Category: productivity

Mid-journey designer

About a week ago, good friend and head of design (of a leading edtech company), Hardik Pandya, advertised a position (on x/twitter) for a designer who needs to be comfortable using midjourney for design work for a new product.

This (quite obviously) got a lot of eyeballs and opinions – basically did what it was supposed to do.

At the root of this, this essentially validates something that I have been saying for a while. This whole generative AI thing (and I am not generalizing AI for this) is something that is going to enhance the productivity of specialists. Sure some mid level people who are either not competent enough or are not adapting fast enough might get affected. But the general rule of thumb is – if you are adapting yourself to latest tools, you should be fine. This is something that you should have anyway been doing all the while.

Let us take the example of designers in this specific context of the tweet.

  • A good designer’s competency is his way of framing a UI screen / graphic. The way the colour palette is chosen. The way copy enhances the visual. The gradients. The user interactions. The way by which you lead the users’ attention/flow. Once the designer has this nailed (or has the capability to iterate to nail), then its a question of using the right tool for the job.
  • A good designer has probably anyway evolved throughout their career – from photoshop to sketch to figma. This is based on my exposure to the tool chain for a limited use-case superset that I have been involved in. I am sure there are other tool chain evolutions that others can quote.
  • The latest is evolving to a way by which the designer describes all of the above by way of a good prompt. Most likely, the designer would get a 80% accurate outcome (or some similar high percentage), and then the designer iterates on a tool of choice to get the final outcome.
  • The better the designer is with generating the prompt, the quicker (and lesser number of iterations) they get to a high fidelity outcome close to the final. By the time, they are extremely efficient, they are probably close to 95% accurate through their prompting and just have to add finishing touches outside of genAI.
  • Do you see the parallel with extremely competent high productivity PMs <> designers combos?
  • If not, I will give you an example. At Travenues (early stage small team size startup), when I used to sit down with Das (Abhisek Das), our designer with whom I have worked with in the past, and work on a screen/graphic. I would keep rattling off my product thoughts, and Das’s hands flew on figma. It was magic watching the design come alive in front of me, as I iterated, gave feedback, gave more product thoughts, and it just evolved.
  • The expertise power shifts right with genAI. If the designer learns how to translate my PM thoughts into a design prompt, imagine the rate of productivity improvement.
  • Also, do notice here, that the designer cannot be replaced with the PM. The designer knows how to prompt way better, because he has the outcome in his mind, and he is getting the machine to churn that out as closely as possible to what he has in his mind.
  • The designers competency in this grows as he does this more and more (and the models become better and better).

Out of several fields getting impacted with GenAI, this is one of those where I can see first hand (in my mind and in real life recently), how this can practically increase productivity significantly. (The other one is of course code generation, which I am not that close to, but I see very similar parallels).

Modiji, Bullet trains, and the Prioritization conundrum

PM Modi and the Japanese PM Abe jointly laid the foundation stone for the first bullet train in India. Enough has been ranted about this in social media. About, why this is not the thing that is needed now. And why the Govt should fix all the issues that is plaguing the railways and so on.

I think this is a problem that Product managers face too (Hmm. Just a coincidence that, they are PMs too.).

The feature prioritization conundrum is the scenario where a PM is faced with a host of small urgent + Important  issues/features to deliver in a short time-frame ; and a smaller bunch of longish important but more challenging hard problems to solve. The engineers want to do the latter, but the former are very important too.

A PM cannot keep prioritizing the smallish important problems higher, because they will never end. You will never get to the largish challenging problems. This will lead to your engineers getting demotivated and doing mundane familiar stuff. But at the same time, you cannot just prioritize the challenging projects – this will keep your engineers happy – but the business suffers. Some of these urgent+important tasks are most likely important for the business.

One of the solutions to this is to assign more than one task to engineers. This should be a mix of the smaller urgent tasks and the longish exciting tasks. This will keep your engineers happy and the business going.

So, does that make, what our Prime Minister did, with the bullet train right? I do not know, since I do not have enough context. But if I see the PM as a PM ( 🙂 ), then I guess he is doing the right thing.

Habit as a deterrent

24hrclock

Most self help books and blogs typically advocate the use of habits and rituals for attaining goals. For example, they would say get up early at 530AM and do half hour of exercise. Or, set aside half hour a day for journalling. While it does help a lot of times to do this, this has its own problems. For example, you get up late one day, you would blame yourself and postpone the exercise for the next day. If you still want to do it, it would hit other rituals of yours, and delay yourself further and so on. Worse still, you would be grumbling at yourself for not having done your initial ritual(s).

