Reflection on Skill Development in Product and Design

We have all these skills that we want to build, we want to grow, we want to learn. But the problem is there's so many new systems, tools, and learning learnings that emerge. It's similar to this one. You're here and you're like, oh, it's another training. It's another learning. Well, there's gonna, there's gonna be so many new trainings that come out between now and the next, the rest of the year. But it's about how you, how you soak in that knowledge. What books are you going to read, what trainings are you gonna try? How can you diversify your learning but do it in a strategic way? Like, even if you watch this training and then you want to go back in and go to, like, another, you know, this is not your style. That's okay. I want to diversify your learning, and I want you to be aware of all the opportunities that are out there to learn. And I want you to find what's most meaningful to you and what's most impactful to you. Because I've learned from. I'm basically a serial learner, and I love learning new things. It is how it's gotten me to where I am today. So I want to encourage you to start thinking about, whoa, whoa. What systems tools and learnings do I have in my tool belt? How am I approaching what I'm learning and why I'm learning it, and the companies that I'm supporting, How am I thinking about that? And that just makes things go a little deep. But we're going to get deep today, and you can come back and rewatch this, because know you're here today and there might be a lot, a lot to take in from this, but that's okay. Let's keep going. So problem number. There's. There's two problems that I want to show, and the problem number one is skill fragmentation. So, yes, there are hundreds of tools that you can use, but they're all created. And when you're creating and when you're learning these things without integrating them into your, you know, what are your values, what are your passions, what is your desired lifestyle, then all these tools just become noise. But if you can align and start thinking about the tools and how you use them and be a little bit more intentional about them, then that unlocks a whole nother level of execution, of awareness and, you know, communication, collaboration, execution. So when we think about creating tools, you know, we have like, you know, I put as example here, you know, you have like keynote or a marker or Pen or like Figma or Adobe or you know, even like an AirPod that I have in my ears right now. The templates that you use to do things, you have creation tools, things that help you make things right, think about those things, you know, from an interaction design perspective, from building design strategies to planning your out your events. You have a series of creating tools. You also have a series of planning tools like, okay, well, how do I build clarity for my team? How do I build alignment? How do I collaborate? Where, where did this Google Doc go? What is these Google sheets? How do I measure success around these things? What's the velocity? What are your planning tools? Then you have communication tools like Slack and Figma and Asana or Envision or Jira or Notion, all these things that use for communication. And then you also have the chatbots and Discord and LinkedIn and other things that you use. There's learning tools like netflix, YouTube, LinkedIn, learning next level, UX, lynda.com, all those things. And then there's expression tools, right? Like your Dribble, your, your Twitter, your Instagram, Facebook, to express yourself to, to really form your identity. Like who are you, what's your identity and how do these things work? So obviously this is kind of like a chaotic sketch of all the things that are out there for you. But our goal is to not let this be a fragmentation in our life is its purpose is to help you realize that you don't need to use all these tools. You can dial it into maybe the five or ten that are most important to you, that really help advance you and also your team. So I'm just trying to open the door. There's a skill fragmentation, but that doesn't mean that you have to be fragmented with that experience. You can connect the dots, you can show up and use the tools that serve you the best. The other side of this is the soft skills. You know, understanding how to communicate better, understanding systems, understanding strategy, understanding how to have influence in your team and in your, in your role in your company, understanding how to understand marketing or visual design. And if you're not in the design field, you could fill these box, these bubbles with the actual large themes of the things that you have in your industry and think about how do you integrate practice into your daily, weekly and monthly life. So the problem too here is that these skills are kind of developed in a vacuum. And when I say vacuum, like you might not know that four or five other people in your staff or on your team are trying to learn the exact same Thing, what are the four or five other people that are on my team, what are they learning and what do they know about these things? And if you can share, just, even just sharing what you're learning and what you're developing and what you're growing in, it can be a life changing thing because now you have, you have a community, you have peers that can help you actually grow. So and alongside that you want to think about how you actually integrate this learning. So when I worked in performance management and like, you know, the history of the companies, I've been at Facebook, I've been at LinkedIn, I've been at Linda, I've been at, you know, envision and looking at how performance management is measured. So how do we actually measure performance management? Right, the skills and level that you are and the maturity that you have across these different levels. Right, so you're level one, level two, level three, junior designer, designer, senior designer, principal designer. And even if you're like associate in your role and then you have a principal, senior level, like there's all levels in our, in our positions. So but the problem with all that is, like, it's just a way to label, like our employee, like label employees and see what level they are so we can make sure that we pay them the right, the right thing. Now this development for these practical applications is going to expand and evolve your entire career. So understanding what's most important to you and your team right off the gate can help set you up for success in the long term of your career. So I've been doing this for 16 years and I've been mapping these things for a long, long time and practicing these things over. But I got to tell you, like, even when you get to the very top of your role and you're an executive in your staff, you're still working on these things, you're still practicing, and then you're actually probably teaching your team how to do these things. So starting now with understanding the whole ecosystem or getting awareness of it is going to serve you in the long run. So this is again gaining another level of awareness about your space, about your ecosystem, about your business, about how it works, what doesn't work, and all the things around it are going to serve you. All right, so I'm going to show you three, and I hope this is so far getting the wheels turning, getting you thinking about, oh, how reflecting right now. So meet product designer number one. This is just like a Persona from the research that I've done in the space. So this designer and this could Also relate to you. If you're not a designer, but you're transitioning into one role and you're passionate about the space, but there's dozens of programs, content and platforms. Feeling overwhelmed, Right? This is something that happens to a lot of designers coming out of school. It comes to. It happens