This isn’t about me
“I’m the victim here! How am I supposed to be a man?!”
– Josh Lyman, The West Wing
This story is my own, but this really isn’t about me.
I ♥ the IA Institute
You know what I love about Lou? Everything. But in this case, the thing I love about him is his willingness to put his money where his mouth is.
Professionally speaking, the UX community has has given me everything – the IA Institute and IxDA, in particular. Those of you who know me know I’ve bled more than my share for both organizations. I love them both. I love the people they serve – my friends – even more.
I’d like to see to see the IAI open up, ease up, and iterate over Lou’s proposed model. I’d also like to see the IAI go local – for real. Local with outreach and local with sponsorship. We’ve got to be able to do better than this and this. Connect people to each other and connect them to businesses looking to hire. There are a lot of human connections to be made at the local level, and there can be no shortage of sponsors who want access to them.
I believe in the potential of this model. So much so, that I’d be more than happy to contribute $750 to the IAI’s future. To promote healthy incentives, I’ll split that Lou-style:
- $250 as soon as the IAI adopts the free membership model, and draws up a simple plan to approach sponsors
- $250 more as soon as the IAI increases its current membership by 50%
- $250 more as soon as the IAI doubles its current membership
I’m far more interested in doing that than I am in paying my meager (and lapsed) membership dues. Only reason to do that would be to purchase a discount to IA Summit.
Am I the only one?
Nexus Project Managers
- Yoni: Did I ever spew my theory of project management tools at you?
- Matt: Um, no.
- Yoni: They are nearly all good and bad, depending on the type of project, type of people, nature of use, yada yada yada… In the end, I truly believe a human needs to be the nexus. Hopefully, that human would be naturally good at using (and relating to) any of those tools, without having a focus/need to use any them, per se.
- Yoni: So, developers can use their preferred tool (or tools), business people another, marketing another, design another… Or they could share tools – doesn’t matter – so long as each team is using something that speaks to their semi-independent process, and remains accessible (available) to other teams. The nexus’s main purpose would be to keep these tools – and these teams – in sync.
- Yoni: And yes, I know this sounds problematic, but I’ve never seen a tool that everyone used correctly, unless it is used correctly, but inherently fails to meet certain needs.
- Matt: Would that person be a project manager?
- Yoni: Basically, yes.
- Matt: In the past, I’ve derided project managers because all they did was make gantt charts and write meeting minutes…
- Yoni: Yeah, me too.
- Yoni: I’ve always disliked the entire field of project management, but I’ve also had a couple incredible project managers, who made my life better.
- Matt: …but that sounds like a reasonable implementation of a value-adding PM.
- Matt: It’s too inefficient to pick a one-size fits all project tool, but project managers can be had relatively inexpensively.
- Yoni: Exactly. A single person – of a certain bent/talent – can be far more efficient than any tool possibly could be at navigating, negotiating, and synthesizing the in-betweens of process and project.
- Matt: Yup.
- Yoni: And there might be a million different ways to do that job well. The key is simply doing it to serve the team/project/product, instead of enforcing process.
- Matt: That’s a hard sell to most organizations, I’d think. They love one-size-fits-all software (e.g. massive sucky ERP).
- Yoni: Yeah, I know. My theory is that there is totally a one-size-fits-all solution, it’s just not software… It’s Joe or Michelle.
- Yoni: Of course, various teams/groups/whatever would still need to figure out efficient processes in their common language. If they can’t, they shouldn’t really be working together, right?
- Yoni: OK. Done.
- Matt: It certainly matches a lot of my experience in software. Write a blog post on that please.
- Yoni: Sure. Eventually.
I let things simmer way too long.
The New Job Requirements
I recently dug up this “job requirements” email, which I wrote after a particularly harrowing experience with someone I was expected to manage.
Skills Required:
-
Ability to write.
You must be able to piece together more than two sentences at a time. Specifically, you must understand how to communicate without bullet-points.
-
Ability to ask questions.
If you don’t understand something – whether it is the material at hand, or simply what is expected of you – ASK!
-
Ability to say, “No.”
We’re all human, and we all make unreasonable demands. Sometimes, you’ll be asked to deliver more than is reasonable. Let us know.
-
Ability to set expectations and meet them.
If you say you can get something done, we’ll believe you, until you don’t. Then we won’t worry about it again.
… and as a corollary to both #3 and #4…
-
Willingness to work yourself to death when you were either too fucking stupid to say, “No,” or you set unreasonable expectations for yourself.
Your problems are not our problems, and they shouldn’t become our problems. If it gets to this point, not only will we not care but, short of a hospitalized injury or immediate family member’s death, we won’t even sympathize.
Turns out I still mean every word.
On unicorns (and other myths).
There’s been a lot of talk about unicorns lately, and it hasn’t all been from stoners trippin’ out on double rainbows. Unicorn has become the new ninja or guru or rockstar, but, unlike those terms, unicorn is also bandied around by people mocking the notion. It’s been used as an epithet. And, since unicorns are in fact mythical creatures, it’s easy to turn the metaphor on its head and sound witty.
But here’s the thing… People hurl epithets at others when they fear them. In the design community, unicorn has become an epithet.
Should everyone try to be (or hire) a unicorn? No, of course not. Most people lack either the desire or the ability to do so, and seldom are we confronted with a situation requiring a unicorn-only fix.
Depending on your definition, unicorns and dragons and wizards exist. If there is anything mythological about them it is that they are naive enough to work for others at a pittance, without the opportunity to really use all of their magic (and learn more).
But why quest after a unicorn when all you need is a horse or a narwhal? (Everyone needs a narwhal, by the way.) Unicorns aren’t better, just different. They are also not worse. I’ve met far too many crappy researchers, designers, developers – whatever-ers – to accept the notion that being multi-faceted is inherently debilitating. Anything and everything can be both a feature and a bug. It just depends on context.
