Katie Dill: preference

Transcript context

…And I really like this, it's pretty simple, but it's a good reminder that, as a leader, one of the things that you are of course driving towards is trying to get better performance so that your team feels more purpose and motivation and is excited about their work and that you're building greater things for your customers and you're having more business effect, and, of course, performance. But the key pieces of that, of course, is potential, so thinking about how you increase potential, which would be, of course, hiring really well, developing the talent and helping them grow and increase their own potential to do better and greater things. And then paired to that though of course is decreasing the interferences, which could be that lead weight on top of great talent, because you can hire the best people in the world, but like a muscle atrophying underneath a cast, if there are interferences that are holding them back from doing great work, they're going to burn out, they're not going to enjoy the work, they're not going to be as successful, and you will not get as strong of performance from it. And so I really do think of this constantly as to how can I increase potential, how can I decrease interferences? And over time, especially as your company grows, you're going to have to keep doing that. The design work is never done in designing a team, because the more people you bring in, the more it puts your processes in a faulty state. I have intentionally run teams where you get to a point where it's like running hot, it's just like, "Okay, we've outgrown our processes." And that's okay because then you can learn as to, okay, this is how people are actually trying to work and this is how we actually can improve it. So making those changes as needed helps to make them more sought after and more informed in terms of as you improve the processes. One of the things that I've been working on since I worked back at Airbnb was this idea of improving awareness of the things that are happening. What happens at a lot of companies, especially as they grow, is people lose touch with what's happening in different parts of the organization, and everybody's got a doc, their PRD, where they've written down what they've done and it's got tons of words that nobody really understands and keywords for the different projects, and that isn't the best way to lead to clarity. And I'm a strong believer that a picture tells a thousand words and a prototype saves a thousand meetings. What we do, and I've been doing it for the last decade or more, is having people within the design team share as a screenshot or a prototype of what they're working on in a shared deck. And so they add this to a slide, in Google Slides decks every couple of weeks, and we get to see what's happening across the design team. ot or a prototype of what they're working on in a shared deck. And so they add this to a slide, in Google Slides decks every couple of weeks, and we get to see what's happening across the design team. And this is really important for all the designers because they could see, whether or not they're a team of 10 or 170 or whatever it might be, what is happening, and they can say, "Oh my gosh, you're working on that surface, so am I. And let's talk about it. Or Oh, that's an interesting pattern, maybe we could use this in more places." And we send it to the product managers and the engineer leaders and the leaders in the company because it is also a really great way for them to understand what's happening and what are we building together. Because going earlier, as I talked about, the importance of thinking about things as a journey, so what's happening in the marketing side, what's happening in this aspect of the product and seeing how all these pieces really fit together, that has been absolutely one of the things I will take wherever I go, whatever I do, because it has just been a very, very useful tool. I remember that at Airbnb, and there's nothing more fun than just looking through a bunch of awesome designs and products that are in motion and in a deck form is so handy, just flip through what's going on around the company, I'm like, "Oh wow, look at this thing. That's amazing." And it's interesting that ends up in a deck, it feels like Figma would be really good for that too, but somehow decks are still really handy for simple things like that.…

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