collaboration
It passes by the river
Business people and developers
Engineering, design, and product management
The problem with CAD
We want you to work with an artist
The power of One
picnic.lectoro.me
Designer + Developer Workflow
An Article by Dan MallThe way designers and developers work together today is broken. It’s too siloed and separate; “collaboration” is a fantasy that few enjoy.
The state of advertising in the 1940s was similar. All of that changed when copywriter Bill Bernbach met art director Paul Rand. Their collaborative working style led to the birth of the idea of “the creative team,” the mutual respect and partnership between art director and copywriter that tended to yield unique results. Bob Gage, an art director that worked for DDB, the agency Bernbach co-founded, described it like this:
“Two people who respect each other sit in the same room for a length of time and arrive at a state of free association, where the mention of one idea will lead to another idea, then to another. The art director might suggest a headline, the writer a visual. The entire ad is conceived as a whole, in a kind of ping pong between disciplines.”
Isn’t that what we all strive for in our jobs? True collaboration with equals and partners? Ideas that build off one another? Why does this seem so far away for some of us?
The Hot Potato Process
An Article by Dan MallThe big misconception I’ve seen designers and developers often fall victim to is believing that handoff goes one way. Designers hand off comps to developers and think their work is done. That puts a lot of pressure on the designer to get everything perfect in one pass.
Instead, great collaboration follows what Brad Frost and I call “The Hot Potato Process,” where ideas are passed quickly back and forth from designer to developer and back to designer then back to developer for the entirety of a product creation cycle.
Nobody gives a hoot about groupthink
An Article by Baldur BjarnasonTwo relatively common ‘fashions’ today are real-time collaboration and shared data repositories of one kind or another.
Both increase productivity in the naive sense. We work more; everybody is more active; the group feels more cohesive.
The downside is that they also both tend to reduce the quality of the work and increase busywork.
Pair Design: Better Together
Pair design is the counterintuitive practice of getting more and better UX design done by putting two designers together as thought partners to solve design problems. It’s counterintuitive because you might expect that you could split them up to work in parallel to get double the design done, but for many situations, you’d be wrong. This document will help explain what pair design is, how it works, and tour through the practicalities of implementing it in your practice.
Asynchronous Design Critique: Getting Feedback
An Article by Erin CasaliGetting feedback can be thought of as a form of design research. In the same way that we wouldn’t do any research without the right questions to get the insights that we need, the best way to ask for feedback is also to craft sharp questions.
When we were all together in-person
A Quote“We believe that in-person collaboration is essential to our culture and our future,” said Deirdre O’Brien, senior vice president of retail and people, in a video recording viewed by The Verge. “If we take a moment to reflect on our unbelievable product launches this past year, the products and the launch execution were built upon the base of years of work that we did when we were all together in-person.”
Building Momentum
An Article by Dan MallFight the Waterfall
Start all of the pieces of work a little bit earlier. The key to starting work early is not succumbing to the pressure of having to finish the work. Don’t worry about finishing. If you’re a developer, you can start doing things while your design or information architect are working because a lot of your work actually isn’t dependent on their work. Some of it is, so you probably won’t be able to finish, but that shouldn’t stop you from starting.
Share Work-in-Progress Early and Often
When you share work-in-progress, share it with the caveat that no feedback is needed at this point. You’re simply sharing it to let people know where you are. For example, if you have to make 12 wireframes, share it when you finish 2 or 3. Rather than spending a whole week to drop 12 wireframes, share 2 – 3 wireframes every 2 days. The more often you do this, you start to build rhythm, and rhythm builds momentum.
The Small Group
An Article by James MulhollandLying somewhere between a club and a loosely defined set of friends, the SMALL GROUP is a repeated theme in the lives of the successful. Benjamin Franklin had the Junto Club, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had The Inklings, Jobs and Wozniak had Homebrew.
Around a dozen members is the sweet spot of social motivation: small enough to know everyone, yet large enough that the group won’t collapse if one or two members’ enthusiasm wanes; small enough that you are not daunted by competing with the whole world, yet large enough that you still need to be on your toes to keep up.
Scenius
Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.
Mutual appreciation
A Fragment by Matt WebbTo use slightly different terms, mutual appreciation is a healthy jealousy without envy – a drive to achieve the same but without wanting to take it from the other.
Managing Oneself
Only from strength
Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong. More often, people know what they are not good at—and even then more people are wrong than right. And yet, a person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weaknesses, let alone on something one cannot do at all.
Feedback analysis
The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis. Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations.
Taking pride in ignorance
First and foremost, concentrate on your strengths. Put yourself where your strengths can produce results.
Second, work on improving your strengths.
Third, discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it...First-rate engineers, for instance, tend to take pride in not knowing anything about people. Human resources professionals, by contrast, often pride themselves on their ignorance of elementary accounting or of quantitative methods altogether. But taking pride in such ignorance is self-defeating. Go to work on acquiring the skills and knowledge you need to fully realize your strengths.
But bulldozers move mountains
A planner may find that his beautiful plans fail because he does not follow through on them. Like so many brilliant people, he believes that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.
Waste as little effort as possible on low competence
One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.
How do I perform?
For knowledge workers, How do I perform? may be an even more important question than What are my strengths?.
A few common personality traits usually determine how a person performs:
- Am I a reader or a listener?
- How do I learn? Writing? Taking notes? Doing? Talking?
- Do I work well with people, or am I a loner? And if I do work well with people, in what relationship?
- Do I produce results as a decision maker or as an adviser?
- Do I perform well under stress, or do I need a highly structured and predictable environment?
- Do I work best in a big organization or a small one?
To improve the way you perform
Do not try to change yourself—you are unlikely to succeed. But work hard to improve the way you perform. And try not to take on work you cannot perform or will only perform poorly.
The mirror test
In the early years of this century, the most highly respected diplomat of all the great powers was the german ambassador in London. He was clearly destined for great things...yet in 1906 he abruptly resigned rather than preside over a dinner given by the diplomatic corps for Edward VII. The king was a notorious womanizer and made it clear what kind of dinner he wanted. The ambassador is reported to have said, "I refuse to see a pimp in the mirror in the morning when I shave."
This is the mirror test. Ethics requires that you ask yourself, What kind of person do I want to see in the mirror in the morning?
Your organization's values
Organizations, like people, have values. To be effective in an organization, a person's values must be compatible with the organization's values. They do not need to be the same, but they must be close enough to coexist. Otherwise, the person will not only be frustrated but also will not produce results.
Values vs. strengths
There is sometimes a conflict between a person's values and his or her strengths. What one does well – even very well and successfully – may not fit with one's value system. In that case, the work may not appear to be worth devoting one's lift to (or even a substantial portion thereof).
Values are and should be the ultimate test.
Successful careers are not planned
Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values. Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person – hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre – into an outstanding performer.
The best-laid plans
It is rarely possible – or even particularly fruitful – to look too far ahead. A plan can usually cover no more than 18 months and still be reasonably clear and specific. So the question is most cases should be, Where and how can I achieve results that will make a difference within the next year and a half?
The second half of your life
Today, most work is knowledge work, and knowledge workers are not "finished" after 40 years on the job, they are merely bored.
There are three ways to develop a second career. The first is to actually start one. The second is to develop a parallel career. Finally, there are the social entrepreneurs.
There is one prerequisite for managing the second half of your life: You must begin long before you enter it. If one does not begin to volunteer before one is 40 or so, one will not volunteer once past 60.