Stop being scared.
Be better at what you do.
Learn something new.
If you can’t be happy (and successful) doing that, you’re doing it wrong.
A different kind of me.
The right kind of client.
A wrong right different kind of me.
Back in November, I decided to take a hiatus. I was burnt out, working too much and too hard, and I was spending far too little time with my family. I promised myself I wouldn’t even consider new clients until after Interaction12. Now, five months later, I realize that a break is not what I needed; rather, I just needed to break-up with those who were (unintentionally) bringing me down: clients, organizations, and even some friends (at least for awhile).
A new kind of life.
I moved to Brooklyn in August 2006. A few months earlier, Anna had found a job that would transfer her to New York, and neither of us wanted to stay in California. Though I didn’t have a job when I arrived, the market was good, and I landed my first gig with Standard & Poor’s even before the movers had arrived with all of our clothes. It was a 4-6 week interface engineering contract that turned into a my first “official” UX position six months later.
During my first 15 months working in NYC – from August 2006 until November 2007 – I either coded or designed over 200 different pages/screens for five products while contracting/consulting at S&P. That number doesn’t take into account all the various states and interactions involved. Of those, only one – that’s right, one – ever saw the light of day, and that was a throw away “About page” I had quickly coded up on my first day to use as a baseline for the template I’d be working with.
It killed me, and, despite having been fully bitten by the UX bug while there, I decided to take on some front-end development gigs at various agencies. In the end, I nearly always ended up dipping into design anyway, and these positions allowed me to meet some amazing people, expand my toolkit and my vocabulary, and to learn a bit about the business, the people, and the community of design.
A new kind of community.
Both as a designer and as a developer – hell, as a human being – I judge myself not simply by what I’ve done, but also by what gets done. I constantly ask myself, “Have my efforts made a difference?” In the product world, a problem isn’t solved until a solution has been used with success. Measuring success can be tough, but it is impossible if you don’t ship.
Between 2008 and 2010, in addition to little things made for my own amusement, I was integrally involved in the creation of approximately 40 launched products or sites. My roles ranged from back-end developer to information architect to design strategist to one-stop-shop. Sometimes, I would experiment with something new. Occasionally, I would make something to help out my friends.
I have always believed that the purpose of being online is to connect with people and to try to make things better. So, after attending my first few UX conferences, I became involved, in some manner or another, in every subsequent IDEA, Interaction, and IA Summit, as well as the organizations that sponsored them. Amazingly enough, my efforts were noticed and appreciated, and from mid-2009 forward, nearly every project I worked on could be directly traced back to my involvement with the UX community.
Now, I can’t say I loved all my clients. I won’t say I loved all my projects either, and I can’t claim that everything I worked on was a success – or even good. But I can say that I enjoyed the majority of the work, regardless of my particular role. I enjoyed making things and watching people use them. Moreover, I have been fortunate enough to have worked with some of the most amazing people this community has to offer.
A new kind of… ?
Last year started much like previous years, except, well, I was now a dad. For whatever reason, I had the feeling that 2011 would be big. I had already committed to being Technical Director for Interaction12, was presenting at a few conferences, and I was excited about finding time to work on some of my own pet projects as well. I landed two gigs in February, and had no problem getting the gigs I wanted – when I wanted them – all year long.
So what the hell happened?
Well, for starters, I had probably already overcommitted myself by April – I just didn’t know it yet. And, a couple projects changed direction on me and a couple people let me down. But I also started letting people down too. Oh, I was working myself to death to prove that I deliver, but I had, as they say, lost sight of the forest for the trees. I spent a lot of time “planning” what would be next for me: a new blog, new workshops, a new class of client – who knows? But I spent most of my time working my ass off creating stuff that no one would ever see, let alone use.
As the year wore on, I also spent a lot of time being bitter; bitter about what I was doing and bitter about what I wasn’t doing. Stupidly, I started to become bitter about what other people were doing (or not doing) as well, and this was my state of mind when I decided to take some time off.
In a state of less than blissful ignorance, I began planning for a huge 2012. Turns out, though, that bitterness, time off, and me are a recipe for disaster, and I didn’t see what was happening until it was too late. In November, I thought I was just pissed at a couple crappy clients. By February, I was pissed at just about everyone, and my bitterness had become central to my identity. I became more and more distant to some, and an unbearable kvetch to others. Hell, a lot of the time, I couldn’t stand being around myself.
As time wore on, I started spending even less time with my daughter than I had before, and, as with everything, Anna bore the brunt of it. Dublin came and went, and it was time for me to start talking to potential clients, but I was nowhere near where I needed – let alone wanted – to be, both professionally and personally. I had first ignored and then underestimated what it would take to put my life in order, and I was still playing catchup with the world and with myself, three months later. Needless to say, I didn’t exactly leap back into the fray. In all honesty, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted, and I still mistakenly believed that it was all about finding a new kind of client, rather than a new kind of me.
A new kind of me.
I’m working on me and I am, as ever, a work in progress. So is my family – Anna and I are going to be outnumbered in the fall.
I’m also still looking for work, though, I confess, I’m still not 100% sure what I want to be doing, mostly because I kinda enjoy all of it – research and strategy, design and coding, testing and experimenting, collaborating and arguing – but I hate doing just some of it for protracted periods of time. It’s one of the main reasons I’ve been independent for over a decade. For now, though, I’m taking what comes, and I’m going to kick-ass at it – and the next thing that comes after.
I’m also going to spend more time with my family. In fact, I’m going to go meet Anna and Navi at the playground before I miss another once in a lifetime opportunity to be with them.