Short Take #2: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers
Summary
Key Insights
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Design can be treated as an evolving strategy where parts can be shipped incrementally.
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The Judgment of Solomon metaphor helps recognize that shipping partial features is sometimes necessary.
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Investing in slow, steady relationship-building with product partners deeply impacts product success.
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Rapport and shared understanding among team members are key drivers for sustained incremental progress.
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Product development is more about cultivating relationships than moving fast and breaking things.
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UX research roles often expand to facilitating collective knowledge rather than just user data collection.
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Helping a team build on prior research avoids starting from ground zero in every cycle.
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A thriving product team grows its knowledge over time through synthesis and collaboration.
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Research inspires positive change in both teams and end products rather than simply reporting findings.
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Shifts in partnership perspectives can lead to more effective collaboration and better final products.
Notable Quotes
"They’re not living out the Judgment of Solomon every day, where the baby can be split in half."
"Sometimes it’s reasonable to consider your design as strategy and ship a piece now and other pieces later."
"I wish I knew it was okay to invest in relationships; that’s how incremental change happens."
"It’s not move fast and break things; it’s slow and steady."
"Rapport building is slow and steady synthesis that leads to really big ideas."
"I didn’t invest enough in slow and steady relationship building early on, and that led to major shifts."
"Facilitating a shared understanding among everyone on product takes a lot of time."
"It became less important to keep doing fresh research and more important to grow the collective team knowledge."
"Research helps make a positive change on the product team and our end users."
"Both of our perspectives changed, and now we’re seeing that come to fruition through the product we’re building."
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