Start — Stop — Continue from 2020

I always keep a running journal of things that I come across on social sites and valuable links shared by friends or colleagues from my network. Here’s a list of 55 notable learnings that I want to keep in mind as I roll over to the new year of 2021. I have divided the list into design, leadership, hiring (hiring/getting hired), writing/communication, and relaxation for ease of reading. Scroll below to see the entire list of learnings from the year 2020.

Design and being a designer

“Design doesn’t happen in the deep, cold vacuum of space. Design happens in the warm, sweaty proximity of people with a lot on their minds.”

— Erika Hall.

1. Great product designers find “what’s missing” instead of finding “what’s broken” in this world.
2. Create meaningful designs by targeting significant outcomes for both business stakeholders and end-consumers.
3. Edge cases and constraints will help you to create designs with novelty and utility. Very few will admit this fact and learn from it quickly.
4. Don’t just change the visuals when doing product redesigns. Changing visuals is cheap; changing the way user thinks is where the real meat of the problem is. Redesign exercises should be more about changing user flows and solving user problems.
5. Spend 80% of your time doing research, talking to people, and discovering what worked, didn’t work. The rest, 20%, should be reserved for pushing pixels and perfecting your interface.
6. A user experience designer is simply someone who can influence the user’s experience — either officially or unofficially.
7. Use empathy and user journey maps as an opportunity to strike deep conversations and alignment with various stakeholders in your organization.
8. Good design can sustain various degrees of strain. The designer should pre-calculate all the different stress levels for their designs before deployment.
9. Limit the amount of information exposed to the user and use standard user patterns. This will reduce the total cognitive load in your designs.
10. Switching from an individual contributor (IC) role to management leads to a loss of creativity and passion. If you genuinely love crafting beautiful experiences, then find ways to keep doing it at a senior level. Don’t stop!

“The problem with the designs of most engineers is that they are too logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.”

— Don Norman.

11. Trendy and fashionable designs lack resilience. Focus on foundational components, fundamental qualities, and proven tech instead.

12. A good service design blueprint can help you and your team understand how your services perform, where it needs improvement and the plan ahead.

13. Learning design requires you first to learn the fundamentals, read about it obsessively, and practice it regularly.

14. Users might never send requests for features they are battling with most of the time.

Leaders are like

“The true measure of leadership is influence. Nothing more, nothing less.”

— John C. Maxwell

1. Give credit when it’s due. It can open doors to many opportunities when you do.
2. Use data to determine what went wrong and what went well. Never use it to decide the future of a product. Data shouldn’t always drive decisions.
3. Observe, lead, delegate.
4. Conduct meetings with clear agendas and outcomes. This will reduce the meeting fatigue in small as well as large teams.
5. You can lead more seamlessly if you take out the time to talk to your team about their work ideas, personal life, and perspectives.
6. Business outcomes achieve business goals but don’t expect them to create killer user experiences. UX outcomes make for better goals.
7. Lead by taking a path forward and inviting others to follow, not focusing on all the wrong tracks.
8. Successful design leaders are good at dealing with pain, helping others, and inviting criticism by work with everyone.

Hiring Talent

“There are two things in this world that take no skill: 1. Spending other people’s money, and 2. Dismissing an idea.”

— Jason Fried

1. If you’re hiring for a startup, then focus on finding candidates who can think outside the box with limited resources at their disposal.
2. Find opportunities to improve our work, ourselves, and our environment by accepting occasionally misplaced things.
3. You have to be open to bet on people that may have never done it before. Judge people on how they see things differently. Judge them on their past track record, on their resilience to find answers to difficult questions.
4. Hiring diverse candidates is critical to building real belonging cultures.
5. Successful careers are defined by skills and how they have been applied to solve complex real-world problems.
6. Remote interviews make the process feel longer. Embrace the awkward moments of silence, technical woes, and anxiety.

Getting Hired

“To find what works for you, it helps to understand why the old stuff doesn’t.”

— Merlin Mann.

1. Don’t make your resume look like an analytics dashboard or an Instagram post. Anything that makes it harder for the hiring manager to read your resume kills your chances of getting hired.
2. Answer questions in an interview at a slow pace. It is easier to screw up when you are looking to answer all questions quickly. Let the interviewer complete the question, take time to think & reflect, and respond in detail.
3. There’s always going to be a place reserved for only you. It’s your duty to explore the world and find that welcoming space.
4. Experiment, fail, play around, and be weird with your career moves. You will eventually thank yourself, provide value, thrive, and redefine your career.
5. Optimize your thinking solely to crack and progress forward in job-interviews. Improve your interview skills by practicing to give interviews more often.
6. Applying to many jobs and not putting in the work to research its responsibilities, company culture is a sure shot way to end up at a really sucky job.

Communication & Broadcasting

Learn to speak the language of the business, not so we can be fluent in business but so that we can better understand it.”

— Aaron Irizarry

1. Writing is a means of universally capturing and communicating ideas concretely. You will understand better what you do and why you’re doing it. The more you write, the better you will get at communicating. Writing leads to hidden discoveries.
2. Keep bringing new things into this world thru’ design, writing, or motion capturing. Putting out new things into this world changes it for good in some small ways.
3. Always keep a personal journal to think structurally. Success follows critical thinking, and journaling makes it easy.
4. Side projects can result in real work experience. It can help you to define your process and give room to tinker with parts of your product development lifecycle.

Startups

“It isn’t enough to move fast as a company. You have to move faster than your competition. The company who scales first is the first to set the rules for everyone else.”
— Reid Hoffman

1. Pay attention to the problems. Acknowledge finding a solution and committing to it. Then immersive yourself in the process to challenge the status quo.
2. What we do behind a screen should impact the world outside the screen to create real value.
3. When the design is core to the business, it’s good business.
4. Find objectives measures to create sustainable growth and use them to mark your progress. You will be on your way to solve tricky problems in due time.
5. Product managers should be responsible for supporting design decisions that will ultimately define a user’s experience. They don’t need to know how to implement the design, but they need to understand it.
6. Moving fast is equally important as building strong foundations.
7. Start something small. You can learn a lot about how you work best by doing small work.
8. Solve problems in a straightforward, effective, and boring way. Then find opportunities and innovate on the finer details.
9. Ambiguous problems that lack even a hypothesis can be solved by starting somewhere. Analysis-paralysis will lead you nowhere.
10. Broaden your thinking by asking “Why?” questions. Focus on the why’s by asking “How?” questions.

Motivation

“Creation plus persistence can lead to recognition. But creation without recognition is still a worthwhile endeavor.”

— Seth Godin.

1. You can totally do the thing you keep telling yourself you can’t do.
2. Show up every day. Do something continuously, no matter how small the progress. You can get better at anything if you choose to work at it.
3. When we choose to engage with others, learn new things, and look at everything with curiosity, we become better at work. Our work gets better is by us getting better.
4. Use documentation as a way to combat imposter syndrome.

Relax

1. Take a day off every week to do nothing. Rejuvenate your mind and body. If you can’t take a whole day off, then take small daily breaks.
2. Everything away from work contributes to it.
3. Make time for early morning walks, drink plenty of water, exercise, and nap for 8+ hrs regularly.

“There should be no shame in admitting a mistake; after all, we are only admitting that we are now wiser than we once were.”

— Greg Mckeown