I recently read this great FastCo article, which talks about about this conundrum. If you rather set yourself a goal of half hour exercise per day, this could work out better. You could do a 15 minute work out sometime in the afternoon. Perhaps work in another 15 minute walk after lunch. Maybe take your kid to the park and do some walking there. You would reach your half hour of exercise.

Today may not be the same as tomorrow. Maybe I could not get up early enough today because I had late night conference calls the previous day. Maybe I would be able to get up much earlier the next day. So again, the ritual goes against this philosophy.

Again, this is not a satisfy-all formula. In fact, that is the whole point. What works for today may not work for tomorrow. What works for exercise may not hold for diet. What works for the summer days may not work for winters. Hold yourself accountable for the end goal rather than how you reach the goal.

(Reference: FastCompany article)

(image src: flickr)

PillPack – Another Great Ideo Idea

Another super idea from Ideo – the design firm. Basic premise is to help folks take their medicines correctly at the right dosage at the right times. Without having to sort through medicines by yourself and figure what to take in the morning, afternoon, or night, pillpack works with your prescription and gives you these small tearable pouches with the date and time printed on them. You just tear the appropriate pouch and take the pills in the pouch. Nice. Another real world problem solved.

(via fastcodesign)

Youtube vs Vimeo [Usability Peeve]

There is one big usability peeve I have about launching and watching embedded videos. My typical embedded viewing experience is as below:

  1. Read the article on theoldreader.com (yes, I moved from greader -> feedly -> theoldreader – more on that in a different post).
  2. If I see a good video that I want to see, I typically click on the “youtube” icon or “vimeo” icon on the post, so that it opens up the video in youtube or vimeo respectively in a new tab.

vimeo   youtube

Now, when I do that, my reasonably average cognitive capabilities want me to think that the video link would open up in a new tab, and should wait for me to go to that tab and press play. Why? Because I had never pressed play on the embedded video. I had just said – open it for me in youtube or vimeo.

  • Youtube opens the video up in a new tab and begins playing it ! Whaa ??? I dont want to watch it now. I will watch it later.
  • Vimeo dutifully follows my thought process, opens up the video in a new tab and waits for me to go and press the play button.

In this duel, Vimeo wins. Sorry youtube.

PS: By the way, you should watch the planet six video. Hilariously done. Simple claymation with a message.

Delegating vs MicroManaging

Just read a great post by Steven Sinovsky in his “Learning by Shipping” blog, which he started, just after he left MS. This is one of his few rare concise posts. He has a ton of experience and fantastic in-depth into software management, but some of his posts just run too long. I liked this one.

The problem is clearly stated in the words of a first year MBA student:

High-performing people generally want autonomy to get things done without anyone micromanaging them.  At the same time, as a midlevel manager, I’ve often had someone above me who’s holding me accountable for whatever my direct reports are working on.

I’m struggling to find the right balance between giving people their autonomy while also asking sufficient questions to get the detail I need in order to feel comfortable with how things are going. 

And Steve provides 5 tips to find the right balance between delegating vs micro-managing.

  1. Delegate the problem, don’t solve it.
  2. Share experiences, don’t instruct.
  3. Listen to progress, don’t review it.
  4. Provide feedback, don’t course correct.
  5. Communicate serendipitously, don’t impede progress.

I mostly agree with all of them. My favourites (which I try and practice as much as possible) are (2) and (5). I am a big believer in Management by Walking Around (for middle managers atleast). It is so much more productive for the manager and the team.

Maybe sometime later, I will write up something myself on what I feel one can do to find the middle ground. But for now, you can read the full article here.

Feedly: Bring back the big green check mark

Dear Feedly

Could you please bring back the big green check mart which used to appear just below the article list? This used to be so much better.

What was:

feedly1

Once I was done flipping through the articles, I would just go ‘bam’ on the “Mark feed as read”.

But now:

feedly2

See how much I need to scroll to get to the teeny check mark. This happens especially bad in the Magazine view. It is slightly better in the cards view. But the check mark is still small. I want that big smacking green check mark to go ‘bam’ on when I am done reading my feeds.

Please feedly – in the interest of going mainstream, don’t take away these small pleasures.

Yours

Recent Greader->Feedly Convert.