Branding and relationships
This week: make a plan for your personal brand, and build powerful relationships with your engineers
Branding and relationships
If there’s a common thread today, it’s that of your reputation.
First steps to building a personal brand
Your personal brand helps you curate and craft the story you want to tell the world and build a reputation that’ll yield opportunities down the line.
Building a personal brand doesn’t happen overnight. And is it any wonder? It’s fucking hard. It takes courage to put yourself out there and risk the scrutiny of the world; it takes deep introspection to understand the value you can provide and convey that value to others. Moreover, it takes an incredible amount of discipline and persistence to consistently take the small steps it takes to make progress towards a large goal.
Fortunately, Kateryna Romanenchuk shared her insights on this topic a couple of years ago in her post Personal branding for designers on UX Collective. Highly recommend. Equal parts empathetic, encouraging, prescriptive, and forgiving — this piece tells you how to find your voice, stay consistent, be open-minded, all while understanding that you will trip up from time to time.
Our main takeaways? Start small, stay consistent, and do what resonates with you — not just what’s trending.
Big tasks are hard to embrace. Building a personal brand is heck of a big task for a designer like myself, as it is time-consuming and very personal. Splitting the process into manageable chunks should make it easier.
Working with engineers
You don’t stop working on your reputation when you sign the offer letter.
On the job, you build your cred with every interaction you have with individuals as well as with. Be proactive and thoughtful in how you approach those relationships, listen closely to the needs of others, and leverage that empathy to help yourself and your org be more effective.
This is particularly crucial when it comes to working with developers.
Ahem — *puts on best infomercial voice* — has this ever happened to you?
Have you spent weeks on high-fidelity specs, only to find out that the final implementation looks nothing like this?
Have you ever had to go back to the drawing board because you found out too late that the technical trade-offs were too high to build what you designed?
Have you ever felt like this when trying incorporate feedback to account for newly discovered edge cases?
Hear Slack’s Tina Chen and Garrett Miller discuss the common pitfalls designers face when working with engineers and killer strategies to improve collaboration.
In short: early, frequent communication around a shared vision, fitting requests and feedback into a dev team’s existing processes, and being proactive in uncovering implementation concerns yield a fruitful working relationship.
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