all of these different things? From the energy that you give when you're giving feedback, from the energy that you're giving when you're syncing and doing versioning, dev, handoff, design, systems, research, all these things, right? We got energy that comes, that comes in within us so we can know, like, well, how do we want to design these things? Do we want to be fun or we want it to be miserable? This stuff's fun, y', all, so we got it. We gotta really step it up here on this energy stuff. So with design Energy, there's four sections for these categories that I think are going well. One for my research and that I've mapped. These are the things that if you're going to come out of anything today, right, I was talking about. I was talking about priorities, I was talking about efficiency, I was talking about speed skills, right? These are the first things. So you want to think about all of these categories and apply them to the product design, like, disciplines, the different things that you're doing. So I want you to think about just for a second, and I know this is, this is, this is a challenging task. I want you to think about your priorities across how you do visual design, how you do prototyping, how do you do project management and like, project management for yourself. We're always doing project management. Even though there's project managers on a team, it is a necessity that you're still doing this for yourself so that you can manage big projects and you can lead projects. If you don't do this, then you're missing so many opportunities to accelerate your flow, accelerate your design energy. So we got priorities for all these things. We got efficiency, like, how well are you leveraging the tools? How well are you communicating with the tools? How well are you communicating and collaborating with the people, right? Efficiency. You gotta be efficient with your time, right? Cut to the chase, get to. Get to the points. When you're showing your designs, when you're showing your product individual, like just your work with people. Get to the point, get to the point. Show what needs to be done. Get through, get through the content. Like, I'm trying to get through this slide right now. Get to it. Speed, right? Think about speed. Speed matters, y'. All. It matters. You know, that was one of the things that really Separated me apart from my peers at my early design stages. And I learned this at scad Savannah College of Art and Design. They taught us to be incredibly, ridiculously fast at our skills and our craftsmanship and what we were doing. Not only did we have to do that, we had to be very, very, very strong at documenting what we were doing. Because nine times out of ten you're going to get asked, well, why, why are we doing this? What's, what problem are we trying to solve? You have to articulate and document the things that you're doing and don't assume that your cross functional stakeholders know why you did something. You have to explain it verbally. You have to articulate why you made the decision and just build it into the conversation and get to the point. And then the same thing for skills, right? Skills. All of these categories here in the circle have different levels of skills. Like different level. These are all in a sense, certain skills that you have to develop. You have to develop a wireframing skill. Like when do you use a wireframe? When would you not use a wireframe? You have a design system in place. Maybe you don't need a wireframe. Right? Cut it out. But you understand the use and the purpose of a wireframe is to talk about that interaction design, but not necessarily focus on the visual design ideation. When you're creating ideas, what does that look like from a junior senior principal and director level in design department? What does that look like from an ideation stage? How do you need to step into those different roles? I want you to start thinking about these things. The other things that we need to think about right when we're talking about building integrated suites is we use our skills as a product designer, as a maker to build clarity around how things are connected. Oftentimes the team doesn't understand how things are connected, but it's your per. It's your responsibility and it's your purpose to actually connect the dots for people. That's what we do as designers. That's why we do workflow maps. That's why we, that's why we build ecosystem maps so that the team can understand how things are connected. You have one component that's used across the entire ecosystem of the product. How might you explain that and articulate that back to your staff? How might you do that? You can do that with post in Slack. You can do that with documentation and keynotes that you share to your team. During presentations, you architect and narrate the story. You don't wait for people to. If you Know if you think it's valuable and you think it's going to actually like help evangelize what it is you're trying to do, then make it a part of your process. Get in, get in there and present the things that matter. Get on those lineups for presenting your work and your, in your presentations during your weekly reviews with your team. Like figure out when those things are and that goes back to right are. Here's just a couple other examples. So building integrated products, you use that with diagram as a maps, knowledge sharing, how well you knowledge share and then building expansive design systems not just for the components but for the people, for the processes, for the content strategies. All that is included inside of the design system and the design maturity. Let's go. So then we have rituals and routines, right? Here are a list of examples of things that I've done in the past and that also still do here at growth day. So we have standups, right? Getting to understand like what did you achieve? What's up next? Any blockers? Product reviews, right? This is how you can get things in front of your CEOs and executive team to be able to make sure like this is what we're doing, this is where we want to go. This is the metrics we're looking to improve and this is what we want to build. All hands, right? Getting the whole entire team excited and motivated about what's coming, what's the status of the business and getting FaceTime with your actual like cross company individuals squad calls. These are also called like you know, if you say pods but these are like getting your team together and unifying what it is you're building and using the team to push those things forward. Very important to have squads and have groups of, you know, because smaller, smaller groups can perform way faster than bigger groups. This is, this is time and time evidence based research backed. Like smaller teams can do more than big giant groups. And you know, I can remember this when, I mean it happened, it's happened in every single one of the companies I work for for Facebook. You know, we started some very new zero to one products. Same thing happened. Smaller group, we were able to do so much once the. Once it got bigger and bigger and bigger, it took a lot, it was a lot slower because we had bureaucracy and we had other things that we had to go up the level, up the channel. I mean obviously Facebook's a really big company, but you have more to share the bigger the group gets, right? Makes total sense. You have to share it with a lot more people. But Then you have more stakeholders and the bigger the company gets, you want to try to keep the squads and decision making to a smaller group and enable the performance of the team to move things forward. Then have like one decision maker that can advance the decisions to get things going. Because if you have too many decision makers, then it ends up slowing the process down. I mean, we're talking weeks, months of slowdown time. So you gotta be really thoughtful in these processes. But if you're not a, if you're not a principal designer or if you're not like a, a director and you can't make those decisions right now, then just start being aware of what they are now. Because as you level up in your career, you're going to be making those decisions one day. And you want to have an awareness and a kind of an anchor for how you're going to make those decisions down the road. Because that's going to come for you. You're going to get promoted. You are going to get promoted. You're here, you're going to understand these systems. You can go through this program and you'll get promoted and then you'll level up and then you'll be making those decisions one day and then you'll be making them again. And say you switch over into different roles and disciplines in your career, you could be making bigger decisions. So you need to understand how all the systems are getting made today in your company so that you can level up to get where you want to go, to be able to make those things, make those calls in the future. We have design jams, we have interviews, right? How you have interviews, how you have status updates. Don't miss your status updates. If you don't even have a status updates right now, then make one for yourself. Get a Google Doc, message me and I'll give you five questions that you can ask yourself. Answer these things every single Friday. Put them in a Google Doc, run this thing through the entire year. Don't miss a beat. We're talking 42 to 52 weekly updates a year. Okay, it might seem like a lot, but it's so critical from a reflection perspective. But it's also important for you to hold yourself accountable for the work that you're doing. You want to double your income, you want to get more wealth, you want to get more impact in your teams and companies. You have to reflect on the biggest questions, the most important questions, and move things forward. Don't take this for granted. Then we have these other things that we do. Advance the priorities. These are all like, routines, things that we do, things that we put in place. And then we have rituals, like the celebratory things, like Friday shout outs, Friday finishers, Design Clarity Wednesdays. I've been doing design Clarity Wednesdays for years. And we. We take them now. Now, now at Grote, it's kind of like just we have Wednesday workshops internally, and we Wednesday workshops externally. Externally is what we do for our coaches, our life coaches, and internally is like what we do for our team when we have big things that we're trying to move forward. But the whole purpose of this is to increase design clarity, which we'll talk about next week. And design clarity is about making sure each of your disciplines and parties know what needs to be built and why it needs to be built. Okay. And then, yeah, research. Mondays or Tuesdays or Wednesdays or Thursdays or Fridays, whenever you do it, just do research and talk about your team. What. What are you learning? What are you advancing? What are you trying to grow in? Continuous feedback, obviously, like, you got to get feedback not only about your designs, but how you're communicating, how you're giving presentations, how you're showing up for your last. Your last project. Ask for feedback this week. Get feedback from your peers. Get feedback from your PMs or from your talent directors or whoever. Ask for some feedback and get specific on what. What it is you're going to get better at this week. So I hope this was already super helpful. This screen, take a screenshot. Or you can just get this, this slide. I'll send you this slide and it will be in the replays.
