What’s up family, hope you’ve had a great August!
I’ve read quite a few books and articles on design. One of the most useful books is “About Face” which is the holy grail of interaction design. But I feel like I could have read all the books in the world about design and I still wouldn’t have been prepared to be a designer at Meta… because nothing beats experience when it comes to learning a skill. It’s like playing a sport. Reading all the basketball playbooks and watching all the basketball games can’t substitute for actually playing basketball.
After doing design at Meta for almost 2 years now, I’ve learned a lot. In this month’s newsletter, I want to share some of the most important learnings I’ve had.
Communicate frequently and communicate effectively.
A company is made of people, so the better you communicate, the better your results will be. I used to update my team on my progress once every few days. I thought that being the designer meant I needed to design alone and then share my designs when they were in a good place. Turns out that couldn’t be further from the truth. You design as a team — and you actually design faster and better when you keep your team in the loop constantly. They have opinions just like you do. And they definitely know things that you don’t.
Don’t waste your time exploring and perfecting design directions that aren’t feasible or impactful because you waited 2 days to show your team. I update my team on my progress at least every day. And if there are any questions I have about the project, I ask my team ASAP.
You’ll also be put in situations where you have to sell your POV to your team, your leads, or other teams with a stake in your work. This requires communicating effectively. You should be able to speak to the business and user needs your designs are solving and why they are better than the alternatives. A good book on this is Articulating Design Decisions by Tom Greever.
Make sure your work is organized.
I don’t think there’s any job where you wouldn’t benefit from being more organized, but it’s for sure important for designers.
When you are exploring design solutions, it’s not uncommon to end up with a hundred different mocks in your design files. Make sure your file is structured in a way that people know which mocks are the most recent and which ones are ready for development. Shout out to Figma for their new "Mark as ready for dev” feature — they made this a lot easier. Also, make sure you link to your design briefs and any relevant research to the project. You and your team will have to reference all of this a lot. You never know who is going to be in your Figma file. Here’s a good video on design file organization.
Keeping my files clean has benefitted my collaboration immensely because anybody who I needed to work with could understand my project at a glance. It also earns you trust and credibility.
Manage your time wisely.
As a designer, you will likely be juggling multiple projects. You need to make sure you balance your days to be able to work on what you need to without neglecting other important priorities.
You also need to have a sense of what is the highest priority to work on. When are your engineers ready to start building? Make sure you can deliver on time or else your team risks being delayed and has a harder time reaching their goals for the half.
A good way to manage your time is by time blocking. Look at your calendar and schedule time to work on each project you have throughout the week. Make the most of the time that you aren’t in meetings.
Think about the big picture & mind the details.
It’s important to understand how your work fits into the overall strategy of the company. That helps with getting your work approved by managers and working with other teams if you ever have to.
But don’t forget to think about the details no matter how small they may seem. In big tech, you are working on a complex system. Small changes might have a lot of edge cases.
For a while, I didn’t feel like I knew when a design project was really “complete.” I would do some design explorations until it felt like I explored all the directions I could. Then, I picked the best exploration according to what I knew and what the team knew. This isn’t a terrible way to approach design projects, but it will always leave you with that unsure feeling of whether you really did everything you needed to. Sometimes my design lead or manager would point out an edge case I never considered, and then I had to go back and work on that.
A better way to approach design projects is to think of it as whittling down a long list of unknowns. The big questions are:
What is the business problem we are solving?
What is the people problem that addresses this business problem?
Is our solution the best way of solving that people problem?
What assumptions are we making to believe this?
More detailed questions will start popping up as you answer these questions, especially around the third question. You can consider your project complete when you’ve answered all the questions, or have a concrete plan to answer these questions.
What is most important is that you consciously think about and evaluate your design process. Always ask yourself (and your mentors): “Is this the best way for me to approach projects? Is there something I can be doing better?”
My month in review.
👨🏾💻 Partnering with BlackGovTech to design their Winter Gala landing page.
🗣 Spoke to Cornell freshmen about tech careers and college experiences through my alumni network.
💡 Connected with a few people on some exciting startup ideas.
📚 Started diving into philosophy. Currently reading “Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction.”
🏝 Took a trip to Tulum, Mexico for a week.
🍱 Getting back into meal prepping.
Love how these 4 lessons can also be applied to things outside of tech as well. Great read, definitely motivated me to apply these steps more in my workflow
Thanks for sharing this Jalil! It’s great to hear these tips from one of Meta’s best (: