The other day, when I had lunch with a friend, one of the topics which came up is still resonating with me. And it’s something I had to learn the hard way. During my interviews this week, I’ve been trying to be more cognizant of it, and more open about the fact that I didn’t always get it right. What is it? I don’t want this to be a big wind-up, but — essentially — it’s that the work doesn’t always speak for itself.
This has been a recurring theme for me, unfortunately. I like my work to be good. Scratch that. I need my work to be good. Even better than good. And my assumption had always been, it could stand on its own. Unfortunately, I know — now — that’s not true. In fact, the work is usually, like, 40% of your job. Especially in places where content design is not yet a known quantity. And for people like me who love both doing content design and talking about content design, it should be easier to be successful. But I often didn’t get that balance right.
See, most of the time, and especially when I started at Twitter, I thought that if I put my heart and soul into each and every project, the results would speak for themselves. And most of the time, the results were great. I’m very proud of the contributions I made to the product while I was there. But I didn’t do enough to create the relationships which would allow more of my work to see the light of day. I can’t even imagine how much more I could highlight in my portfolio if I had just taken some of the effort I was putting into the word choices and experiential flows, and invested them in my relationships with the teams and leaders I was building with.
Now, I definitely got better at this while I was at Twitter. And a vast majority of the time I spent at Google was doing what is frequently referred to there as “stakeholder management”. But throughout my career, I feel like I neglected the relationship portion of my role, preferring to spend my time with templates and frameworks and style guides instead. The possible explanations for this are numerous, but I’m glad to finally have the self awareness to think more realistically about how much time I should spend on the process of content design and how much I need to spend with the people who will help get all that design thinking into the project I’m working on.
I think we tend to carry habits from job to job, both the good and the bad. I am very thankful for the places and the people who allowed me to grow, pulling me aside when I went astray, setting me on a path for improvement, and making the work, our product, and me better along the way. As hard as it is for me to admit, no matter how good the work was, it needed a team behind it to launch. I keep reminding myself that in my interviews. And I hope that I keep learning, no matter where I go next.
Worse Dreams
10 March 2023
Key relationships.
The other day, when I had lunch with a friend, one of the topics which came up is still resonating with me. And it’s something I had to learn the hard way. During my interviews this week, I’ve been trying to be more cognizant of it, and more open about the fact that I didn’t always get it right. What is it? I don’t want this to be a big wind-up, but — essentially — it’s that the work doesn’t always speak for itself.
This has been a recurring theme for me, unfortunately. I like my work to be good. Scratch that. I need my work to be good. Even better than good. And my assumption had always been, it could stand on its own. Unfortunately, I know — now — that’s not true. In fact, the work is usually, like, 40% of your job. Especially in places where content design is not yet a known quantity. And for people like me who love both doing content design and talking about content design, it should be easier to be successful. But I often didn’t get that balance right.
See, most of the time, and especially when I started at Twitter, I thought that if I put my heart and soul into each and every project, the results would speak for themselves. And most of the time, the results were great. I’m very proud of the contributions I made to the product while I was there. But I didn’t do enough to create the relationships which would allow more of my work to see the light of day. I can’t even imagine how much more I could highlight in my portfolio if I had just taken some of the effort I was putting into the word choices and experiential flows, and invested them in my relationships with the teams and leaders I was building with.
Now, I definitely got better at this while I was at Twitter. And a vast majority of the time I spent at Google was doing what is frequently referred to there as “stakeholder management”. But throughout my career, I feel like I neglected the relationship portion of my role, preferring to spend my time with templates and frameworks and style guides instead. The possible explanations for this are numerous, but I’m glad to finally have the self awareness to think more realistically about how much time I should spend on the process of content design and how much I need to spend with the people who will help get all that design thinking into the project I’m working on.
I think we tend to carry habits from job to job, both the good and the bad. I am very thankful for the places and the people who allowed me to grow, pulling me aside when I went astray, setting me on a path for improvement, and making the work, our product, and me better along the way. As hard as it is for me to admit, no matter how good the work was, it needed a team behind it to launch. I keep reminding myself that in my interviews. And I hope that I keep learning, no matter where I go next.
See you tomorrow?