Holy amazing. Headphones and after 9PM on a weekday preferred.
It’s not easy to define one. So I thought of simple ways to describe what it is I do and what it is I don’t do.
I don’t want or think I should
• Focus on colors of the Web site, they don’t facilitate the business
• Make buttons “pop”
• Appeal to the “design committee” outside the Product team
• Have lists of feedback from outside teams of which I execute precisely
• Be the bottom totem pole in which I create based on everyones “feedback”
• Have Photoshop open 24 hours a day
• Be excluded from executive meetings or high level product decisions
• Be told, “make the logo bigger”
• Have someone hover over my back as I have Photoshop or Illustrator open
• Get emails from anyone outside the Product team saying, “We were thinking we should move the button to” because the button is not the issue the product value in that area of the flow is
I do want and think I should
• Listen to the sales team for customer feedback so we can reduce friction
• Focus on data to drive user and customer acquisition
• Understand the teams business model well enough to execute for it’s financial longevity
• Listen to executes on high level vision and create amazing product for it
• Listen to 100% of feature requests but only take 10% of them to incorporate into a much larger picture
• Use art direction to reduce friction based on large sets of common feedback
• Create features without always needing written consent by the executives
• Understand the impeccable dynamics of the business, it’s management and it’s internal flow
• Work closely with the engineering team to create sprints and analyse lists of plausible feature sets to support the vision and the instinct the Product team has that will impact the business in garnishing ways
• Have the ability to execute visually but only do so once all of the above is firmly understood and the evolution pattern is in place
Now how many startups really want a Product designer? These roles listed work and work very well but 95% of startup founders want to be the director of directors. Hire people who are great at what they do and allow them to do it for you.
In wide brush strokes I continuously think about human nature. The internet has become so massively adopted that I often feel it’s given us a false sense of reality. Not by which this is a negative thought. But by this inkling of consciousness that made me realize it’s creating a dopamine state allowing us to believe we’re “creating change” collectively all the meanwhile we’re still sitting on our couches. Virtual human connection in multiple instances all creating this interesting effect. A tool that’s still so freeing and open to use but having our embodiment physically controlled. The military was the first to explore virtual connections of multiple machines, I wonder if this effect was the bi-product and discovery of it’s use. Lastly if that was a discovery I wonder if it had any decisive ability in making the tool for public use.