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The state of product and design content in 2023: “meme content wins”

These types of reports can be a bit vapid sometimes, but I am happy to say that The State of UX in 2023 by Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga is an extremely thoughtful, well-researched look at what’s going on in the design industry. They talk about the current economic and labor landscape, the type of skills required, how design tools are evolving, and much more. They also addresses the topic of “algorithm-driven thought leadership”, which is a topic that’s close to my heart:

When content is shorter and maximized for engagement, we often lose track of the origin, history, and context behind it: a new designer is more likely to hear about a UX law from a UX influencer on an Instagram carousel than through the actual research which brought it about.

The lack of nuance from algorithm-suggested posts undermines any value we could get from them. For a discipline known for asking “why” and for striving to understand users’ context, it’s time we become more intentional about our own information sources.

I recently did a bit of research on what type of product content “works” on LinkedIn in terms of engagement, and all I can say is that it’s really weird. If you want to get a lot of “engagement” on LinkedIn you can’t post outside links in the content (that gets down-ranked by the algorithm). For some reason long posts with one-sentence paragraphs and tons of emojis do really well. And, of course, carousels with screen shots of Twitter threads. I decided not to even try.

Things aren’t that much different on Twitter, where content is driven by long threads of fortune cookie sayings. Kyle Lambert said it well: “Meme content wins.”

I don’t want to go all old person “no one wants to read anymore” on you, but we have to admit that the current algorithmic web is optimized for extremely low attention spans. Here’s another example: there’s a specific type of Tik Tok video that’s really popular right now where users stitch random, unrelated videos together and rack up millions of views. The always-interesting Ryan Broderick wrote about it in his Garbage Day newsletter:

People on TikTok have realised that literally everybody who uses it have really short attention spans and get bored super easily. To “keep people engaged” they put 2 or more videos together with the audio being part of the “main content” while the other one or two videos are there to keep them entertained so they don’t immediately scroll down and ignore their content.

I don’t see a clear solution to all this, except to just continue to read as much longform content as we can, encourage the authors, and share that content with our peers. And also to try my best to write more like that as well.

I don’t want it sound like I think tweets or funny videos are bad or stupid. But if that’s the primary way we learn design and product principles, that is bad. Without the context of the thought process behind the decisions someone made or the framework they used, all you could ever do is copy something and apply it to a situation it almost certainly isn’t applicable to. So let’s do a little less thought-leadering and a little more explaining our “why”, is all I’m saying.

Stray Links for January 20, 2023

Every few days I post some links to things I enjoyed that don’t neatly fit into the topics I usually cover on this blog. Use it to fill your reading queue with interesting stuff!

  • The Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2022 Winners are out.
  • Did the Music Business Just Kill the Vinyl Revival? “On an aggregate level, consumers are simply not buying music. They prefer to stream it for pennies rather than purchase it for dollars.”
  • How Do Big Tech Giants Make Their Billions? I know infographics are so 2000s, but this comparison data is super interesting.
  • This week’s useful appReadow provides book recommendations powered by AI.
  • This week’s WTF LinkThe lights have been on at a Massachusetts school for over a year because no one can turn them off. “The lighting system was installed at Minnechaug Regional High School when it was built over a decade ago and was intended to save money and energy. But ever since the software that runs it failed on Aug. 24, 2021, the lights in the Springfield suburbs school have been on continuously, costing taxpayers a small fortune.”
  • This week’s Gen X linkRemembering horse_ebooks in the age of GPT3. “it’s this fear of the uncanny which i think drove the negative response to the discovery that horse_ebooks was actually no longer a bot at all. more than the disgust at feeling like you’d been played in service of a viral marketing campaign, the deeper sense that a future is coming where it won’t be possible to reliably tell the difference between bot activity and human activity lay underneath that negative reaction. and ten years later – that future is here.”

You can’t just cancel 76,500 hours of meetings

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post Meetings for an effective engineering organization, I bring you more meeting content! In You can’t just cancel 76,500 hours of meetings Becky Kane makes some good points about the context of meetings within an async culture:

Reducing meetings is just one piece of creating an async-first culture.

She gives some examples of other pieces that are harder but even more important in having a lasting impact on engagement and productivity:

  • Decentralizing decision-making so people don’t have to wait for permission and deliberation before acting
  • Delineating clear areas of responsibility so people feel individual ownership to move work forward

You can read the post for the other examples, they’re all very good! As with most of these kinds of topics it’s really valuable to think about them not in isolation, but as a system. It’s not about whether meetings are good or bad, it’s about how meetings fit into the culture and system of planning and delivery that the organization operates in.

Becky’s illustration of what “async” really means is a perfect example of this:

Meetings for an effective engineering organization

It seems like the topic of meetings is on everyone’s minds again as we start the year. Will Larson has some good perspective from the engineering org viewpoint:

Some engineers develop a strong point of view that meetings are a waste of their time. There’s good reason for that perspective, as many meetings are quite bad, but it’s also a bit myopic: meetings can also be an exceptionally valuable part of a well-run organization. If you’re getting feedback that any given meeting isn’t helpful, then iterate on it, and consider pausing it for the time being. It may not be useful for your organization yet, but don’t give up on the idea of meetings. Good meetings are the heartbeat for your organization.

