Category Archives: Design Management

Not Just Unicorns: A Designer Bestiary

Unicorn_hunt_-_British_Library_Royal_12_F_xiii_f10v_(detail)
Illustration of a unicorn hunt; detail of a miniature from the Rochester Bestiary, BL Royal 12 F xiii, f. 10v. Held and digitised by the British Library.

Let’s talk unicorns.

And I’m not thinking of Twilight Sparkle. Legends about the unicorn differ, as is typical with mythical beasts. Some tales describe interaction designers who are also talented visual designers. Others carry news of the rare designer who can also code. And the wildest tales of all describe a designer who is supernaturally capable of anything. These conflicting tales confuse those seeking to hire designers. And of course designers may be asking themselves: “Am I a unicorn, or not?” And since all designers consider themselves magical, if not actually sparkly, the potential for an identity crisis is acute.

A Designer Bestiary

But fret not! Found in a dusty library in a long-forgotten corner of the Bay Area, a tome once thought lost to the centuries has now been found. (It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of The Leopard”.) Within it’s pages lie descriptions of a vast assortment of legendary creatures. In a Medieval Bestiary, each entry would describe the characteristics, habits, and nature of a type of creature. Creatures were understood to be both real (if you sailed far enough you might meet one) and allegorical (the story of the Pelican echoes the Bible). Whether the descriptions within A Designer Bestiary are similarly allegorical is disputed by historians and Human Resources professionals alike.

Continue reading Not Just Unicorns: A Designer Bestiary

Book Review | Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

Gen-Xers got a bad rap for a while in the 90s. There was the whole "slackers" media craze in the 90s (which some of us recognized as not having much to do with true Slack, Praise "Bob"). In retrospect, all that was about was a bunch of relatively smart middle-class youths looking at the jobs the previous generation had in mind for them and thinking: "Nah …." Which is normal intergenerational behavior. But at the time, I recall a lot of Boomer fretting about lazy kids these days, etc. Funny thing was, (and I’m thinking in terms of zeitgeists here, not actual data), it seems like the minute there was something actually interesting to do — like a radical technological and cultural shift happening out in the fabled West, for example — there was a collective packing of bags, moving out, and suddenly all the former slackers were putting in 80+ hour weeks at dot-com jobs. Followed by a boom, then a bust, then a boomlet, and here we all are.

80+ hours can make (some) sense (in certain circumstances, for not too long) when you’re changing the world at a crazy start-up. But it makes much less sense as the crazy start-up starts to get big and stable — and it takes a toll when done over the long haul. Unfortunately, some companies have tried to keep that aspect of their start-up culture a little too long. Which brings us to Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency by Tom DeMarco.

Preston Smalley recommended the book to me, and I found it pretty compelling. It’s aimed primarily at managers of knowledge workers (e.g. designers and software developers), but could also be useful, or at least therapeutic, for folks who’ve been subjected to certain kinds of work cultures. It’s really a couple of ideas wrapped up in one (smallish) package:

  • When dealing with folks like designers and developers, many ways corporations have of maximizing "efficiency" have limited success, can actually backfire and make things slower and more costly, and have pretty serious consequences in terms of burnout, turnover, low quality, lack of innovation. 
  • Following these, it discusses more general management issues that spring from the overall efficiency culture he’s just poked holes in, taking on various management fads and failings like management by fear and overemphasis on process and quality. He also takes some swipes at Dilbert here, which is always nice.
  • Finally he wraps his recommendations for what to do as a manager of knowledge workers primarily around planning for change: ways of creating flexible groups that can adapt to changing circumstances, building slack into schedules to manage risk, and having trust in your team.

There were a bunch of "a-ha" moments for me in the early chapters — DeMarco has a nice way of capturing the absurdities at the heart of some cherished workplace cultural habits simply and neatly. The later chapters are a little more scattered, but then figuring out what to do is always a little harder than figuring out what not to do.