Bob Baxley: belief

Transcript context

…I love that. That's so interesting. So the advice here is, if you're finding design is taking too long or you want to just level up your success with your design team, give more context, spend more time on the brief, on what you're actually trying to achieve. And make sure there's a clear vision or mission that everyone can row towards. Yeah. Look, design is a problem solving methodology. So the more variables you can remove before they go into the process, the more efficient it's going to be. And if you give designers a lot of ambiguity, they're going to spend a lot of time spinning around, and honestly, that's your fault as the client. As a design leader, I think one of my main challenges is frankly trying to make the PMs better clients, helping them get more specific. It's very common for a design team to get extremely ambiguous asks from a product team. And the problem for designers, they have to take all that ambiguity and they've got to wring it all out. So when they give it to engineering, engineering knows exactly what to code, because computers don't tolerate ambiguity. Engineers need to know what the thing's going to be. And so design gets stuck with a really ambiguous input, but they have to have a highly specific output and then often timeboxed to do that. And it's just not a recipe for success. So you're much better off either kind of compressing the PRD experience and bringing the designers into that, kind of co-creating with product and design really rapidly. But you need to... You could think of it in some ways as designers are going to draw the storyboards, and if you don't give them a great script, they're going to have a very hard time. And then you can't give the shooting crew ambiguous storyboards or you're just going to waste untold amounts of money on set. So if you think about those three steps from script to storyboard to production, it's all about getting rid of ambiguity. And so the more ambiguity that can be removed upstream, the faster design's going to go. This begs the question then, you don't want to give designers here exactly. Here's the thing we're designing, make it really great and pretty. There's always this balance of just give designers space to think and be creative and explore. Advice there of just how to navigate that.…

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