Make things happen

I was recently catching up with a designer I used to manage, who was consistently one of the top performers on the team throughout our time working together. We were both reflecting back on that time period in our careers, and she said:

I used to worry that the other designers were mad at me. Like, I got to work on all the fun projects and redesign a bunch of stuff, while everyone else had to follow the rules and work within the design system.

At first, I was surprised to hear she’d worried about that, but thinking about it, I can understand why she would have felt that way. She did get to work on a lot of fun projects and it’s true that she did wind up doing a lot of net new design work that including defining new paths and patterns for others to eventually follow. In many ways, over our time working together, she became my right-hand designer - someone I constantly partnered with on super hairy and gnarly design problems. I can definitely see how someone in that position could worry about how their peers viewed them.

But as we kept discussing it and I sat more with it, I realized that, if we look back on many of those projects she worked on, it wasn’t as simple as she made it sound. In retrospect, a lot of the projects she got assigned to were initially not glamorous. They didn’t initially call for net new design work, many of them weren’t even that fun to start out on. In fact, I can recall many times she got assigned to projects and teams that were in a slump, and were slogging through the work. I could really only think of one or two examples in years of working together where she was handed something that was a desirable project from the very start.

What made those projects glamorous and desirable was her and how she approached the work. There’s that old nugget about making your own luck and that is something she excelled at. She had a unique ability to take really hard or nebulous problems (both design and team-related) and morph them into something amazing that got people excited. Instead of getting discouraged, she’d respond to friction with more energy, more enthusiasm. In so many ways, she was a transformative presence on any team and project.

And that’s what made me keep going to her - not for the fun and amazing stuff, but for the hard and unamazing stuff. Because over time, I found that she was someone who could take that hard, unamazing stuff and make it seem effortless and amazing.

And if someone on the design team had ever come to me to ask why this designer got all the “good projects,” that’s exactly what I would have told them. The projects weren’t good. They were made good. It wasn’t something special about the project. Any designer on the team had the opportunity to do what this person was doing. It’s just that most folks didn’t. Whether consciously or unconsciously, a lot of people wait to be handed the big cool project with a lot of visibility. They accept and assimilate to the current constraints on their team - whether that’s team culture, product requirements, technical concerns - and never push the boundaries and get their teammates excited and willing to stretch a bit for greatness.

I guess this is all to say, that if you’re a designer and you’re in a spot where you’re sitting and waiting to get picked for the shiny cool new project, stop waiting. Make your current team, your current work, the shiny cool new thing. Be loud about the thing you’re making and why it’s awesome and how it could be even more awesome if-only-we-pushed-a-little-more. Get your team excited. Get the people around you excited. Make the work and the career you want. Make things happen.