Writing by Bruno BergherArticles about making products, building teams and living life.https://brunobergher.com/2021-12-01T00:00:00+00:00Bruno BergherThe best managers do nothing: Action items as symptomshttps://brunobergher.com/writing/the-best-managers-do-nothing.html2021-12-01T00:00:00+00:002023-03-18T10:38:12+00:00Bruno Bergherme@brunobergher.com<img src="https://brunobergher.com/images/writing/the-best-managers-do-nothing.jpg" alt="" /><p>This zen-like bit of wisdom was once imparted on me: as a manager, you should never leave a 1:1 with action items.</p>
<p>Let that sink in for a second.</p>
<p>This doesn't mean you should blindly delegate. Or abdicate of your responsibility. It means doing the work of not taking issues into your own hand, so your employee can do so.</p>
<p>For one, <a href="/writing/answering-is-easy-asking-is-harder.html">as we had previously established</a>, you should strive to ask questions, not provide answers. It's hard, but it forces you to help the other person grow by seeing your [hopefully] more elevated perspective, explore the context, and get to their own conclusions.</p>
<p>This is an extension of the same idea. If you're trying not to provide answers, why not go a step further and strive to avoid action? This creates the space for your employee to take the learnings from the conversation and solve the problem themselves.</p>
<p>Sure, it makes it hard for you to come in and save the day, or to leace your fingerprint on the work. But you're not a a manager for the glory of it, right? You're in it to support your team, to help them grow, to ultimately make yourself obsolete.</p>
<p>So try to hold back not only the urge to answer, but even the urge to act. Watch growth happen.</p>
<hr />
<p><em>Please don't think I'm insane, there are plenty of reasonable action items you can take from your 1:1s, especially reviewing work products and taking bureaucratic actions. But pausing and checking is critical, and I like this pithy title.</em></p>
Rank-order it all: If everything is in bold, nothing is in bold.https://brunobergher.com/writing/rank-order-it-all.html2021-11-19T00:00:00+00:002023-03-18T10:38:12+00:00Bruno Bergherme@brunobergher.com<img src="https://brunobergher.com/images/writing/rank-order-it-all.jpg" alt="" /><p>This should not be an article, but experience has disappointed me. So today, I'm going to let you in on a big little secret.</p>
<p>Wanna improve your thinking? <strong>Rank-order your lists.</strong></p>
<p>Yes, select your list, click the button right next to the bulleted list, and go with the one with the tiny little numbers. Yup, that one. Then marvel at one of humanity's most valuable cognitive tools.</p>
<p>Look at the ideas next to the numbers, see if the order makes sense. Then move things around - there's a good chance number one wasn't that important. And which one matters most, two or three? No, they can't both be "equally important". Something's got to give.</p>
<hr />
<p>The thing is that we all live in a world of finite resources. Most often money, sometimes space, always time. So if you'll have to split whatever resources you have to accomplish multiple things, you'll invariably have to make trade-off decisions. Why not get ahead and prioritize upfront?</p>
<p>Structuring a project at work? <em>Rank-order the goals.</em></p>
<p>Planing for the new quarter? <em>Rank-order your objectives.</em></p>
<p>Buying a house? <em>Rank-order your must haves.</em></p>
<p>Looking for a new job? <em>Rank-order what you want from it.</em></p>
<p>Wanna take it to the next level? Keep the list to five items. Wanna blow your own mind? Limit it to three. It will force you to identify what really matters, and let go of the rest.</p>
<p>Do this with your team, partner, boss or whoever else is involved and you'll have no option but identify what matters more and what matters less.</p>
<p>Nothing brings clarity to the mind like acknowledging the scarcity which hides behind unordered, long lists.</p>
Extraneous Schedules: Investigating natural consequenceshttps://brunobergher.com/writing/extraneous-schedules.html2021-07-24T01:00:00+01:002023-03-18T10:38:12+00:00Bruno Bergherme@brunobergher.com<img src="https://brunobergher.com/images/writing/extraneous-schedules.jpg" alt="" /><p>(This may seem like a parenting article at first, but bear with me.)</p>
<p>90% of the stressful situations I have with my kids are about forcing my schedule onto them.</p>
<p>Be it a daily battle to go to school, a social event, a doctor's appointment, all of these have in common arbitrary time delimitations – schedules – which are useful for social living, but also entirely cultural and hard to justify for a young, developing brain.</p>
<p>From the many child development philosophies my wife and I <a href="/bookshelf.html">have investigated so far</a>, the Montessori method is consistently the most relatable and actionable. One of its tenets is that the most effective way to adjust child behavior is by expressing the <a href="https://montessoriacademysharonsprings.com/natural-consequences-vs-punishment/">natural consequences</a> of what their actions.</p>
<p>Instead of using behavioral approaches, like rewards and punishments, we aim to respect the child's intelligence and explain, in age-appropriate ways, the consequences of their actions. Instead of not eating from the floor because it's disgusting, it's because your tummy can hurt. Instead of trying to force them to sleep, you explain they may be too tired the next day to enjoy the playground.</p>
<p>But this is quite hard to accomplish when it comes to time-related conflicts for young kids. What's the consequence of being 5 minutes late to pre-school; won't the teachers be there then? So what if mom will be late for work; can't she continue working later? Etiquette also suffers from this: what's <em>really</em> going to happen if you talk while chewing?</p>
<p>The mental clarity which we need to articulate the natural consequence of their actions seems to trip over what are ultimately just social conventions. So they resist.</p>
<hr />
<p>I think we do it to ourselves too.</p>
<p>A lot of adult anxiety seems to come from unclear natural consequences.</p>
<p>We find ourselves doing things which are apparently expected of us, but we can't quite explain why. We work jobs we don't like and don't need, invest time with friends we don't enjoy, spend money on things we don't need. All of those breed anxiety, discomfort, emptiness.</p>
<p>We follow extraneous rules, some large societal equivalent of just getting-in-the-damn-car-to-go-to-school, we can't quite see the natural consequences. Because they aren't really there. It can be all a house of cards of unjustified models and expectations which don't need to apply to us, but we just don't see them as such.</p>
<p>But because we are supposedly grownups, instead of throwing tantrums, we keep our revolt to ourselves. We drink, we fight, we swallow and let it fester.</p>
<p>We can set ourselves free though, by investigating the natural consequence of our choices.</p>
<p>What will really happen if you don't follow what's expected of you? What if you start with the consequences which actually matter to you, and act to support those.</p>
<p>You may just get in the car and <strong>go</strong>.</p>
Getting useless feedback? It's your fault.: The four elements of effective askshttps://brunobergher.com/writing/getting-useless-feedback-its-your-fault.html2021-03-21T00:00:00+00:002023-03-18T10:38:12+00:00Bruno Bergherme@brunobergher.com<img src="https://brunobergher.com/images/writing/getting-useless-feedback-its-your-fault.jpg" alt="" /><p>Have you been there? You ask for someone's thoughts on an idea, and you get crickets? Or something irrelevant which won't make your idea better?</p>
<p>Or the other person brings up issues of which you were entirely aware, but had chosen not to solve yet? Or you even got a general 👍 or "I don't like it" for a complex proposal which help you improve it?</p>
<p>Disappointing, right?</p>
<p><strong>I'm sorry to say, but it may be your fault.</strong> The thing is, in this world there are <a href="/writing/how-old-romans-can-revamp-your-1-1s.html">things you can control and things you can't</a>. The quality of the feedback you get is way more under your control than you may realize.</p>
<p>To understand that, let's switch sides.</p>
<hr />
<p>Have you been asked, simply, <em>"what do you think?"</em></p>
<p>If yes, unless you're pathologically confident of your own opinions, you probably had a ton of questions whiz by your head:</p>
<ul>
<li>Well, about which part? This thing is so big!</li>
<li>And how polished is this idea? It doesn't seem like it's ready for prime time, but it has potential, but I don't want to offend anyone.</li>
<li>If I say this is good, will they launch this into the world tomorrow? I don't want that kind of responsibility.</li>
<li>If I don't answer today, which I stop their progress? I want to give this some thought, but I'm so busy today.</li>
<li>How attached are they to this part of the idea? I think it could be better, but don't want to say anything unless it's still subject to change.</li>
<li>Why do they think I'm capable of giving good feedback on this problem? I'm not an expert, maybe I can only help on a couple of small points.</li>
</ul>
<p>I'm only writing this hypothetical situation and I'm sweating here.</p>
<p>You shouldn't do this to others.</p>
<hr />
<p>And that's your path forward: empathy. Help them help you.</p>
<p><strong>The quality of the feedback you get is limited by the quality of your ask.</strong></p>
<p>If you can't make it clear what will help you, how on earth do you expect others to hit the bullseye of what you need? Sure, you may may be talking to feedback experts who can read between the lines and, through well-honed telepathy, will say exactly what you need to hear to improve your idea. But hey, that's unlikely – <a href="/writing/the-way-out-of-prescriptive-feedback.html">quite the opposite</a>.</p>
<p>So how do you bypass clairvoyance (and massive anxiety-generation) and make it easier for them? There's key information you can provide which will always be necessary for great feedback: context, need, timing and format.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Context:</strong> where does this idea exist, as it relates to other projects or initiatives? What does the other person need to know to evaluate it? How far along in its evolution is it: is it a first pass or the result of months of blood, sweat and tears?</li>
<li><strong>Need:</strong> what are you unsure about? Where do you need input? A great way to express this is in opposition to feedback you don't need:– decisions you've made, constraints you can't move, etc. It also includes what feedback you need from <em>whom,</em> since different folks have different areas of expertise and may be able to contribute in specific ways.</li>
<li><strong>Timing:</strong> when do you need feedback? Can they take their time and thing deeply about it or do you need to make a decision as soon as possible? If there's a deadline, explain it. If you're not in a rush, take the pressure off.</li>
<li><strong>Format:</strong> where and how do you need the feedback? Comments on a doc? Direct chat messages? Audio on Whatsapp? Give them space, but don't make them think too hard. Anticipate what's the most effective and convenient for them to get you the thoughts which, afterall, <em>you</em> asked for.</li>
</ul>
<p>At first look this may seem overly structured, or even defensive. But it's quite liberating, as you open up the path for others to express their thoughts in a productive way. When you provide this level of guidance, you avoid the main pitfalls of unclear asks:</p>
<ul>
<li>Feedback about things you know are broken, but haven't invested in fixing yet.</li>
<li>Feedback about things beyond your control or which can't be changed.</li>
<li>Feedback that is hard to parse or incorporate.</li>
<li>Feedback that is simply too late to act upon.</li>
<li>Ultimately, feedback that's not useful.</li>
</ul>
<p>And all because you took the reins of the ask.</p>
<p>In the end, it's that simple: <strong>ask better</strong>.</p>
<hr />
<p>PS: If you use Slack at work, here's a recipe to operationalize this:</p>
<ol>
<li>Create a channel called #input (or #feedback, or whatever)</li>
<li>When you need feedback from people, post requests which cover the points above: context, need, timing and format.</li>
<li>Do it a few times</li>
<li>Watch in awe as not only you start to get much better feedback, but others start to follow your lead.</li>
</ol>
Answering is easy, asking is harder: Leadership often is about not showing the wayhttps://brunobergher.com/writing/answering-is-easy-asking-is-harder.html2021-02-06T00:00:00+00:002023-03-18T10:38:12+00:00Bruno Bergherme@brunobergher.com<img src="https://brunobergher.com/images/writing/giving-answers-is-easy-asking-questions-is-harder.jpg" alt="" /><p>Oh, that urge to provide a solution.
