Today, Almitra Inocencio from Definery joined me and we had an incredibly interesting discussion about the importance of being vulnerable. Each time we start working together we bring our own experiences, assumptions, expectations into the next project.
Some of the key learnings Almitra :
✅ Start every engagement by understanding the why of what you're trying to do
✅ Establish that we're all on the same team. We're trying to accomplish a unified goal
✅ Everyone has to feel comfortable to ask questions
Almitra
I've seen a lot of stuff and at the end of the day, I will say that everything boils down to communication and particularly, again, speaking from experience in this industry.
Just like the baseline understanding of how systems work and who users are.
And coming to terms, like as a collective group, that these are the baseline assumptions that we're working off of. Let's acknowledge that in certain instances, different people and different people have different levels of people have different skillset, people have different responsibilities have a certain degree of understanding, right? That they're bringing to the table.
Um, and oftentimes what happens is you get this dynamic between product and design, which I also think happens a lot between engineering and literally everybody else, but just the technical understanding of things. Um, but, uh, you know, it's just having, just starting every engagement and starting every conversation or like group of people working together with understanding why we are there to work on something and just like reestablishing the fact that we're all on the same team and trying to accomplish a unified goal.
I find that communication, setting a baseline, having everybody sort of like be comfortable asking questions and not being the expert and kind of coming to the realization that we all have to be very vulnerable in these aspects.
That's the only way to make a good product. And at the end of the day, you know, I think, uh, titles sort of like, really set kind of it's interesting because you want people to have responsibilities and know what they're supposed to be doing, what they're, what they're accountable for.
But like, if I'm a designer, the typical interpretation of that is that I need to be pushing pixels and working in Figma. I can't have a perspective on the business model. I couldn't possibly have a perspective on the business model, which isn't necessarily true.
And those are typically, I think, the points of contention and the areas of communication. Places honestly, if we all just sort of listened to each other and had it out, would really just make a better working environment and at the end of the day, a better thing for everybody.
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