Post Category → Sketches
Manager coverage and scope
People often ask what the different responsibilities are between levels of management: manager, director, and VP. First, there is no perfect way to draw this as organizations are all different. This sketch is an attempt to show different areas of coverage and daily interaction.
1. Team view: Primarily focused on the success and performance of direct reports.
2. Cross-functional: Working with other team leaders across the org
3. Upward: In addition to overseeing larger scope of org, works upward with senior leaders on strategy
4. Company level: Usually executives or department heads. Focuses at the company/board level
The importance of a portfolio and progression towards proof of impact. When you’re early in your career, having a really strong portfolio is the only thing people have to go off of. As you progress the evidence will be more on the proof of impact in your previous roles—success metrics, outcomes, results of the work.
Sketch inspired by my post, How experienced managers should think about career opportunities
Sketch from “the art of experiments”
I made a drawing for this article about running experiments. People often cite Steve Jobs as someone who made decisions solely from intuition so I drew a turtleneck to juxtapose it with data.
Binary thinking stunts innovation. Data and intuition are complementary, and should not be put up against each other. Quantitative data can foster creativity. The new Gmail UI isn’t perfect, and this isn’t a critique of it specifically, but rather an opportune time to discuss experimentation and testing. As Ran Liu says, growth design is good product design. The practice of growth is dear to my heart, and it typically gets a bad rep. Though there are certainly people who mispractice it, growth is not about getting people hooked. It’s helping guide people and teaching them to get the maximum value from your product. As a result, it grows your business. It’s one of the reasons our product pillar that has growth teams at Webflow is called Lifecycle.
Metaphors and allegories sketches
In issue 92 of Proof of Concept I did a piece about metaphors and allegories. This article covered how you can create metaphors and allegories to discuss really abstract and complex challenges. I made a drawing of a whale to depict Moby Dick, one of the most famous allegories of all time.
Instead of getting frustrated about literalism disrupting the process, find ways to deconstruct it. The reality is developing products is hard, and getting a group of people to have a common language and align on direction is even harder. It’s inevitable that this happens. Metaphors and allegories spark an excellent level of fidelity to building common understanding. Alignment doesn’t happen in one meeting and must be fostered over the course of the product development lifecycle. Let’s look at ways how these figures of speech can be used in the design process.
Original post: https://www.proofofconcept.pub/p/designing-with-metaphors-and-allegories
Startup growth: oil and water
When you join a startup that is growing rapidly, there are usually two groups of people. The first is the tenured employees who were there super early to get the company off the ground with the founders. The second are people who’ve been at other companies that have scaled to where the company desires.
The two groups integrate at first like oil and water. Instead of picking, “this is how we’ve done it” vs. “we did this at company y” the goal is to blend the cultures together.
Armenia x Colombia flags
For those who get confused like me, I made a drawing.