Collaboration

Nothing is accomplished by yourself

In my career, I’ve learned that in order to achieve anything, I have to learn how to work with others. I learned that quickly during the first phase of my career in web analytics. I had to work with leaders at companies to identify business goals. I had to work with developers to understand their process and the structure of the website. Then I took those goals and process and figured out how to track and measure success. Now in the second phase of my career as a product designer, I’ve applied the lessons I learned from that experience. I know I have to frame things from both the customer or user’s perspective and the business perspective. I know how to partner with developers to build designs that I create.

Learning

Teaching

Learn by teaching

I am a case study of the Protege effect. I want to help others and learning a topic and sharing what I know has helped me gain the trust of others. It was helpful when working on products in enterprise networking or application monitoring. I was able to provide a general overview for new or junior designers. Later I became the subject-matter-expert on the design team for certain topics.

Action

Make it happen

I bias towards action when I see an opportunity to improve experiences. And there’s always room for improvement. When evaluating opportunities, I follow these actions before pursuing: 

1. Determine benefit to user by asking:
   1. What problem am I solving for the user?
   2. How much impact to the user (e.g. time-saving, improved feature) will this idea, if implemented, have?
2. Feasibility, I.e. is this even possible:
   1. How much time will it take from socializing to implementation and testing?
   2. Can we use existing capabilities? If not, how long or is it possible to create new capabilities to support this idea? Is there something similar in the pipeline we can piggyback off?
   3. Do I have time to manage this? Do I want to spend time on this?
   4. What other priorities do I have?
   5. Has someone created or tried to put in place an idea like to this? If it failed, why? How can I avoid the same pitfalls?

These actions determine if I put in more effort. I know my work is only a small part of the product development. 

Feedback

Make it better

There’s always room for improvement. Of course feedback from my teammates and design team are important. But getting feedback from cross-functional partners, like engineering or product management is critical. Their feedback helps navigate the roadblocks to implementation. The first draft is never perfect. You need people to poke holes and challenge your idea. Then you need to plug those holes. Embrace the growth mindset and continue to grow your communication skill (in my opinion, one of the most critical skills in everyone’s career).

victor@iamvictorlin.com