to a lot of seasoned pros that have been inside the same company maybe for four to five years, and they feel a little bit of stagnation. They feel a little bit of lost momentum. So the questions that they typically ask are like, how do I manage where to go to learn these new skills? Right. It's obvious that there's a lot of tools to use, but it's not obvious on how you actually, like, get super laser focused on learning the right skills that are actually going to move the needle for you and your team. Right. How do you integrate all these new tactics into your daily rituals? Like, how do you practice? Right. That goes back to the practical application that I was just talking about with. With problem number two. Then there's like, focusing on the right focus areas. Right. Maybe your manager thinks you should focus on one thing, your peers think you should focus on another thing. You haven't gotten the feedback, so you don't really know what you need to develop in. So it's. It's a similar problem. Or where do you get that motivation and clarity to make sure you're on the right path? Right. I mean, maybe you could get coaching or you could get a mentor or you could go into programs like this. How do you start a development plan? Like, what is even in the development plan and how do you start creating one? Well, from the homework that you can get. And I'll share a little bit about the homework of the Clarity Builder course that's going to help you really get an understanding and awareness of, like, where you should start, and then how do you get more strategic and intentional about where you show up as a designer? Like, where are the things that you can have the most impact? Where are those things? And these are types of things that we would be asking and learning and developing and working on going through these sorts of programs. But we should have the awareness of how to solve these problems just, you know, integrated into our flow, integrated in how we can do this. The other designer is thinking about, like, they kind of lost an identity. They've been traditionally trained and through an authoritarian manager or business that has literally told them what to do every step of the way their entire career. Now this has happened so much because, you know, these companies are old They've been around for, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40, 100 years and they have a certain way that they want you to do things, but you coming into those things. This is similar to the, you know, similar to school system where you go into a system that's already created, but it's not customizing, it's not integrating with what your needs are and what you need. So this designer needed to reform their identity and figure out like, who they were because they were transitioning to another role. But they're like, well, shoot, what kind of designer am I? What kind of legacy do I want to leave behind? What am I in my. Like, just how do I even describe who I am and what I want to do? This is another opportunity for accelerating an awareness and a reflection practice so that you can start knowing this and you never lose connection with who you are. You never lose connection with the things that are most important to you. And you got to do this with systems. And I'll talk about those systems shortly. I'm just trying to set the tone for, you know, these are real problems out in the space and you might have tapped into one or two of these problems or maybe, maybe not, maybe the next Persona will be your Persona. But like, these sorts of things are happening all the time. And even, you know, with COVID and people losing jobs and, and people getting laid off because of the recession, you know, thinking about, well, how am I going to compete or how am I going to get that role for that next position? Well, are you learning? Are you growing? Are you still developing but not making it into thing like, oh, shoot, now I need to learn, now I need to do this. It needs to be a part of your, your lifestyle, your learning lifestyle, you know, the things that serve you the best. This is a part of like making learning and personal development a way of life is incredibly important because this impacts you the most every single day. So waking up and knowing what you're going to do is an incredibly important thing. And then this other director level Persona is like, they need to elevate the team, the coach, the business, the mentor. They want to this Persona. They really want to elevate the team. Right? Get the understanding. So they're also saying, like, where do I start with coaching and accelerating my team? They might be learning these things, but they also need to be able to develop and build a greater impact for their team and their business. Right? How do they integrate these trainings and these new routines with the team that they're going through? There's all sorts of Problems too at that level. And again it comes back to skill fragmentation and not knowing really like where, where it is that drives the most impact. So these are all things that I love to coach about and I teach about inside my programs. But it's just so important because again all of these, these companies so I've worked at, you know, I went to scad Savannah College of Art and Design. Incredible programs, incredible facilities really where it tapped into this next level awareness of design and how incredible it can be. Also learned incredible practices playing baseball my entire life and being a catcher and really understanding like how to really increase your awareness in what you see, the details and how you plan really can take you to a whole nother level of awareness. And then also going through each of these roles and companies that I've been at, I've mapped these companies, I map these teams, understanding what it takes to raise the bar of your output and create world class products that are really solving problems for people. But also you're creating a vast amount of wealth, a vast amount of happy lifestyles and, and positive, positive actions. Now what I'm doing, I'm building out this next level UX training program. I'm building a show called Makers. This is a long process. It's like building, you know, if you've ever watched on Netflix these like reality shows where people are making things and building things. I want to do that for the product and design space. I also created these two courses that I think are the most pivotal skills that you can learn in product and design. And any if you're a business owner is learning how to concept map with mapping to learn. Also learning about action planning which is just basic planning skills because again in design school they're not teaching you how to plan. You got 10,000 things to do, but you're not getting taught about how to integrate those skills and those practices to be able to really. Okay, you got four weeks. How do you work yourself backwards? How do you do backwards planning? How do you make sure that you have the really clear goals and outcomes and milestones and actions that you need to take? That's what action planning is. And then a career accelerator is more that one one on one for me. And if you know you want like high performance coaching, one on one career accelerator is where you get that. And then also I'm head of product and design at Grote right now where we're building the world's biggest all in one personal development app that basically has tools, community and live coaching and content all in one place. It's pretty epic. I use it every single day. And I also use it to journal, which I'll talk about later, because remember, journaling is about that. And you know, I dropped this earlier when I was talking about Practical UX Weekly. There's 70 episodes in here. If you really want to just ramp up your awareness and practical application of design, this is a good course for you.