<br />You know what I mean.</p>
<p>You're talking to someone – a member of your team, a co-worker, a friend, your child –, they're laying out a problem and asking for your help. It's a pretty complicated issue, and they don't know how to move forward.</p>
<p>You want to give them an answer, but you also know that if you do, even if you're confident of it, is a shortcut.</p>
<p>Most of the time it's a shortcut around learning, which is serious enough. But often it's a shortcut around the friction involved in developing self-awareness. Or a way to avoid hard (yet necessary) conversations with others. But you really want to help them. It may even be your job to do so!</p>
<p>So you tell yourself "I just want them to get through this, solve this problem and keep moving" and give them a solution or two for the problem at hand. You may even put a lot of effort into explaining the solution clearly. You consider alternatives, articulating truly valuable advice. The other person expresses their gratitude, maybe even some admiration for your ability to solve their problem. And you feel that warmth of being perceived as even smarter than before.</p>
<p>Well, that's easy.</p>
<p>You fished. And you know that teaching someone how to fish is much more valuable. But actually doing it requires significant self-restraint. Even for the best-intentioned. That's because we don't realize how many normal conversations are actually teaching moments in disguise.</p>
<p>Here I share a couple of tips for how to hold back your fishhook and keep your mind in a coaching mindset.</p>
<h2 id="first-pause">First, pause</h2>
<p>The first step is always to embrace silence.</p>
<p>Give the other person time to reflect on what they said. Sometimes simply framing and describing a problem can unlock a solution in people's minds (that's even easier to see in writing). If you jump to answers too quickly, you miss out on the opportunity to let the other person develop their own solution.</p>
<p>If that's hard for you, try to breathe. When you hear the ask for help, take a subtle, deep breadth, and give the other person a few seconds to complete their thought. It may be just enough for them to see a path forward and not only arrive to a new conclusion, but develop a mental map for how to get there.</p>
<h2 id="then-ask-questions">Then ask questions</h2>
<p>You're not a zen master in an 80s movie (if you are, wow, thanks for coming to my website). Don't make the silence too long. If it persists, you've got to fill it in. And now's the moment to ask another question back.</p>
<p>A good question is the most elegant type of nudge. It shows that you trust the other person to think on their own, leveling any tense power dynamic. It acknowledges the challenge as worthy of exploration. It gives a possible hint of a solution, without going all the way there.</p>
<p>In my experience, the best nudge-like, coaching questions are short, open-ended and run the risk of sounding like the caricature of a psychoanalysis session. But they work!</p>
<p>Four of the ones I find myself naturally using over and over again (and why) are:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>And what do <em>you</em> think?</strong><br /> People often have hidden ideas they're not ready to articulate, which makes them see a problem as much more of a wall than a small hurdle to overcome. When you create the space for them to express their true thoughts, the problem may shrink</li>
<li><strong>And how does that make you <em>feel</em>?</strong><br /> We sometimes say something is a problem not for objective reasons, but because we don't feel aligned or included in it. Articulating these feelings can point to the real underlying problem.</li>
<li><strong>And why is that a <em>problem</em>?</strong><br /> More often than not, unspoken assumptions make a challenge seem harder than it is. Digging into why the other person sees something as a problem can help reframe it and sometimes cancel it.</li>
<li><strong>And <em>what else</em> have you tried?</strong><br /> We make problems seem harder because of constraints we impose upon ourselves. We assume certain paths aren't acceptable, and soon hit a wall. By encouraging others to list what else they've explored, you can help them see solutions they may have overlooked.</li>
</ul>
<p>But please, don't constrain yourself to these. Try to find the best question for each situation, keep note of what worked and what didn't, and iterate on your approach next time.</p>
<h2 id="stick-through-it">Stick through it</h2>
<p>This way of engaging in conversation can drain quite a bit of your energy. That's is counter-intuitive, since you're not providing answers, you're "just" helping people find their own. But holding back from providing answers can be exhausting. Our culture rewards answer so much that sticking to questions can feel like a mistake</p>
<p>But that's the way towards empowerment and real growth, which makes it oh so worth it.</p>
<hr />
<p><em>Thanks to Neeraj Mathur for unknowingly nudging me into writing this.</em></p>
What My Children Can Teach You About Leadership (Part 1): Big lessons from small humanshttps://brunobergher.com/writing/what-my-children-can-teach-you-about-leadership-part-1.html2021-01-27T00:00:00+00:002023-03-18T10:38:12+00:00Bruno Bergherme@brunobergher.com<img src="https://brunobergher.com/images/writing/what-my-children-can-teach-you-about-leadership-part-1.jpg" alt="" /><p>I freaking love being a parent. Seriously.</p>
<p>I haven't found anything more rewarding than the failure-prone, sleep-depriving process of trying to mold the minds of little humans. Being on the receiving end of unconditional sure is quite a high. And I'm sure parents' genes wire them to think their kids are the cutest thing since the Big Bang.</p>
<p>But a big part of it is what little ones can teach us about life. And each other.</p>
<p>One unexpected area where I found plenty of lessons from my daughters is in leadership. Young children are such pure, unfiltered versions of humanity that they make so-called grown-ups easier to decode. You can see the mental and emotional processes happening in real-time (often loudly). And those are particularly noticeable in social contexts, even more so when involving power dynamics.</p>
<p>I'd love to share some of what my daughters have taught me so far, applied to work. So sit down, grab your sippy cup and let's talk about what my kids can teach you about leadership.</p>
<h2 id="for-motivation-focus-on-the-why"><strong>For motivation, focus on the why.</strong></h2>
<p>I can't count the times I've gotten upset that one of my kids isn't doing something – peeing before leaving, changing their clothes, getting into the car. Even when it's for their own good! Say, to go to the playground, or not to catch a cold, or eat the food of the gods, pizza.</p>
<p>And every time I have to remind myself: they don't know why I'm asking them to do this. While this man in his thirties finds the need for shoes obvious to go a restaurant, that's not quite an obvious connection to make for a toddler. But when I explain the reasoning behind my request, things tend to flow a lot easier.</p>
<p>As leaders, we often forget that we're privy to a lot more context than folks on our teams may be. Leaders are in different meetings, reading different documents, and usually are able to see more of the big picture. That information gap can make requests we make or guidance we provide a bit opaque, sometimes even seem contradictory. So always remember to walk back through the chain of reasons which led to whatever project/process/change/etc you're putting forth, as you're much more likely not only to get motivated folks, but often better ideas to achieve those goals than you could have thought of yourself.</p>
<p>Oh: keep in mind adults can be much better at seeing through bullshit than little kids, so you better have some solid reasons at hand, alright?</p>
<h2 id="add-a-new-person-get-a-new-team"><strong>Add a new person, get a new team.</strong></h2>
<p>I have a tattoo on my right arm which I got after my first child was born to remind me that, in a family, partners have to work hard to ensure they continue to have a relationship between themselves, irrespective of being parents. I had seen many couples lose their connection once a baby appeared on the scene, and wanted to avoid it. Which I believe we have.</p>
<p>What I didn't realize was how much the arrival of our second kid changed the dynamics between the three of us. The ways I relate to my wife and my first child are now entirely different, we're a new family in many ways.</p>
<p>That experience highlighted for me at work how the addition of a new person to a team completely changes that team's dynamics. When a team of five grows by one, the number of connections grows by five. This made me more disciplined in checking in with every member of my team when I on-boarded someone new and in observing the dynamics between everyone, not just the ones involving the new person.</p>
<h2 id="want-great-behavior-model-it-yourself"><strong>Want great behavior? Model it yourself.</strong></h2>
<p>I thought I knew how much kids were little sponges. But seeing my accent from Rio de Janeiro in my kid's speech, who's been growing up entirely in the US, drove it home. But what really hit me was seeing her engage in bad behavior which was clearly modeled after my own bad examples.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I eat broccoli quite voraciously, and so does she. I kid you not, one day she refused to eat a quesadilla, asking for broccoli instead. Parenting award anyone?</p>
<p>Joking aside, it's easy to see how much kids will copy our behavior. But that's something all humans do. In every group, the leaders' behavior is mimicked throughout, consciously or otherwise. So as a leader, if you want your team to engage in some sort of positive way of working – providing feedback, consulting other groups, being inclusive and empathetic towards different backgrounds and lifestyles, not interrupting others, promoting accountability without blame – you gotta lead by example.</p>
<h2 id="be-mindful-of-peoples-individuality"><strong>Be mindful of people's individuality.</strong></h2>
<p>Siblings can share 50% of their DNA (100% in the case of some twins) and still be such different people. It's blown my mind how two humans born in almost the exact same environment, raised by the same parents, with the same values, can be so diverse. It leads to significant challenges in how to deal with siblings with fairness, while still engaging with them in a way with speaks to their own unique personalities.</p>
<p>Isn't that one of the biggest challenges in people management? Being fair and consistent in how you evaluate the work and behavior of people in your team, while still honoring what makes each of them unique? How to encourage proactivity without only rewarding extroversion. How to praise thoroughness in some contexts, while encouraging the breaking of rules in others.</p>
<p>I like to think that the constant reminder at home of the myriad ways in apparently similar people can be very different and care about entirely different things has made me a much better manager. Any expectations of people fitting a certain mold have been shattered.</p>
<h2 id="growth-happens-through-freedom-within-clear-bounds"><strong>Growth happens through freedom within clear bounds.</strong></h2>
<p>A parenting device which we always try to use at home is the French notion of <em>cadre<a href="#footnote-1">¹</a></em>, or frame. In a nutshell, it means establishing very clear limits for your kids, but giving them complete freedom within those limits. A simple example is a safe playroom – <em>"for the next 30 minutes you can do whatever you want, but you gotta stay in this room"</em>. Or a box full of washable markers – <em>"you can't use any pens, but you can use these markers in any way you want."</em></p>
<p>This gives kids the confidence and respect to explore and discover. It allows caregivers to establish simple guidance and avoid constant corrections and nos. All because they're need to be thoughtful and responsible in creating a safe environment with clear limits.</p>
<p>I've found that a lot of confusion and frustration at work comes from the lack of a cadre. The lack of shared understanding of limits within which someone is expected to operate, combined with an expectation that they do creative, innovative work.</p>
<p>In practice, this has taught me to be very clear with folks on my teams about what's expected of them and what constraints there may be around their work – budget, timing, dependencies, including others, adherence to a general direction – while also encouraging them to explore a lot of different paths and possibilities within that space. And, of course, over time the constraints can change, be re-evaluated and negotiated. Especially as great work is done within those boundaries or, in other words, through growth.</p>
<h2 id="to-keep-your-sanity-keep-the-long-arc-in-mind"><strong>To keep your sanity, keep the long arc in mind.</strong></h2>
<p>As any parent knows, the day-to-day is hard. Sometimes brutal. The diapers are endless. Sleep seems like an eternal struggle. But as the months and years go by, we start to see that a lot of these difficulties are phases. You don't potty train forever. At some point they do put on their shoes with no complaints. That is obviously not the entirety of it – there are plenty of permanent challenges which parents can face – but kids grow and change so fast and so often that time can sometimes ease a lot of our tensions and frustrations on its own.</p>
<p>And this may have been the lesson from my kids that has most affected me at work: having the calm, patience and resilience to persevere through challenges. Since becoming a parent, I've seen few problems to solve at work which feel as hard or consequential as the raising of self-aware, empathetic, thoughtful adults.</p>
<p>That contrast has given me a level of steadiness and confidence which I know I lacked when I was younger, and something I'm impossibly grateful for.</p>
<h2 id="one-last-thing"><strong>One last thing</strong></h2>
<p>The main daily learning I continue to get from my daughters is <strong>presence</strong>.</p>
<p>Every. Single. Day.</p>
