Sharing Early And Often
I’ve been writing a lot. Yet despite 10 months of daily journal entries I’ve only shared one post. Part of this was my concern over spelling, but I can also attribute it to waiting for the ‘right’ thing to write about – overthinking what will make a good post and missing the value of messy thoughts and discovery.
Although I do a better job of sharing and communicating in my design leadership role at A Cloud Guru, it’s something I need to improve – both to create more visibility around the work I’m doing, and to ensure I’m leading by example. With our distributed team growing across Australian and the US, being able to see design work in progress has become essential, both for ensuring design consistency and identifying opportunities to create a more cohesive customer experience.
Figuring out how to facilitate communication has been something I’ve given a lot of attention to this year. How do we make it easy for people to share work and receive feedback with low friction, and make that part of our culture? We have a number of tools in use, but so far nothing that’s really been able to fill that gap between discovery documentation and delivering design assets.
Our weekly Design Review meetings are currently the best way to do this, but a complimentary asynchronous ritual would be a great addition to our process. Maybe it’s as simple as a blog post. Maybe I’m overthinking what would be an ‘ideal’ solution and missing the value of messy thoughts and discovery – starting with something simple, gathering feedback and working out what actually helps the team communicate better.
This is what’s running through my head as I reflect on the past week, and it seemed an opportune time to share early. The next thing is to make it more often.