The Values of Design
Summary
As designers, we have a core sense of our personal values and the value we bring to our users. Thinking about self promotion and finance can feel at odds with those values, but we do need to make sure our colleagues value our work, and that we're adding to the value of our company. By the end of our time together you should have answers to the question "how can I create more business impact, while still feeling like a designer?"
Key Insights
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Personal values deeply influence how product and design professionals perceive and tolerate team dynamics and workflow decisions.
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Explicitly articulating personal values can reveal blind spots and reduce workplace tension.
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In large organizations, different teams may view 'the user' differently, requiring tailored framing of user value.
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Translating qualitative design work into quantitative business metrics significantly improves stakeholder buy-in.
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Users and customers are often distinct groups with differing needs and priorities, complicating product decisions.
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Giving value first to your team and understanding what your manager is measured on fosters stronger collaboration and career growth.
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Rigid attachment to preferred techniques can limit effective teamwork; learning others’ approaches promotes better outcomes.
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Building relationships across teams, such as data or customer support, yields deeper context and better outcomes.
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Organizational financial metrics, including valuation multiples, shape company growth demands and directly affect employee experiences.
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Owning your full range of professional skills without diminishing parts of your craft increases your organizational influence.
Notable Quotes
"I wrote a blog post called Can We Talk about the PM Designer Tension almost 10 years ago."
"Sometimes the tension comes from conflicts in how we think about our values and how we think about value."
"You should think about what you uniquely will do because of your values that others might not tolerate."
"In one project, a design change required approval from 32 people, which clashed with my low value on authority."
"Different teams were thinking about users quite differently for the same product on the Windows phone."
"We increased conversion to starting a project by 50% by building a qualitative walkthrough at Kickstarter."
"There’s often a mismatch between the users designers think about and the customers the business considers."
"Think about what your manager is being rewarded for to figure out how to better support them and your team."
"If you find yourself feeling persecuted or on the drama triangle, you're probably not feeling valued by your team."
"Share price is actually a model of the expected value of all future income of a company."
Or choose a question:
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