<p>Young kids' ability to live in the present, to not get anxious about the future or to hold grudges about the past is nothing short of remarkable. Their way of making you feel like there's nothing else worth happening in the universe is soul-warming. We somehow lose that level of natural mindfulness over time, and that's something I'm always trying to recover – at work, with others, with myself.</p>
<p>We "adults" have a lot to learn from them still.</p>
<hr />
<p><em>Big thanks to my wife, Taís, for reviewing a draft of this piece, for being a partner in seeing a lot of these lessons and for giving me the best family I could ever hope for.</em></p>
<p><a name="footnote-1"></a>
<strong>1</strong> I learned about the cadre in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13152287">Bringing Up Bébé</a>, a highlight in <a href="/bookshelf.html">my bookshelf</a>.</p>
How to Develop a Vision: Four steps towards imaginationhttps://brunobergher.com/writing/how-to-develop-a-vision.html2020-12-30T00:00:00+00:002023-03-18T10:38:12+00:00Bruno Bergherme@brunobergher.com<img src="https://brunobergher.com/images/writing/how-to-develop-a-vision.jpg" alt="" /><p><em>"What's your vision for this?"</em></p>
<p>Have you been asked this question? Did you freeze not knowing what it should be? Maybe you thought "How on earth does a vision emerge? I'm not a visionary, I'll just on execution."</p>
<p><strong>Bullshit.</strong> That's what you may have been told, but that's it's not true.</p>
<hr />
<p>A vision is critical for any undertaking. It keeps a team working together, in alignment. It rallies people in the face of adversity. It makes those blurry, far-away goals feel crisp and tangible. It fills in for data when you don't have any, and still need to make complicated or ambiguous decisions.</p>
<p>But where does it come from? The mind's eye? No, it comes from data; over and over I've seen a path for most people to develop a vision.</p>
<p>In a nutshell, it goes like this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Data</strong> accumulates as <strong>Experience</strong> leading to an <strong>Opinion</strong> which unlocks a <strong>Vision</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>You can't skip any of these steps, or your vision will fail. It will incomplete, uninspiring or unattainable.</p>
<h2 id="data">Data</h2>
<p>It all starts with individual data points.</p>
<p>First, you need to be exposed to lots and lots of isolated anecdotes, quotes, stories, events and stats about the subject matter you're working on. You can't just think about it, you need to get out there and bathe in information of all sorts.</p>
<p>At first, they're loose, floating in the weightless ether of a newbie's brain. Think of how, when learning a new language, you only hear random sounds and try to memorize what they mean. The whole doesn't yet make sense.</p>
<p>And over time, you start to see some patterns. You realize that people may describe the same thing in different ways. So instead of keeping all of those data points in isolation, you start to group them, to correlate them. As you learn new data points, you know where to file them. you develop the ability to recognize and reflect on new learnings.</p>
<p>In other words, you develop experience.</p>
<h2 id="experience"><strong>Experience</strong></h2>
<p>Experience is the traffic cop in your gut who lets to know what to follow and what to ignore.</p>
<p>It turns loose learnings into cohesive threads. It unlocks the possibility of focus, since you're not overwhelmed with new information anymore. It rounds edges and coalesces the shape of knowledge.</p>
<p>Beyond that, experiences build on each other. The neurons you've been dedicating to learning whatever it is you're learning start to have fun, unplanned meetings with other neurons, ones holding unrelated information, and new possibilities emerge.</p>
<p>And over time, the sum experiences give you confidence to think, more subjectively, more instinctively. Your brain can shortcut through the thousands of data points you collected, filter them through experience and say: "hey, this is a promising solution, that is not."</p>
<p>In other words, you develop an opinion.</p>
<h2 id="opinion">Opinion</h2>
<p>Opinions are unapologetically subjective but if you think about it, when derived from experience, they're actually supported by lots of objective data.</p>
<p>They are critical because for so many projects, from the most intellectual to the most manual, from the artistic to the scientific, making things is never deterministic. You never enough data – and never ever enough time – to make fully data-based decisions. So you need to rely on your judgment to evaluate solutions. And then jump in, dedicating resources, time, money towards the best bets.</p>
<p>And over time, you become more attuned to your opinions. You begin to throw some away and develop new ones. You gain the ability to tease your opinions apart and understand where they are coming from.</p>
<p>And they evolve from being mostly reactions to your environment – about what you hear, see, read, learn – and start to move towards possibilities – about what things should be like. You develop an idea of the direction things should go, of how they could be different, even if no one has gone there yet.</p>
<p>In other words: you arrive at a vision.</p>
<h2 id="there-you-go">There you go</h2>
<p>This progression is why some people who have worked for a long time in an industry can imagine a completely different world. Why designing a product or process to be used by people like yourself is easier than designing for people who are different.</p>
<p>The key ingredients for the process are time and thoughtfulness. You can compensate for time with intensity, by exposing to as much learning as you can, if you're diligent enough about processing your learnings.</p>
<p>But in my experience, there's a limit to how much you can compress time. Maybe our brains evolve to operate at a certain natural pace. Maybe it's the cross-pollination between work and life experiences.</p>
<p>What really matters is that people aren't born with a grand vision. So you should not divide the world between the visionaries and the rest. Like so many skills, the development of a vision can be learned and developed. Even if, like so many skills, it clearly comes more naturally to some than to others.</p>
<p>But it also means you can hire people who can develop a vision that goes much beyond what you already have. It means anyone can develop a vision for their slice of the world, be it how an industry changes, how a product evolves, how a team shapes up, how a community changes.</p>
<p>So remember. Data to Experience to Opinion to Vision.<br />The key is to live, and learn, with intention.</p>
The Best Thing to Learn is Yourself: An argument for self-discovery, from the mundane to the existentialhttps://brunobergher.com/writing/the-best-thing-to-learn-is-yourself.html2020-12-21T00:00:00+00:002023-11-18T11:59:24+00:00Bruno Bergherme@brunobergher.com<img src="https://brunobergher.com/images/writing/the-best-thing-to-learn-is-yourself.jpg" alt="" /><p>Learning is always worthwhile. The accumulation of insights, experience, lessons makes itself a multiplier: you accumulate ideas and skills which improve whatever you channel your energy towards later on.</p>
<p>And because of that, the highest ROI in learning you can achieve is to learn about yourself.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“I think a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time.”</em></p>
<p>Charlie Munger</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Recently, I've been trying to observe, meditate, consult with people who know me well to discover the answers to questions like this:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>What are your real values?</strong> What do you truly care about? Discern between things you know are important and ones which you're expected to – be it by family, friends, colleagues, your industry, culture, country, religion.</li>
<li><strong>What do you truly enjoy doing?</strong> What types of activities do you find yourself not looking forward to? What brings you to a state of flow and what causes you anxiety? Break down complex sets of activities – "work" into the many tasks which your job entails, "exercise" into the myriad ways you can get your body moving, etc.</li>
<li><strong>Who brings out your best self?</strong> What are the types of people who make you betray your values? Separate between those who praise you or make you laugh or reward you and the ones who elevate your core identity, who add to your energy levels.</li>
<li><strong>What types of challenges engage you?</strong> What problems feel draining? Discern between what's easy/relaxing but emptying and what's hard/effortful and fulfilling.</li>
</ul>
<p>And a lot more:</p>
<ul>
<li>What are the habits that make you thrive, feel balanced, feel fulfilled?</li>
<li>What are the physical objects which make a positive difference in your happiness?</li>
<li>What makes you feel like you're living a life which is true to your values?</li>
<li>What makes you mad? Mad and ready to walk away, but also mad and ready to fight?</li>
</ul>
<p>These questions may seem big and expect big answers, but they don't always do. I can give you some of my very pedestrian answers:</p>
<ul>
<li>I learned that if I go for too many days without going up hills, I feel caged. So (because I can), I moved somewhere hilly and accessible, and make the time to do this often, reducing conflict in my relationships and helping my concentration abilities.</li>
</ul>
<figure>
<img src="/images/writing/the-best-thing-to-learn-is-yourself-sunset.jpg" alt="Photo of a sunset over hills" />
<figcaption>I need these often.</figcaption>
</figure>
<ul>
<li>I learned that I abhor waste above most things, and that the only type of purchase I never regret is books. So I spend money on them freely, but I'm frugal with almost everything else, which avoids such feelings of wastefulness.</li>
<li>I learned that I need to understand a problem in detail before trying to solve it. So I prioritize work with people who value openness and thoroughness over assertiveness and confidence, which gives me the space to understand and explore.</li>
<li>I learned that putting time into thinking about clothes makes me feel drained and that owning lots of clothes makes me feel wasteful. So I pretty much wear the same outfit every day (which I do wash, mind you), allowing me to focus energy on more valuable things.</li>
<li>I leaned that I like to talk more than the average person. So I watch myself and make a deliberate effort to keep my mouth shut at times, to ensure others have the room to express themselves.</li>
<li>I learned that I really love to spend time at home and enjoy it. So I spend a somewhat disproportional amount of time arranging bookshelves and wall art in my home, which grounds and inspires me.</li>
</ul>
<p>And the list goes on.</p>
<hr />
<p>Such focus on self-discovery may seem outright narcissistic. The dozens of instances of "I" and "me" in this text so far do make it seem self-centered. But believe, well, me: it can be quite utilitarian. Borderline altruistic.</p>
<p>When you're well informed about yourself, you know who to surround yourself with. You find work which brings out the best of you (if that's within your control). You collaborate with others who complement yourself – and whom you can complement.</p>
<p>And when you're aware of how you perceive the world, you're better equipped to handle what it throws at you. Every little thing you experience, you do so t<a href="/writing/how-old-romans-can-revamp-your-1-1s.html">hrough the eyeglasses of your experience and state of mind</a>. By knowing what you value, how you process information, what affects your state of mind leads to precision, honesty and empowerment.</p>
<p>By associating yourself with the ones who get the most out of you, by aligning yourself with causes best aligned to your values, by working in ways which best fit with your personality, you get the most out of yourself. And then you bring the most out of others.</p>
<p>In the end, you increase your impact.</p>
<hr />
<p>This is a never-ending quest. Like any worthwhile discipline, there's no end to how much you can learn about yourself – more so when considering you're always changing. Not only most of your cells get replaced every few years, but your thoughts evolve, your values react and adapt to your environment, the people who surround around you provide influence in countless ways.</p>
<p>And it requires significant effort, an almost constant level of self-analysis. For some, meditation unlocks this type of self-learning. For me, it's walking on my own, having long conversations with my wife and getting feedback from work colleagues. But discovering what works for you is step one of the journey.</p>
<p>If you're not already dedicated to that quest, the start of a new year may be a great time to begin.</p>
<p>May you know yourself well.</p>
How Old Romans Can Revamp Your 1:1s: Using the Stoics for more productive manager/employee conversationshttps://brunobergher.com/writing/how-old-romans-can-revamp-your-1-1s.html2020-07-30T01:00:00+01:002023-03-18T10:38:12+00:00Bruno Bergherme@brunobergher.com<img src="https://brunobergher.com/images/writing/stoics-control.jpg" alt="" /><p>Coaching employees is often about reconsidering perspectives, instead of acting on problems. But that can be challenging. You most likely have found yourself in a situation were a team member:</p>
<ul>
<li>Was confident someone else didn't care not care about quality/speed/something</li>
<li>Was convinced someone else was trying to undermine their work or position</li>
<li>Was frustrated because of what seemed like incompetence in the part of others</li>
<li>Was sure they should be promoted, but expected it to happen to them, instead of doing the work</li>
</ul>
<p>They may have been right. But most of the time, they probably weren't seeing the full picture, or were barking at a wall that wouldn't move, which may have been challenging to you to coach through.</p>
<p>In any case, even if your situations don't sound exactly like this, manager-employee conversations often involve the process of:</p>
<ol>
<li>Parsing through frustrations</li>
<li>Contextualizing them</li>
<li>Working on solutions.</li>
</ol>
<p>In contexts like these, I've found help in some old Greek and Roman dudes: the Stoics.</p>
<h2 id="classical-philosophy-in-11s">Classical Philosophy in 1:1s?</h2>
