Maximize your impact as a designer in an organization
Often times I get asked how do you create impact in a team/company and make yourself more valuable. This conversation comes up much more during performance review sessions. So, I have jotted down few pointers which can help you accelerate the process.
You don’t grow alone, you make your team grow and that’s how you create impact in an environment
🔥Framework: Start being impact focused vs effort focused or feature focused.
These are some of the tips I usually share if they help more people achieve impact:
🔁 Reusability by default
We often try and build components from scratch, which might look shinny but we also need to think about “systems design” and how existing components can help expedite the product development process. Also, think about the never ending tech debt in the engineering team? You don’t want to overload them when you can simplify the process. While building concepts try and reuse existing components to also build a brand identity. Reusing might need a bit of creative thinking initially but moves us directly into floor 9 instead of starting from floor 0. These are few examples but probably there are more.
🛠 Using tools and libraries
The easiest way to not achieve impact is to reinvent the wheel. If certain libraries/tools allow us to get where we need faster, we should use them. Engineers in particular will not be measured in complexity but on simplicity. Make a hard/impactful problem simple and you will receive all the kudos and praises . Do the opposite and you will probably work more hours and not so good rating.
👨🎨 Avoid the rich mentality
Being scrappy is the secret here. We gather very rich insights and data from various research trips and product analysis. If we can approach projects in growth experiments, you will ship more often and learn from them as well. Having such operating model can help you exceed expectations as well. Sometimes, you can even do scrappy research testings and show the results to your team to expedite a feature launch as well. There are only upsides and very few downsides in this framework.
☺️ Create a safe environment
Nobody wants to work with an asshole, trust me! Be open minded, take responsibilities and over-communicate about your progress and if you are blocked. Understand your team mates strengths and growth areas, and ask them if you can help them unblock in any way. All these small gestures goes a long way.
Hope we can all dream big impact, but keeping it simple (it’s harder to do than said).
Note: This document is highly influenced from my previous manager’s (Norman Teh — GRAB) notes. So, all due credits to him as well :)
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