now (dec 2019)
Paddington, NSW + Bushfire
The now page is simply a place to point people who wonder what I'm up to now.
nomadding ➡️ not nomadding
I went to Madrid and ate menus del dia. And icy cold Lourdes and got dunked in holy water, meant to protect me from sickness. And promptly proceeded into one of the periods of my life most defined by sickness. I walked through Portugal and got terrible blisters and went to the Canary Islands and panicked and went to Paris and Edinburgh and got an Adenovirus and went to Wales and coughed so hard and so long I cracked a rib. And hobbled to London on codeine and booked a next-day flight to Manila and finally got back to Australia. A little worse for wear.
I learned that freelancing is easier at home, and travelling is better when I don’t have to work. Very successful experiment: very clear results.
building design in a startup
I was approached by Mina on Twitter to join and bring design to :Different. Twitter DMs have now gainfully employed me more than once.
I’ve been here since September ‘19. Here’s what’s on my mind right now:
Just how important product and engineering processes are to letting design be effective. We needed to restructure essentially our entire technology team (into cross-functional autonomous teams) to allow design to be really effective in the company. And get alignment on a new process of how we work. I’m really chuffed that we are able to make this happen, and that I’ve seen that level of genuine support from the founders. i’ve seen too many designers get stuck in roles where they’re “not allowed to do research”… I believe this is often a symptom of ‘wrong’ product/engineering process. If design is brought in at the wrong time, or if the team is structured wrong, then research starts to be really hard to make happen. In this world, design isn’t able to have the impact on the bottom line that it can in a design-led process.
Creating a new organisation in a company is a big job. Every new thing I do, I need to start from scratch. Hiring? Start from step 1. who do we need? How do we assess them? What’s our interview process like? What’s the take home task, and what’s the whiteboard challenge, and how do we decide which to do? What about designer levelling? What meetings and rituals should we have, and who outside of design is part of them? What about tools? How do we communicate out? Multiply this by… everything. Luckily, I am an idealist. The idea of dragging a utopian vision of Design into reality is just the kind of challenge to get me up in the morning.
How to effectively include an engineering team in Sri Lanka in design/research/product work for users in Australia. This is hard. I am planning to spend lots of time in Sri Lanka to build relationships.
Design not being a bottleneck. Design systems and how they can make the whole team more effective. Loving Figma. Sorry Sketch, I even had to peel your sticker off my laptop.
Thinking about the big picture of a scaling startup, and always asking how a little decision now could play out on a super-large scale. I think anyone working in startups should be thinking about the risks of the potential social impact of their product. It’s especially important to me, as we work in property management, which means we have impact on housing. People’s homes. Property management is such a different proposition to an owner and to a tenant. To the tenant it’s their home. To the owner it’s their biggest investment. High levels of emotion from all sides.
Trying to maintain any sense of meaning in a world that appears to be hurtling towards unstoppable climate disaster. Wondering how everyone around me isn’t freaking out about it. Reminding myself that the end of this iteration of life on earth perhaps isn’t the calamity it might feel like - the planet has been through mass extinction events before. Wondering if it might indeed be kind of cool, in some detached, philosophical way, to be here to see the beginning of the end of humanity?
On that cheerful note…
What’s next?
👉I hired two designers to join the team, who are starting early 2020. Excited to be building the team for real now, with structure and alignment in place to let them be effective. Excited to be back in the coach role. Excited to have people to hold me accountable to stick to good process.
👉Focusing on how to include engineers in user-centred activities more and more. Really, focusing on how to allow engineers to have deep understanding of users - and just including them feels like the easiest way to do this. People learn better when they come to a conclusion themselves, rather than listen to someone else just tell them something.
👉How do we build really effective cross-cultural remote teams? This is a big question mark for me and a big learning focus area.
👉Heading to Colombo for likely most of March 2020 🇱🇰
Do you have advice for me? Reach out, please. You know my email: hello@nicolarushton.me.