<p>Stoicism is a philosophy school (quite literally, its name comes from Stoa, the porch outside Athens where Zeno, the first Stoic, set up his school) from classical Greek and Roman times. It had an emphasis on personal ethics through a very rationalistic approach. But you don't have to care about that – or agree with the core tenets of Stoicism – to leverage of their wisdom.</p>
<p>What matters is that over a couple of centuries, Stoic philosophers developed very useful frameworks to deal with the challenges people face in life, especially at the intersection of the outside world and how we experience it. It's fairly popular in some tech circles (<a href="http://thedailystoic.com/">Ryan Holiday</a> and <a href="https://tim.blog/stoic/">Tim Ferris</a> have a hand in that), but mostly with an emphasis on self-improvement.</p>
<p>I've found though that a couple these frameworks can be super helpful in coaching others, and I'd love to walk you through them.</p>
<h2 id="nothing-is-its-all-perceptions">Nothing <em>is</em>, it's all perceptions</h2>
<p>Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and striving stoic, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30659.Meditations">wrote a diary full of valuable reflections</a>, including:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact.<br />Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In other words: we aren't able to objectively know what happens in the world, because we engage with it through our senses. Since our experience – the events we've lived, upbringing, culture, struggles, etc – biases our senses, they change how we perceive the world.</p>
<p>Helping others see this goes a long way. You can use this by asking: how much of what you're experiencing is objective reality and how much of it you think could be tinted by your own perspectives? What was really said and what did you interpret? What was clearly intentional and to what did you attribute intention</p>
<p>Mind you that this is not about questioning the legitimacy of people's feelings – those are always legitimate. Or doubting that there could be malice in the world. It's instead about helping individuals notice the lenses that they wear in perceiving events and interactions, which is pivotal to help them assess and potentially reconsider their perspective.</p>
<h2 id="the-things-you-can-control-the-things-you-cant">The things you can control, the things you can't</h2>
<p>Epictetus, a Greek philosopher who started as a slave and earned his freedom to later on live an ascetic life, thought intensely about an idea:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In fact, he was even more assertive:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have no power over external things, and the good that ought to be the object of our earnest pursuit, is to be found only within ourselves.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It could be tempting to read this as a defeatist, individualist stance in regards to challenges ("I can't do anything about it, it's not in my control"), but it's quite the opposite: discerning between what you can control and you can't is quite empowering, and can really help you focus your efforts. By trying to identify what you control, you find new ways to act on challenges. <strong>Clarity over what you can change is priceless.</strong></p>
<figure>
<img src="/images/writing/stoics-control.png" alt="Focusing on what we can control" />
</figure>
<p>You can use this by helping team members explore how much they could actually do to improve a situation – when previously perceiving it as something happening <em>to</em> them.</p>
<p>You can also help them minimize frustrations by identifying things they in fact could not improve, reducing stress and focusing their energy on factors they could actually act upon.</p>
<h2 id="put-it-in-practice">Put it in practice</h2>
<p>Stoic philosophy<a href="#footnote-2"><sup>1</sup></a> is a lot about practice, and I encourage you to try these frameworks out when the need arises. And while I'm sharing these ideas from their Stoic perspective, you don't need to explain where they come from to put it in practice. You don't even have to subscribe to any other Stoic notions! <a href="#footnote-2"><sup>2</sup></a></p>
<p>I actually find that one of the most beautiful aspects of philosophy: you can incorporate lessons into your life, even the lives of others around you, without having to align to an ideology: just be sensible, empathetic and use whatever works for you.</p>
<p>If you do put this in practice, I'd love to hear about it! Please reach out on <a href="https://twitter.com/bbergher">Twitter</a> or write <a href="&#109;&#097;&#105;&#108;&#116;&#111;:&#109;&#101;&#064;&#098;&#114;&#117;&#110;&#111;&#098;&#101;&#114;&#103;&#104;&#101;&#114;&#046;&#099;&#111;&#109;">&#109;&#101;&#064;&#098;&#114;&#117;&#110;&#111;&#098;&#101;&#114;&#103;&#104;&#101;&#114;&#046;&#099;&#111;&#109;</a>.</p>
<hr />
<p><sup>1</sup> <a name="footnote-1"></a>If you're interested in further exploring stoicism, I'd recommend you stsrt with <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36340275-the-art-of-the-good-life">The Art of the Good Life</a> (which was my first foray into it) or <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29093292-the-daily-stoic">The Daily Stoic</a>. Great, practical accessible books.</p>
<p><sup>2</sup> <a name="footnote-2"></a>Other lines of thinking also got to similar conclusions. For example, the idea that That idea was formalized in a clinical/empirical way by Aaron Beck in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_therapy">Cognitive Behavioral</a> model, which is very effective in treating a set of mental health issues (depression particularly prominent example). And the power of discerning between what you can and cannot control is the core of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer">Serenity Prayer</a>, popularized by <a href="https://www.alcohol.org/alcoholics-anonymous/">AA's 12-step program</a>.</p>
Why PMs don't improve as fast as designers: Using PM Crits to up-level your product management team.https://brunobergher.com/writing/why-pms-dont-improve-as-fast-as-designers.html2020-05-18T01:00:00+01:002023-03-18T10:38:12+00:00Bruno Bergherme@brunobergher.com<img src="https://brunobergher.com/images/writing/pm-crits.jpg" alt="" /><p><strong>Product Managers are a hungry bunch.</strong> The role is broad, demanding and requires a subtle blend of analytical and qualitative skills, many of which can’t be taught in college. <em>But it’s disappointing to see how PMs tend to grow skills by themselves, in their own track, through trial and error, and not collectively as a team.</em></p>
<p>It may be that the role attracts particularly driven individuals, or how the job of leading a team leads to more competitive behavior. The cause isn’t that relevant, the opportunity is: <strong>PMs could still develop faster if learning as a team. I’ve seen it with designers before.</strong></p>
<h2 id="introducing-pm-crits">Introducing PM Crits</h2>
<p>I come from a design background, where critiques (affectionately referred to as <em>crits</em>) are common practice. Crits are structured, no-holds-barred craft-oriented feedback sessions. <a href="https://uxdesign.cc/the-why-and-how-of-effective-design-critiques-944313947fe4">I’ve always relied on them</a>, since they provide a reliable mechanism for learning from each other within a team.</p>
<p>So when I took over Product Management at Gladly, I saw an opportunity to speed up learning and elevate quality in my team through crits. It was a novel experiment, bumpy early on, but in a few weeks the results started to show. We saw better writing, more thoughtful sequencing of projects, more reliable success metrics, tighter but more impactful scope.</p>
<p>By now I’m convinced every product management team should try this practice, and I hope you do.</p>
<h2 id="why-are-crits-effective">Why are crits effective?</h2>
<p>Ken Blanchard, author of The One Minute manager, puts it well: <em>feedback is the breakfast of champions.</em> In general, early and regular feedback, in a safe space, consistently improves your work.</p>
<p>Plus the math is simple: why constrain your work to your own brain, if you can use <em>other people’s</em> brain cycles for your own benefit? Even if I produce good work, the idea of getting others to think about my problems and suggest ways to improve it, seems like a no-brainer.</p>
<p>So as a manager, I encourage members of my team to learn from other members’ successes and mistakes. PM Steve doesn’t have to bang their head against the wall to crack a hard problem: I can expose them to Maria’s point of view and experience in solving an analogous problem, which accelerates his learning. Crits create an environment and formalize a process for teams to learn and grow regularly and quickly.</p>
<p>Since PM teams are often composed of people with different, complementary skill sets, the value of feedback is compounded.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Crits create an environment and formalize a process for teams to learn and grow regularly and quickly.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2 id="how-to-run-one-of-these"><strong>How to run one of these?</strong></h2>
<p>Here I outline a summary of my recommended mechanics. You can go deeper in <a href="https://uxdesign.cc/the-why-and-how-of-effective-design-critiques-944313947fe4">my previous essay on design crits</a>, but the gist is the same:</p>
<h3 id="have-a-sign-up-sheet-so-team-members-can-take-their-slots-beforehand">1. Have a sign up sheet so team members can take their slots beforehand</h3>
<p>It’s valuable to get the team to sign up early on, to ensure you’re prioritizing what’s more urgent/important and encouraging people to present. As a manager, you may want to nudge your reports to bring their work to crit.</p>
<p>My PM team runs weekly 1-hour sessions; my design team has more volume and organized itself to run two 1-hour sessions a week. Frequency and length will be a function of your team size and how much new work they produce every week.</p>
<p>I’ve found that crits are awkward with fewer than 4 participants and unwieldy with more than 10. Keep group size in mind. Larger PM teams may want to split crits into smaller groups — keeping groups stable most likely yields more honest feedback, but rotating attendees might lead to positive cross-pollination.</p>
<p>30 minutes seems like the ideal time per presenter (a 1-hour session would have two presenters). Less can sometimes be enough for smaller items, but more than that and the popcorn of feedback stops popping.</p>
<h3 id="before-presenting-ensure-everyone-has-sticky-notes-and-sharpies">2. Before presenting, ensure everyone has sticky notes and sharpies</h3>
<p>There’s beauty to feedback written on sticky notes: it leads to conciseness, focus (one piece of feedback per note) and a practical bonus: once done, the presenter can stack all of the sticky notes, stick them on their laptop (they fit perfectly to the sides of your trackpad) and process them later, in their own time.</p>
<p>For distributed teams (the case for everyone right now), there are plenty of alternatives: digital replacements like stickies.io, Figma or collecting comments on Slack threads after the meeting. In any case, I’d still encourage participants to write feedback on stickies on their end, for the benefits above.</p>
<h3 id="when-presenting-ensure-presenters-articulate-what-kind-of-feedback-theyre-looking-for">3. When presenting, ensure presenters articulate what kind of feedback they’re looking for</h3>
<p>Not only is it discouraging to hear feedback you’ve already anticipated, but not every part of a document or presentation may be in the same level of refinement. I encourage my team to present in crit as early as possible, which means sometimes incomplete work. By giving presenters the opportunity (and responsibility) to articulate what kind of feedback they’re looking for, you keep the conversation focused and productive. That includes mentioning the target audience of the artifact and potentially the timeframe to work with (since more rushed projects may need to compress a couple steps in the process).</p>
<p>For a presentation format, you may want to try doing them on the spot or ask participants to pre-read what will be presented, so you can save some time, especially if there’s long form content. I have a preference for real-time, otherwise if a participant didn’t have time to read beforehand, they’re excluded from the session (along with their feedback).</p>
<h3 id="while-presenting-accept-no-interruptions-except-for-clarifying-questions">4. While presenting, accept no interruptions, except for clarifying questions</h3>
<p>The presenter is bound to be in a vulnerable position, so let them tell their entire story arc before anyone steps in with feedback. More often than not, I see notes being written and then crumpled, a symptom that the presenter organically answered the point which was being noted.</p>
<h3 id="once-each-presentation-is-done-go-around-the-room-with-each-person-sharing-their-feedback-while-minding-time">5. Once each presentation is done, go around the room, with each person sharing their feedback, while minding time</h3>
<p>You’ll only get honest feedback if the participants feel like they can share safely, so make sure it flows continuously and that the presenter doesn’t spend too long defending their choices, instead mostly listening to what their peers have to say.</p>
<p>A couple tips:</p>
<ul>
<li>If the team lead/manager is in the room, they should go last. It squashes any chance of people changing their feedback to align with theirs (yours?).</li>
<li>To keep things moving, make each person, when they’re done sharing their feedback, nominate the person to go next.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="keep-the-mood-honest-but-positive">6. Keep the mood honest, but positive</h3>
<p>There isn’t sense in doing this if feedback isn’t detailed, pointed and actionable. But at the same time, people can take feedback personally (especially more junior folks). As a leader/facilitator, pay attention to ensure a productive balance between honesty, precision and friendliness.</p>
<h2 id="what-to-bring-to-crit">What to bring to crit?</h2>