He goes on to recommend six core meetings for every organization to start with. The “weekly team meeting” is one I’ve become a fan of as well. Getting the entire team on a call every week has the potential for being a giant time-waster, so getting the purpose right and facilitating it tightly is essential here. For us, the purpose is:

  • See each other’s faces at least once a week. I wasn’t sure if the team would feel like this goal is a waste of time, but it absolutely is not. Since we’re all remote, “let’s just chat for a bit” is such a great way to start the week.
  • Discuss blockers/issues. This is not a status meeting where everyone goes around the room and tells us where they’re at. We have an agenda in Google Docs that anyone can add to. The goal is to bring up any issues that the team is struggling with so that we can all figure out the best way to help.
  • Company updates. This is also the opportunity for the leadership team to make sure the entire team has all the information and context they need to do their work effectively.

There’s one more thing about this that I highly recommend: every meeting is facilitated by a different team member. We have a schedule that we cycle through with a clear guide on what it means to facilitate—and of course, an option to opt out. This keeps the meetings interesting and everyone invested.


Previously, on meetings:

Collaborative Product Strategy Development: A Case Study

When I arrived at Wildbit in 2016 as Postmark’s first product manager, my initial job was to work with the team to create a formal vision and strategy for the product. I wrote about that process in How we built a product vision and roadmap so I’m not going to spend much time on that.

The focus of this post is on how and why we redeveloped and implemented our Product Strategy after 6 years, and how we used it to create a prioritized product plan. I hope this will be helpful as a guide for teams who need to do similar work. Let’s start with a bit of background…

(more…)

How to manage work that is always “in progress”

I enjoyed this post by Yuhki Yamashita (CPO at Figma) about how design is always “Work in Progress,” and how to deal with that:

Our work never feels done because it isn’t. Our collaborators jump in and out of files, leaving feedback and iterating on designs while we’re creating them. Many of us can ship whenever, so it’s hard to know when new designs are actually ready. It’s the chaotic reality of modern product design and development.

He gives some really good recommendations for how to work in this type of world where nothing is ever quite “done”. The post also introduced me to the concept of flashtags, which I quite like. It comes from Hubspot (See FlashTags: A Simple Hack For Conveying Context Without Confusion), and it’s a way for leaders to indicate how strongly they feel about the feedback they’re giving:

  • #fyi means there’s no hill to die on.
  • #suggestion means they’ve seen the hill but don’t feel strongly enough to commit the energy to climb it. Take it or leave it.
  • #recommendation means the hill was climbed. They thought about dying on it, but walked back down.
  • And finally, #plea means that they do, in fact, want to die on the hill. So if you see this flashtag, you better make sure it’s prioritized!

And finally, speaking of Yuhki… I am not really a podcast person, but I really enjoyed his recent interview on Lenny’s Podcast: An inside look at how Figma builds product.

“Screen time” is dumb—5 questions for educational/technology expert and advocate Richard Culatta

This is an interesting interview with Richard Culatta, author of Digital for Good: Raising Kids to Thrive in an Online World. They discuss how to help kids bridge the gap between physical and digital spaces, how to model good technology behavior, and more. This is such a good point:

By focusing on screen time we miss the far more important concept that we should be teaching our kids; screen value. Some digital activities are just not a good use of a kid’s time (eg. playing a repetitive, luck-based game) while others provide much greater value (eg. editing a movie, creative writing, FaceTiming with a grandparent, etc.) And context is important to consider too. Digital activities that are appropriate on a long car-ride will likely be different than those on a beautiful spring day when friends are around, or the day before a large school project is due.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that is something that not only kids need to learn. We can all benefit from this lesson:

The most important lesson we can teach young kids is to recognize that some digital activities provide more value at some times than others. This means evaluating each digital activity on its own merit based on the circumstances.

We should probably also remember that controlling children’s behavior with screen time leads to more screen time:

Researchers investigated the impact of parenting practices on the amount of time young children spend in front of screens. They found a majority of parents use screen time to control behavior, especially on weekends. This results in children spending an average of 20 minutes more a day on weekends in front of a screen. Researchers say this is likely because using it as a reward or punishment heightens a child’s attraction to the activity.

The Death of Hybrid Work Is Greatly Exaggerated

I agree with Bruce Daisley in The Death of Hybrid Work Is Greatly Exaggerated:

The focus for organisations in 2023 shouldn’t be on mandating a return to the office, but on working out how to build strong cultures in a new, sustainable way. Some of that is about optimising the time that teams spend together, curating rather leaving it to chance. If we’re to get the best out of work culture then we all need to accept that this is the moment to reinvent the construction of it.

It’s a common criticism of remote work that it’s more difficult to collaborate remotely. But I think this is the conventional wisdom only because we try to recreate the office experience for remote work. Since offices rely on synchronous interactions, we use the same lens to try to make remote work effective, and that’s just not going to work.

If we optimize for asynchronous communication instead—which is what remote work is so good at—collaboration can be extremely effective. Perhaps even more effective than office collaboration, because everyone can provide thoughtful responses on whatever topic they are discussing on their own time. As Brian de Haaff points out in Remote Workers Are Outperforming Office Workers—Here’s Why:

Without being able to lean on physical proximity, remote workers must reach out to one another frequently and with purpose. This leads to stronger collaboration and camaraderie.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, this has been my experience as well. As long as we shift the way we think about collaboration away from the office mentality, and use the right tools, I don’t think remote collaboration is less effective than in-person work at all.

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