<p>Figuring out what to bring to PM crit was actually a significant challenge at first. The artifacts of design work are easily critiqued: diagrams, flows, mocks, prototypes. PM craft is more about words –strategy documents, PRDs, metrics analysis, process definitions. That said, you can still critique those, especially if your encourage your team to keep them short. My PM team regularly brings project decks (our take on PRDs), product documentation drafts, pricing proposals, etc.</p>
<p>It’s important to have an artifact to present and discuss, though, because crits are as much about the big picture as the details: word choice, sequencing, etc. So I’d discourage crits about strictly verbal articulations.</p>
<h2 id="what-happens-with-crit-feedback">What happens with crit feedback?</h2>
<p>Crit ≠ contract. It’s up to the presenter to take the feedback, process it, and implement as they see fit. There should be no expectation that loops be closed (though that can be helpful at times).</p>
<p>That’s pretty much it. The team learns and grows together quite fast, and the quality of both the craft (structure, word choice, articulation) and thinking (strategy, sequencing, consideration of alternatives) grows significantly. And once everyone has gone through it a few times, it engenders trust and makes for a stronger team.</p>
<hr />
<p><em>Thank you to Bruno Orsini, Ayush Khanna and Brett Goldstein who provided feedback on this piece.</em></p>
The way out of prescriptive feedback: A simple framework for alignment and freedomhttps://brunobergher.com/writing/the-way-out-of-prescriptive-feedback.html2018-11-29T00:00:00+00:002023-03-18T10:38:12+00:00Bruno Bergherme@brunobergher.com<img src="https://brunobergher.com/images/writing/the-way-out-of-prescriptive-feedback.jpg" alt="" /><p><strong>I bet you’ve experienced it.</strong> You put a ton of thought into something, and present it to someone, looking for feedback. But they crush your dreams. Instead of giving you room to make things better, they prescribe solutions, they tell you what to do.</p>
<p><strong>Or perhaps you’ve been on the other side.</strong> Someone on your team is presenting something to you. Deep down you want them to think on their own, to use their talent and experience to find the best solution. But instead, you go and tell them what to do. They’re clearly unhappy and the results are never quite what you expected.</p>
<p>Prescription takes infinite shapes. <em>This button should be red. The right word here is X</em>. <em>You should be using garlic, not onions.</em> It doesn’t matter what you do: prescriptive feedback is likely some part of your daily life.</p>
<p>It literally sucks. It drains the life out of interactions, it removes the passion from any project or relationship. No smart person wants to be told what to do. But then, what <em>can</em> you do? </p>
<hr />
<p>Well, over the years I’ve developed a dead-simple framework for providing feedback without the prescription, tried and tested across many companies and personalities. Drumroll, please.</p>
<p><strong>Start with why, then illustrate</strong>.</p>
<p>I know, it barely seems worthwhile to write 500 words on this. But I’ve seen so many smart people struggle with prescriptive feedback, that this seemed worth sharing. So let me expand.</p>
<p>If you’re giving someone feedback on some sort of output, even if you have a clear idea of what the right solution should be, <strong>hold it back</strong>. Start with <em>why</em> you think something should be different, getting on the same page as the listener, and then <em>illustrate</em> it with a suggestion. For example:</p>
<p>Instead of</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This button should be red.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>try</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We agreed it’s critical that users know what the primary action is, right? Maybe making this button red will make that clear enough. What do you think?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Instead of</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The right word for this is X</p>
</blockquote>
<p>try</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As you mentioned earlier in this document, differentiation in this market is critical. Perhaps calling it X instead of Y will make us much more unique. What do you think?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The person receiving the feedback gets not only an opportunity to understand how you’re thinking, but also an opportunity to come up with a different solution. This framework:</p>
<ol>
<li>Aligns you two around goals (or highlights misalignments)</li>
<li>Gives the listener room to explore solutions</li>
<li>Nudges them on what you suspect is a good path (but may not be)</li>
</ol>
<p>Even if they take a different direction than you suggested, because you’ve aligned on the <em>why</em>, the <em>what</em> is more likely to be good.</p>
<p>Alright, fine, that’s great when giving feedback. But should I do if I’m on the receiving end?</p>
<p>In that case, flip it on its head: when you hear prescriptive feedback, acknowledge it, then ask: “<em>what would you want to accomplish with that?”</em> Extract the <em>why</em> from the <em>illustration</em>. The other person won’t have any option other than explain their thinking. Boom! Now you can provide alternatives which fit their reasoning.</p>
<p>You can also send them a link to this essay ☺</p>
<hr />
<p>So yeah, it’s silly simple. But super powerful. Try doing this next time you’re giving or receiving feedback. <strong>People will be happier, results will be better, smiles will abound.</strong></p>
Cross-functional empathy for designers: A human-centric approach for working with humans.https://brunobergher.com/writing/cross-functional-empathy-for-designers.html2018-03-13T00:00:00+00:002023-03-18T10:38:12+00:00Bruno Bergherme@brunobergher.com<img src="https://brunobergher.com/images/writing/cross-functional-empathy.jpg" alt="" /><p>As designers, a huge part of our job lies in empathizing with users. It’s exciting to see how far we’ve come as a discipline in becoming more user-centric, more research-driven and better at tying our ideas to actual user needs.</p>
<p>Yet many of us struggle with applying that same level of empathy to the people we work with.</p>
<p>I’ve lost count over the years of how many times I’ve heard designers lament that engineers have no taste, and don’t appreciate the details of their designs. Or complain that the scope of their project is never enough so they have no room for getting into the details and doing a proper job. I’ve even seen senior design leaders roll their eyes and say things like <em>“Don’t even get me started on product managers,”</em> belittling their central role in teams.</p>
<p>Overall, there’s a palpable frustration in designers who feel that their great ideas remain unbuilt, that their attention to detail is ignored, that their peers simply don’t care about design. Yes, there’s obviously a chance those peers might actually be undereducated, or just not care about design. But in organizations with otherwise healthy cultures, that actually <em>invest</em> in hiring designers, that’s probably not the case.</p>
<p>What the folks complaining of such situations fail to understand is that your ability to bring others onboard and buy into your ideas is what ultimately determines their value. The best idea, if presented terribly, becomes a terrible idea. And a great presentation isn’t just about nice visuals: <strong>it’s about communicating with your audience.</strong></p>
<h2 id="empathy-to-the-rescue">Empathy to the rescue</h2>
<p>The key to overcoming these challenges is actually laid out in the first step of the human-centric design process you already follow: <strong>empathy</strong>.</p>
<p>You already go deep into researching and talking to users to understand their context, their needs, and their frustrations. Now, you just need to put a bit of that towards your co-workers in other functions:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Speak their language.</strong> Nerding out on typefaces and grid systems is fun, but their value may not be as apparent to engineers or marketers. Observe your peers and identify what they care about, then highlight features of your designs which speak to those points.</li>
<li><strong>Assuage their fears.</strong> When evaluating your ideas, take a few moments to think about how your co-workers will receive them. Could your bold idea be perceived as plain old scope creep? Could you be prioritizing small details over core user journeys? If so, rethink what you’re about to propose. And if you’re deliberately proposing something kinda crazy, say you’re doing so upfront, and offer it in addition to a simpler, more predictable option.</li>
<li><strong>Enable their success.</strong> While craft is top of mind in a design career, product managers are rewarded if they ship effective products, on time; engineers are rewarded for building fast, scalable, low-maintenance code; marketers kick the most butt when they generate lots of revenue. So while as a designer you should to push for the best solution for each problem, remember that if it’s hard to maintain, ineffective or ships too late, it doesn’t make your peers look good, leading to resistance.</li>
<li><strong>Invite them into your process.</strong> Designers often have the unfortunate reputation of going off on their own and coming back with a supposed masterpiece. Great design often has the inaccurate reputation of being the product of bursts of divine inspiration. But not knowing what progress is being made (and what’s coming next) makes others anxious and unwilling to trust you. Share your thought process through iterations, break work into minor milestones and let your peers know when to expect the next revision.</li>
<li><strong>Show you’re on the same team.</strong> There’s no sense in seeing another function’s differing priorities as a reason to be adversarial. Strive to find common ground (the value/message you want to deliver to users) and tie all your arguments to it. Instead of butting heads because you want different things, direct perspectives towards the fundamental result all of you want to achieve. At a broader, organizational level, aligning designers’ growth path to the success of their product teams (not just their individual performance) can also be effective.</li>
</ul>
<p>These are subtle but impactful changes you can make to how you approach cross-functional collaboration. Time and time again I’ve seen designers adjust their communication and presentation style along these lines and achieve much better results. They earn their teams’ trust, which ultimately gets them closer to shipping what they had envisioned in the first place. And then, <strong>everybody wins.</strong></p>
Coherent, Not Consistent: Consistency in UI Design is overvaluedhttps://brunobergher.com/writing/coherent-not-consistent.html2017-08-07T01:00:00+01:002023-03-18T10:38:12+00:00Bruno Bergherme@brunobergher.com<img src="https://brunobergher.com/images/writing/coherent-not-consistent.jpg" alt="" /><p>Yes, it’s a worthy goal to make different features feel as if designed by the same person, when in reality it’s a team of dozens. Yes, reusing components leads to uncountable savings in repetitive work and correction. Yes, it’s impossible to establish identity for a brand which never presents itself in the same way.</p>
<p>But too often I see teams spending days arguing about the how they’re spacing elements differently between Android and iOS. Obsessing about the minor differences in the text color between what’s on the new tab they’re shipping and an existing one. Stressing whether the tip of a tooltip is should be at 30- or 35- degree angle. <em>All these while letting core interaction problems in their products go unchecked.</em> </p>
<p>Even worse: I often see great ideas slowed down — or even blocked — because they don’t adhere to some set of fine-grained visual design guidelines. Consistency (or rather its relentless prioritization) has significant costs:</p>
<ul>
<li>It adds overhead to new projects which still need validation before becoming part of the product</li>
<li>It creates an incentive system where designs can be shot down because of details, not how well they solve user problems</li>
<li>And the costliest of of all: it eats up time which could be better spent on improving your product</li>
</ul>
<p>So I try to approach these questions with a different priority: <strong>coherence</strong>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Coherence means making sure every part of your product feels like it belongs there, instead of trying to make them exactly the same.</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>It means talking to users across your UI using a similar tone. It means the verbs and nouns of your product are always referred to in the same way. It means sticking to a couple key brand elements which never change, but letting teams innovate in everything around them.</p>
<p>Coherence is multi-platform thinking which focuses on letting users naturally continue their journey from device to device. It’s not wasting energy ensuring buttons look exactly the same, while neglecting the smoothness of end-to-end flows.</p>
<p>Coherence is letting product teams move fast and validate new features that feel natural in whole of the product. It’s not bogging them down with strict guidelines before they’re even sure of what will work.</p>
<p>That said, there are key parts of a product where consistency can’t be abandoned:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>Information architecture:</em> unless dictated by platform conventions, users should <em>always</em> be able to find the information they need in the same place, across devices.</li>
<li><em>Copy (or rather nomenclature):</em> if ‘people’ on your product are called ‘members’, <em>always</em> call them ‘members’. Stick to the same nouns and verbs for key constructs and actions, unless you’re trying to confuse users.</li>
<li><em>Iconography:</em> as noted by <a href="https://medium.com/@jordan_93210?source=post_header_lockup">Jordan Julien</a> in a response to this, icons should always have the same meaning (and the same concept should always be represented by the same icon) throughout your UI. This is similar to the point above on nomenclature, but the visual kind.</li>
<li><em>Brand:</em> one could argue that brand is every single touchpoint with a user, but there are undoubtedly key elements which convey it. <em>Never</em> deviate from brand color, type and imagery standards.</li>
</ul>
<p>For everything else, clean it up every few months. Hold consistency-themed bug bashes. File mid-priority bugs and enforce fixing them in a medium timeframe. Just don’t block innovation. In the end, it’s fine to accrue design debt if your product is doing great. It’s the cost of success.</p>
The Vicious Cycle of Shipping Slow: The hidden cost of taking too longhttps://brunobergher.com/writing/the-vicious-cycle-of-shipping-slow.html2017-08-07T01:00:00+01:002023-03-18T10:38:12+00:00Bruno Bergherme@brunobergher.com<img src="https://brunobergher.com/images/writing/the-vicious-cycle-of-shipping-slow.jpg" alt="" /><p>You know that moving slowly limits your options. It causes you not to try to get it right as many times as your competitor might, you iterate less and end up with subpar solutions. The value is obvious.</p>
<p>Something you might not notice is the effect it has on the culture of your product teams. When you take a long time to ship and don’t iterate soon afterwards, the people making your product feel like they won’t have a chance to reevaluate their decisions. And that is the mother of all brakes. </p>
<h2 id="the-cycle">The cycle</h2>
<p>When <em>engineers</em> feel they won’t have a chance to clean up their code in a following iteration, they feel compelled to anticipate everything which could go wrong, over-investing in architecture for something which might work and handling obscure edge cases which may not matter. The need to get it right the first time makes them even slower.</p>
<p>When <em>designers</em> feel they won’t have a chance to improve on an experience soon, they feel compelled to spend more time finding the perfect solution, polishing details and not letting any imperfections go. The need to get it right the first time makes them even slower.</p>
<p>When <em>product managers</em> feel they won’t have a chance to iterate or revisit their hypotheses, they feel the responsibility to pick the right answer the first time, which requires more analysis and hard to articulate, one-sided decisions. The need to get it right the first time makes them even slower.</p>
<p>When <em>anyone</em> thinks they’ll won’t be able to improve upon what they’re shipping, scope grows out of control, because this is the one chance to do it. The need to get it right the first time makes everyone even slower.</p>
<p>And the cycle repeats, slower each time.</p>
<h2 id="break-out-of-it">Break out of it</h2>
<p>When you make quick decisions, launch fast and iterate soon afterwards:</p>
<ul>
<li>Designers let go of small details and completeness, because they know they’ll have to make changes to the design anyway. They still get to polish things, but over time, not at once.</li>
<li>Engineers let go of perfect architecture, because they know actual usage will better inform their design.</li>
<li>Product Managers let go of having the right answer, because they’ll be able to validate it and adjust it, and will eventually get there.</li>
</ul>
<p>So next time you’re thinking of delaying a project just a little bit, even if it’s to improve your chances of getting it right, think about the hidden costs of that decision down the line. It may be worth it, but good chances are it’s not.</p>
<p>Assume you’ll be wrong. Ship fast. Revisit quickly. <strong>Now go!</strong></p>
The why and how of effective design critiques: Elevate your product, elevate your teamhttps://brunobergher.com/writing/the-why-and-how-of-effective-design-critiques.html2016-11-29T00:00:00+00:002023-03-18T10:38:12+00:00Bruno Bergherme@brunobergher.com<img src="https://brunobergher.com/images/writing/design-crits.jpg" alt="" /><p>Critiques are a time-proven way of pushing design ideas forward. Art and design schools have used them as key teaching venues for decades. And while common in corporate teams, I suspect they’re often underutilized.</p>
<p>To start, it’s worth pointing that critiques ("crits"):</p>
<ul>
<li>Are not <strong>generative sessions</strong> (divergent, idea generation meetings). These tend to involve different project stakeholders and happen early in the design process.</li>
<li>Are not <strong>evaluative sessions (</strong>convergent, approval-oriented meetings). These focus on making a decision, and by definition happen later in the process.</li>
</ul>
<p>Critiques are <strong>iterative sessions,</strong> where the design team comes together to comment on work in progress. It’s an opportunity to enrich solutions between the divergent/generative beginning and the convergent/decisive end of a design cycle.</p>
<h2 id="why-critiques">Why Critiques</h2>
<p>Some of the advantages of having critiques sessions are obvious.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”</em></p>
<p>Ken Blanchard</p>
</blockquote>
<p>First of all, <strong>you get better results</strong>. The more capable, dedicated people look at a problem, better the chances of finding an elegant solution.</p>
<p>Critiques also <strong>increase the chance of cross-pollination</strong>. When designers from different sub-teams or who are tackling different problems meet, they create opportunities to spot patterns in their problems and solutions and to rethink their approaches based on the big picture. Along the same lines, critiques <strong>allow organic consistency to emerge</strong>: if your product lacks a comprehensive style guide, they help ensure consistent patterns are used.</p>
<p>But what excites me the most about crits are how they can help a design team grow, both as a group and as individuals.</p>
<p>By having to quickly articulate a problem, its constraints and proposed solutions, designers <strong>exercise their presentation skills. By doing so</strong> regularly and in a safe space, they get better at it. And since crits are about gathering feedback, designers must be able to <strong>effectively articulate what feedback is valuable and handle it well.</strong></p>
<p>Designers often feel frustrated by seemingly off-topic or untimely feedback when presenting to other functions (product, engineering, marketing, etc). What they often don’t realize is that it’s their own fault. <em>It’s a designers responsibility to set up the conversation so the scope of feedback is valuable to them at a given point in time.</em> Critiques force designers to do so, but in a safer space than an evaluative presentation.</p>
<p>It can also be hard to handle criticism in cross-functional presentations, especially after spending tons of energy. Critiques can help designers foresee objections, strengthening their designs, and develop the ability to handle them with grace.</p>
<h2 id="how-to-run-a-critique-session">How to Run a Critique session</h2>
<p>It would be silly to say there’s one best way of running critiques. The art school model tends to be pretty brutal, and to promote growth through negative reinforcement. Some teams love rules, some teams less so. But I’ve observed over time that successful critiques share a few attribute, which I recommend here.</p>
<h2 id="people">People</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>Design-team only.</strong> Critiques should be a safe space where people can be themselves, present incomplete work and discuss minutiae which could be deemed irrelevant by other functions. That’s why I believe attendance should be limited to members of the design team (which in my definition would include UX Researchers, writers, etc).</li>
<li>In terms of numbers, <strong>4 people seem to be the critical mass</strong> for a session to flow. Large groups (15+) can derail the conversation — or just not fit in the allotted time. You can work around that issue by breaking sessions into multiple meetings on different days.</li>
<li>It’s also important to <strong>appoint a facilitator</strong>, whose role is to balance the more and less vocal people and ensure the session’s fluidity. They don’t have to be a team lead, and the role can be on a rotation. And while the facilitator should be encouraged to also provide feedback, their thoughts don’t count any more or less than the other participants’.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="logistics">Logistics</h2>
<ul>
<li>Make sure your critiques are <strong>regular and frequent</strong>. They should be part of the team’s routine. One hour once a week seems to be a favorite. Many teams also formalize a number of slots (say 3 slots, 20 minutes each) which can be booked ahead, so sessions are fully scheduled ahead of time.</li>
<li>If they’re not, the facilitator should <strong>prepare an agenda</strong> beforehand, calling for presenters. You may want to have a fixed presenter rotation, but ideally your critiquess are so valuable (and fun!) that presenters volunteer by themselves.</li>
<li>Presenters should <strong>make it clear if they’d rather hear feedback or questions during their presentation or afterward</strong>. It’s up to personal preference, but I see much better results when it comes at the end: many questions are organically answered during the presentation and it allows the presenter to control the timing.</li>
<li><strong>Present unfinished work</strong>. The rougher the better — there’s more room for new ideas to make it in. That’s why it’s so important to create a safe space: designers should be comfortable sharing incomplete ideas and low fidelity mocks with no fear of judgement.</li>
<li>While a presenter is speaking, participants should <strong>write their thoughts on sticky notes, and read from them later</strong>. This avoids interruptions, forgotten comments and saves on note-taking: presenters can just take all sticky notes back to their desk to process after the meeting. It also forces participants to articulate their ideas in writing or, better yet, sketches.</li>
<li>It might seem random, but I’ve noticed that <strong>when everyone stands up</strong> during the course of the meeting, <strong>feedback flows best</strong>. The passive, evaluative posture of leaning back on conference room chairs seems to lead to less participation.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-note-on-distributed-teams">A note on distributed teams</h2>
<p>Critiques surely work best when the entire team is in the same room, standing up, looking at the same screen or print-out. It’s hard to recreate that same dynamic for distributed teams, especially across time zones.</p>
<p>One definite requirement is a great video-conferencing system and screens large enough for people’s expressions to be captured. Good cameras where sticky notes can be shown are also important. And facilitators must pay extra attention to ensure everyone participates especially if there’s a significant difference in number of people between HQ and other locations.</p>
<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
<p>To summarize, my recommendations are to:</p>
<ul>
<li>Make crits regular and frequent</li>
<li>Make them exclusive to the design-team</li>
<li>Appoint a facilitator</li>
<li>Collect an agenda beforehand</li>
<li>Present unfinished work</li>
<li>Ensure presenters are clear about what feedback is valuable</li>
<li>Write feedback on sticky notes</li>
<li>Stand up if you can</li>
</ul>
<p>And treat critiques like any design project: <em>ideate, test, iterate</em>. Don’t settle for this model, and don’t give up if things don’t flow right away. Find the model which works for your team, and you’ll be harvesting benefits for a long time.</p>
The Design of Job Descriptions: A bottom-up, alignment-oriented approachhttps://brunobergher.com/writing/the-design-of-job-descriptions.html2015-10-12T01:00:00+01:002023-03-18T10:38:12+00:00Bruno Bergherme@brunobergher.com<img src="https://brunobergher.com/images/writing/the-design-of-job-descriptions.jpg" alt="" /><p><strong>Role ambiguity sucks.</strong> It leads to disappointed employees, wasted time, failed interviewing processes. If people don’t know exactly what their role is, they can’t perform. If managers don’t define clearly the roles of their employees, they can’t assess their performance. And a lot of that frustration comes, in my experience, from sucky job descriptions.</p>
<p>You probably think job descriptions are terribly boring. I won’t judge you. Most of the time they’re boilerplate text; when writing new ones, hiring managers tend to just copy the last one they used, tweak it a little bit, and publish. If you write them this way, then they’re certainly boring.</p>
<p>I see things differently though: if you <strong>design</strong> your JDs — instead of just <strong>writing</strong> them — you can turn lifeless documents into an alignment-producing, consensus-driving, ever-evolving communication tool. It leads to effective interviewing, and ultimately to role clarity. I can also find them pretty exciting, but please don’t judge me.</p>
<p>Here I propose that if you approach them as a design project (define the problem, understand your users, generate low-fidelity solutions, iterate), you’ll end up with results which will leave you as excited about them as me.</p>
<p>Keep in mind this approach is most useful for <em>new</em> positions — when you’re hiring the first 2 or 3 people with a certain title (for example, your first few engineers) or creating a completely new role within the company (think hiring the first designer, marketer, salesperson, HR lead, etc).</p>
<p>By the time you’re hiring your 19th designer or your 57th engineer, you should have a job description which is extensible to dozens of roles and a systematized interview process. In other words, I can’t imagine this approach being too useful for a big company.</p>
<h2 id="purpose">Purpose</h2>
<p>The first key differentiation is between job descriptions and job posts. Posts are a concrete manifestation of descriptions, and can perhaps help attract great candidates, or at least clarify roles. But they’re just text documents. Job descriptions are the soul of job posts.</p>
<p>JDs define what you’re looking for — and very importantly, what you’re not looking for. They take the infinite pool of possible candidates and draw a line around what’s acceptable, and leaving what isn’t outside. A great job description is one with a sharp boundary, removing the blurriness which leads to ambiguity.</p>
<h2 id="audience">Audience</h2>
<p>The second key differentiation is about who benefits from JDs. Yes, job posts are for external candidates, but the main audience of the job description itself is actually internal. A great JD is actionable: it lets recruiters identify who to reach out to, it lets employees know who to refer, and above all, it defines the hard criteria for the interviewing team to evaluate.</p>
<p>So instead of writing an ad (aspirational, non-specific, over-inclusive), approach the problem as if you were writing product specifications (straightforward, actionable, uncompromising).</p>
<h2 id="structure">Structure</h2>
<p>When you create a new role, especially one with no existing parallels within the team, you’re in fact going through an exercise of defining the boundaries of a very amorphous set of attributes. You hopefully know what the job will entail, and have an idea of what type of professional would be suitable for it, but it doesn’t mean that just anyone with a certain set of skills (or worse: a set certifications/experience) will be the right fit.</p>
<p>When interviewing candidates you’re looking at several other aspects, and you should reflect them in your job description. I approach this by breaking these characteristics into three categories: responsibilities, profile and skills/experience.</p>
<p><strong>Responsibilities: what the hire will do.</strong></p>
<p>Clear, concrete, objective tasks the candidate will execute day-to-day, or be responsible for supervising. This is where you come to full agreement about how far the role extends and define the main criteria upon which performance will be evaluated later on. While this list must encompass the primary technical needs of the job, it should also include secondary but important responsibilities – or even aspirational goals.</p>
<p><em>Examples: collaborate on product strategy; execute on visual design; maintain database infrastructure; educate salespeople on product features; manage customer acquisition for the product; develop the department’s hiring brand; publish articles in industry publications.</em></p>
<p><strong>Profile: what are they like.</strong></p>
<p>Objective descriptions of subjective individual characteristics. This is where you draw the line about the temperament, values, social skills and priorities your candidate will need to excel on the job. I see these often taking the shape of an adjective followed by an explanation.</p>
<p><em>Examples: pragmatic, visionary, flexible, disciplined, charismatic, driven, communicative, results-focused, team-oriented, humble, inspiring, flexible.</em></p>
<p>What’s really important here is not to just dump a bunch of adjectives into a list. The adjectives in the examples above are all positive, but it’s unlikely that someone would be both pragmatic and visionary at the same time, or that you’d be able to find someone who equally humble <em>and</em> inspiring. Use this opportunity to figure our exactly who you need on your team.</p>
<p><strong>Skills/Experience: what they must have done before.</strong></p>
<p>Justifiable skills which are needed for the job, and/or the experience to prove them. This is the kind of thing you’ll evaluate in resumes and exercises. Be thoughtful about what you actually need here and of true ways of assessing it.</p>
<p><em>Examples: ability to present in front of large audiences, complete fluency in Ruby on Rails, basic HTML/CSS prototyping knowledge, SPHR certification, good written communication skills, excellent analytical skills.</em></p>
<h2 id="ideate-low-fidelity">Ideate (Low-Fidelity)</h2>
<p>In my experience, the best way to come up with a representative list of items for each of these is to bring stakeholders (people who will interact with who fills the role and/or be significantly affected by them) into a room and have a short brainstorm session. 5 to 7 minutes for each category seems to be enough but will still make it a generative session, and uncover important attributes which would perhaps not be uncovered if you were just writing them by yourself.</p>
<p>As the facilitator, make sure to introduce controversial points and encourage discussion, so you can achieve the clear boundary lines of the role we discussed above. In this process, sticky notes and whiteboards are definitely your friends.</p>
<p>The output of this phase should be a series of unpolished bullet points, grouped into the three categories. Worry about meaning, not polish, and make sure you have clear agreement/understanding among stakeholders.</p>
<h2 id="refine-high-fidelity">Refine (High-Fidelity)</h2>
<p>Once you’ve established the requirements, you can write the job post. Now is the time to turn those characteristics into a cohesive, compelling, external-facing articulation of the role. This is a general structure which works for me, trying to order content in a funnel relevant to the candidate:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Company intro.</strong> “Who are these people?”</li>
<li><strong>Role intro.</strong> “Why are they hiring for this position? Is this roughly something I’d want to do? Who would I report to?”</li>
<li><strong>Responsibilities.</strong> “What would I do day-to-day exactly?”</li>
<li><strong>Profile.</strong> “Are they looking for someone like me?”</li>
<li><strong>Skills/Experience.</strong> “Would I meet their requirements?”</li>
<li><strong>Extra role info.</strong> “What are the benefits? Any perks?”</li>
</ul>
<p>But please go beyond descriptive copy. While you should absolutely be clear and concise, this is a great opportunity to express your hiring brand.</p>
<p>I actually believe it’s a good idea for different departments or different hiring managers to use slightly different tones in their job posts. Some teams are more serious, other more on the funny side, some are competitive, other very collaborative, and that should be reflected here.</p>
<h2 id="iteration">Iteration</h2>
<p>Before publishing the job post, make sure to gather feedback from the stakeholders. It’s a good opportunity to see if anything went missing as you brought the JD to higher fidelity, or if people thought of missing attributes in the meantime.</p>
<p>Once you start interviewing candidates, you’ll most likely notice details about the job which you didn’t anticipate earlier in that process. You might notice for example that all candidates ask about the full range of responsibilities; or that perhaps it’s unclear to whom they’d report.</p>
<p>This is user feedback! Use these opportunities to come back to the document you’ve prepared and update it with answers to those questions. Share it with the team, clarify the role further, update the job post. It will only make interviewing later down the line and help screen bad fits early on.</p>
<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
<p>If you choose to follow this approach, please let me know, I’d love to hear your experience. And if you have any questions, please add them to the comments or get in touch.</p>
<p>If you want to see a couple examples of the final product of this exercise, check out <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WBjJFc5QxGLLN_dZ7OQ6X86kdg3pojf9i6ShtdjrHhg/edit?usp=sharing">this</a> and <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UNd-a6FKouuxuMdw6jAGXl-az2EXxtmoMezOp48_4W0/edit?usp=sharing">this</a> JDs. They were very successful in hiring for these positions.</p>
Knowers and Learners: Two very different worldviewshttps://brunobergher.com/writing/knowers-and-learners.html2015-08-13T01:00:00+01:002023-03-18T10:38:12+00:00Bruno Bergherme@brunobergher.com<img src="https://brunobergher.com/images/writing/knowers-and-learners.jpg" alt="" /><p><a href="https://expa.com">My work</a> these days <em>(at the time of writing)</em> involves spending a lot of time with early stage companies, where we’re racing against the clock to turn bold new ideas into usable products, and see if they work.</p>
<p>It’s a land where you’re knee-deep in ambiguity, and surrounded by a sea of unanswered questions. It’s an environment where short-circuiting feedback loops pays off big time, and where fast action is highly valued.</p>
<p>But with so much to do and so little time, teams often get into hard scoping discussions. There’s no way to know for sure <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product">in advance</a> what a product needs to offer in order to be validated. I’ve noticed two different types of people emerge from those discussions:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>The ones who want to be right</strong></li>
<li><strong>And the ones who want to learn</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>The ones who want to be right defend their ideas based on their experience, their seniority, on their unmeasurable powers of divination of customer behavior. They come up with dozens of possible failure cases, just to justify their more complex solution. They <a href="/@bbergher/the-right-tool-for-the-job-30d9196fb924">get married to their ideas</a> and never let go, irrespective of what’s learned.</p>
<p>They say <em>“trust me, I know what I’m doing”</em>, <em>“no, that won’t work”</em> and <em>“let’s just do it my way this time”</em>. <strong>They breed self-doubt and disempowerment.</strong></p>
<hr />
<blockquote>
<p><em>I know one thing: that I know nothing</em></p>
<p>Socrates <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing">(supposedly)</a></p>
</blockquote>
<hr />
<p>Then there are the ones who want to learn. They’ve realized that when you’re first building something, chances are you’ll be wrong about at least a couple things — and try to identify them early on. They try to keep projects simple, so they can be tested fast, even if they have obvious holes. They maximize their opportunity for learning, by focusing on the problem at hand, and not on who came up with the solution or how it matches the initial big idea.
They can still have a bold vision, and they still listen to their gut, but they’re open to being wrong and eager to find out what will work for their audience.
They say “<em>this is what worked for me before, would you be up for trying it?”</em> and <em>“which option would let us learn faster?”</em>. <em>They breed progress and are fun to hang around.</em></p>
<hr />
<p>I just try to surround myself with people who are open to being wrong (even if they’re right most of the time), and above all interested in learning the truth, whatever it may be. I interview candidates looking for that heart-warming balance of experience and humility, and only invest in friendships with people who are willing to review previously held ideas. And I try to constantly revise what are facts and what are simply my own assumptions.</p>
<p><strong>What about you?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Would you rather be right, or would you rather learn the truth?</strong></p>
A Lightweight Branding Exercise for Startups: A bottom-up, alignment-oriented approachhttps://brunobergher.com/writing/a-lightweight-branding-exercise-for-startups.html2015-06-28T01:00:00+01:002023-03-18T10:38:12+00:00Bruno Bergherme@brunobergher.com<img src="https://brunobergher.com/images/writing/a-lightweight-branding-exercise.jpg" alt="" /><p>While a logo might be the most recognizable manifestation of a brand, it’s only one of many. Brands cut across media, and present themselves in colors, shapes, <a href="http://mailchimp.com/about/style-guide/">words</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRLyMjvug1M">sounds</a>, and even <a href="http://www.basenotes.net/ID26137657.html">smells</a>. That’s because a brand, at it’s core, is immaterial. It’s about abstract attributes and values which present themselves in concrete ways:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Virgin America</strong> is about <em>quality, fun, innovation, challenging assumptions</em>. You can see it in purple aircraft lighting and quirky safety videos.</li>
<li><strong>Honda</strong> is about <em>affordable quality</em> and <em>trust</em>. You can see it in reliable, albeit generic-looking vehicles, and simple and approachable visual design.</li>
<li><strong>Ikea</strong> is about <em>cost-consciousness, simplicity</em> and <em>togetherness</em>. You can see it in incredibly affordable furniture, family-oriented stores, and approachable visual design.</li>
</ul>
<p>Building a brand is a long-term commitment which results from thousands of interactions between a customer and the brand’s touch points over time. </p>
<hr />
<blockquote>
<p><em>“When your values are clear to you, making decisions becomes easier.”</em></p>
<p>Roy E. Disney</p>
</blockquote>
<hr />
<p>Startups lack the time to develop this relationship: it’s a race against the clock, and every dollar spent needs to bring the company closer to validation and traction. But users impressions — especially first impressions — matter greatly. How can a startup make the most of its branding efforts for the best results?</p>
<p>Here I describe a simple branding exercise I’ve used and evolved with the companies at <a href="https://expa.com/">Expa</a> with success. It can help your team get into alignment and articulate the core attributes of your brand. The output will enable designers to define how it looks, writers to how it speaks, and for any vendor or team member to make coherent decisions by themselves. And it won’t cost you more than two 90-minute sessions and a few dozen sticky-notes.</p>
<hr />
<h2 id="the-basic-idea">The Basic Idea</h2>
<p>This exercise has four phases:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Brainstorm possible values and attributes for your brand</strong></li>
<li><strong>Separate those into what belongs and doesn’t belong to it</strong></li>
<li><strong>Group the ones which belong into abstracted groups</strong></li>
<li><strong>Distill them into values, key attributes and analogies</strong></li>
</ol>
<p>Every brand stakeholder in your company should take part, so if your team fits in a room, get them of all in there. If it’s larger, get the people who’d be expressing the brand day-to-day: designers, marketers, executives, salespeople, recruiters. You can also bring whoever demonstrates interest — you want motivated people brainstorming. In any case, just don’t do this by yourself: you’ll end up with a limited perspective.</p>
<p>Once you’ve listed the participants, schedule a 90-minute block for the first session in a room with whiteboards or foam boards. Get plenty of colorful sticky-notes (at least 40 per person) and Sharpies for everyone. Don’t use fine point pens so ideas can later be read from a distance. Snacks could be handy too.</p>
<h2 id="brainstorming-attributes">1. Brainstorming Attributes</h2>
<p>For starters, keep in mind (and reinforce with the group) the basic rules of brainstorming: <strong>there are no bad ideas,</strong> and <strong>be additive to other’s ideas.</strong> Set a timer for 10 minutes to instill some urgency.</p>
<p>Start writing out random adjectives on stickies, words (<em>simple</em>, <em>exclusive</em>) or short expressions (<em>gender neutral</em>, <em>on your terms</em>) which could be used to describe your brand. As people write down each idea, they should say it out loud and place the sticky on the table, so others can hear it. This lets participants build on each other’s ideas.</p>
<p>People will be tempted to stick to “good” adjectives — like smart, professional, etc. Those can be acceptable, but also tend to be generic, which isn’t helpful in differentiating a brand. So try to include controversial or even silly ideas, just to get the discussion going. A few of my favorites are <em>complex, hard, expensive, aggressive, powerful, for dummies, rough</em>. They often cause people to write down the opposing notion – or something in between –, which leads to interesting discussions later on.</p>
<p>Throughout this brainstorm, make sure to keep people generative and on topic — no discussion about what works or doesn’t should happen yet.</p>
<p>After about 10 minutes, the popcorn might stop popping — ideas might start slowing down. If not, do another 10-minute round. Avoid stopping until after 2 minutes have gone by with no new ideas (the silence can be helpful sometimes).</p>
<h2 id="yeses-and-nos">2. Yeses and Nos</h2>
<p>Next, write on opposite sides of the whiteboard, the words <strong>Yes</strong> and <strong>No</strong>. As a group, go take every single sticky note and agree on where it should go. <strong>yes</strong> means <em>“this word could be used to describe our brand”</em>, and <strong>no</strong> means, uh, no. Since you’re the facilitator, you might want to stand up and do the actual moving of stickies, but everyone’s participation is encouraged.</p>
<figure>
<img src="/images/writing/branding-exercise-yes-no.jpg" alt="Example of how to group in yeses and nos" />
<figcaption>Yes, no, and a tiny bit of maybe. You might notice how the concentration of magenta stickies on the <strong>no</strong> side. That was my color, and I deliberately suggested ideas which didn’t fit or where simply controversial, to spur discussion.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The discussions which happen during this step are the most important part of the process. There will be plenty of disagreement, which is healthy, but which needs to be sorted out. Some stickies might actually start on one side and move to the other (that’s why we’re using them!). When you hit a wall, try to deconstruct the meaning of the word in question. A few tactics I use:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Try to find a close synonym.</strong> Sometimes a specific word carries implicit meaning to some people, and replacing it with an equivalent can filter it out.</li>
<li><strong>Use an antonym.</strong> If it’s clear the opposite of the original word belongs under yes or no, then it’s easier to place the original.</li>
<li><strong>Separate the brand from the product.</strong> A product might be <em>easy</em> to use, but it doesn’t mean the brand should make <em>ease</em> one of its core values.</li>
<li><strong>Separate the brand from the customer.</strong> Your product might cost $5,000/seat, but it doesn’t mean the company should be perceived as exclusive.</li>
<li><strong>Skip it and come back to it later.</strong> A word you discuss later might clarify the disagreement about the current one.</li>
</ul>
<p>This process will take quite some time, and you should use all the remaining time in this session to finish this sorting. A few disagreements might remain unresolved, and that’s OK (up to about 5 or 6 adjectives — if you have a large “maybe” group, you probably haven’t gotten to the bottom of it).</p>
<p>You should be exhausted at this point, so call it a day. Document your board (photos are great, transcribing each word is ideal) and feel free take down all the stickies, <strong>but keep yes and no separate!</strong></p>
<h2 id="surfacing-patterns">3. Surfacing Patterns</h2>
<p>For the second session, get back to that same room and bring the <strong>yes</strong> stickies from before. This should also take 90 minutes, but it’s often done in less time.</p>
<p>This step is about organizing ideas in groups of emerging patterns, a process also known as clustering or affinity mapping. To get started, spread out all the <strong>yes</strong> stickies on a table.</p>
<p>Start picking stickies at random, and placing them on the board, grouping related adjectives close to each other. This might feel awkward in the beginning, but after 3 to 5 minutes the team will start to spot similarities, and tight groupings will emerge. You will probably see groups like these three:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Presentation.</strong> Visual ideas about style, color, light, polish, etc.</li>
<li><strong>Tone.</strong> Communication-related adjectives such as voice, authoritativeness, friendliness, etc.</li>
<li><strong>Personality.</strong> Human-like attributes, such as being expert-like, teacher-like, childlike, etc.</li>
</ul>
<p>As well as other groups, mainly about values: abstract, almost philosophical notions — transparent, affordable, innovative, etc. These will probably be unique to your company’s mission or offering.</p>
<p>Try to organize all stickies on the board in up to 60 minutes. As groups become clear, write a descriptive name for it on the board (or on a different color sticky), above the adjectives. Once you’re done, your board should look somewhat like this, and you’ll be ready for the last step.</p>
<figure>
<img src="/images/writing/branding-exercise-clusters.jpg" alt="Example of how an affinity map may look like" />
<figcaption>What your affinity map board might end up looking like. Note the different handwriting above each group: <em>everyone is participating.</em></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2 id="distilling-into-values">4. Distilling into Values</h2>
<p>This is the last step, and the most analytical. Going through each of the groupings, transpose them to a hierarchical list in a text document, including titles and content. <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mv6GhYHbotLc62zy0Ldm8Za3Wq5euE2U_Zx90hPhg54/edit?usp=sharing">You can work off this template if you want.</a> Example:</p>
<h3 id="visual">Visual</h3>
<ul>
<li>Clean</li>
<li>Bright</li>
<li>Colorful</li>
<li>Handmade</li>
<li>etc</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="tone">Tone</h3>
<ul>
<li>Funny</li>
<li>Colloquial</li>
<li>Deferent</li>
<li><em>etc</em></li>
</ul>
<p>If any of the groups doesn’t feel unique to your brand, ignore it. If it seems to be about abstract <strong>values</strong>, put it under a Values header, with all adjectives in a single line. Then, with the team, try to sum up what that group of values encompasses. Example:</p>
<h3 id="values">Values</h3>
<ul>
<li>Safe, Secure, Trustworthy → Secure</li>
<li>Easy, Empowering, Low Barrier To Entry → Easy</li>
<li><em>etc</em></li>
</ul>
<p>Then take another pass at the resulting list and, try to coalesce each group further. Aim to limit each header to 4 items, to ensure the result is actionable.</p>
<p>These attributes by themselves can still be a bit ambiguous. That’s when brand comparisons can be helpful.</p>
<p>Use the remaining 10 minutes of your session to add to the document a “Brand Comparisons” header. Under it, list at least 10 sentences using the format:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“More like _ than _”</em>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>You should fill in the blanks with other brands. But brands in the broadest sense possible: well known public entities about which there’s consistent perception between people. They should ideally not be in your industry, and can include celebrities, cities, typical dishes, etc. This part usually leads to fun discussions. Examples:</p>
<ul>
<li>More like Google than Apple</li>
<li>More like Toyota than BMW</li>
<li>More like Tag Heuer than Swatch</li>
<li>More like Sketch than Photoshop</li>
<li>More like George Clooney than Ryan Gosling</li>
<li>More like burgers than sushi</li>
<li>etc</li>
</ul>
<p>Try to get at least 15 of these; 30 if possible.</p>
<p>And that’s the end of the exercise, you should have now <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mv6GhYHbotLc62zy0Ldm8Za3Wq5euE2U_Zx90hPhg54/edit?usp=sharing">a document which looks roughly like this</a>. It outlines your brand values, shows concrete ways those values present themselves, and anchors your brand relative to others in different spaces.</p>
<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
<p>You could work with a branding agency for a richer — and more expensive — process, which could achieve more granular results. But you have little time and money to spend, and this will get you what you need to start establishing a brand.</p>
<p>Share that document with a graphic designer, and you can expect logo designs which fit your brand. Work from it with your marketing team, and it will be easy to define what language and tone to use.</p>
The Right Tool for the Job: Only pick up a hammer if you’re working with nails.https://brunobergher.com/writing/the-right-tool-for-the-job.html2015-06-27T01:00:00+01:002023-03-18T10:38:12+00:00Bruno Bergherme@brunobergher.com<img src="https://brunobergher.com/images/writing/the-right-tool-for-the-job.jpg" alt="" /><p>We designers, we can be such gearheads. We can easily spend hours discussing the latest Sketch plug-ins, arguing about the pros and cons of Framer vs Pixate, the merits of InVision over Flinto. Some people can be fanatical about the best pen to use on their Moleskines. I love that excitement: transcending the external nature of your tools and blending them with your skills is the route to incredible results.</p>
<p>And freedom to use whichever tool makes designers most productive is crucial. Trying to constrain a team to a specific piece of software ignores differences in people’s mental models, learning curves and comfort levels. And this is such an exciting time, with new and interesting tools popping up constantly.</p>
<p>But I’ve also noticed an unfortunate trend lately. When working with some designers or interviewing candidates, it’s becoming common to see these types of processes:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>“I sketch a little bit on paper, then go straight into Sketch/Photoshop. I’m just really fast with those tools, you know?”</em></li>
<li><em>“Oh, these days I design straight in the browser. Since I can code, it’s faster to just skip the design applications.”</em></li>
<li><em>“The engineers on my team are so fast I can just talk through ideas and they’ll build it.”</em></li>
</ul>
<p>I can see few situations when these approaches could be valid. If the problem you’re solving is rather small and only requires a tactical solution, sure, go ahead and define it in high fidelity. Or if you are working on an established product, doing incremental work, utilizing stable UX patterns and UI components, yes, I can see how designing in the browser could be a quick and easy approach. But not so much if our work doesn’t fall in those buckets. It’s about new problems, which require new and specific solutions which, in turn, require plenty of exploration. And the steps along the way don’t have to be pretty.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“The usefulness of a pot comes from its emptiness”</em></p>
<p>Lao-Tzu</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Working at the lowest level of fidelity you can afford to always pays back. Low fidelity is fast — so you can try many more alternatives in the same length of time. Low fidelity is cheap — so you spend so little time with each idea that you don’t marry any of them. And tools determine fidelity.</p>
<p>The more control you’re allowed over the details, the more control you’ll want to exert, so it’s a good idea to constrain yourself. A few of my strategies:</p>
<ul>
<li>When sketching, I prefer to use Sharpies over pens: the thick tip prevents me from spending time on detailed icons or UI shading, so I explore more alternatives.</li>
<li>Moving up one level of fidelity, I use <a href="https://balsamiq.com/products/mockups/">Balsamiq Mockups</a>: it gives me so little control over the details, I can only focus on the meaningful elements a flow. Using it I can drop pre-made components on a canvas in half a second, instead of manually crafting them from primitives on <a href="http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch/">Sketch</a>. It’s faster, so I explore more alternatives.</li>
<li>When testing with users, I tend to start with a tool like <a href="http://invisionapp.com/">InVision</a>, which provides standard interactions out of the box. They’re less expressive, but I can get a prototype in front of customers and start learning in a fraction of the time it would take me to tie a series of beautiful transitions together with <a href="http://framerjs.com/">Framer</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Astronomers can’t see black holes, by definition.</strong> To find one, you observe other celestial bodies circling around them — even if you can’t see the black holes (light doesn’t escape their gravity) – but since they attract so many other objects, they just have to be there. That sometimes just sounds quite like the design process to me: you can never be sure the idea you just had is the right one. So the more ideas you have, the more possibilities you try, the more you’ll have circling this possible ideal solution, and the more confident you’ll be about picking one.</p>
<p>So please, to get the most of your talent and your time, be deliberate about moving up the fidelity scale, and explore as much as you can along the way. Use whichever tool makes you the most productive at each stage, but always take a moment to think: <em>am I using the right tool for the job?</em></p>