A simple trick to accelerate growth as a designer
The designers who accelerate their abilities the quickest are the ones who will, given the same amount of time, become the most skilled designers.
And following that, to accelerate growth, you have to optimize for learning.
Breaking it down even further, there are only two ways to learn — from your own experiences or from others. Let’s put the former aside for a second and focus on the latter. As an individual contributor who’s also been a design manager I believe it’s true what they say — you will learn more from your peers than from your manager.
So how can you maximize the learning you get from peers? Here’s a simple mental trick that I use to learn from others during meetings & interactions.
Whenever you hear someone suggest a really great idea, make a really sound argument, or say something brilliant that you wish you said— reverse engineer it.
What do I mean? Let’s tap into this a bit more.
Why and How to Reverse Engineer
“If I’m just trying to learn from others, why don’t I just copy what they say?”
Like the apprentice who follows the master, if you follow everything that the master does you will only ever be as good as the master.
But — if you understand how the master developed his/her skills, gained his/her knowledge, you can replicate that and potentially surpass whatever ceiling they’ve reached as well.
So how exactly do we do this?
It starts with asking the right questions. Whenever someone gives for example a fantastic piece of feedback, start by asking questions like:
- How could I have come up with that?
- What knowledge would I have to have?
- What experience would I need to acquire?
- What process would I have to put in place?
- Given my answers to the above, how could I broaden the learnings & principles to apply elsewhere?
Gradually but surely, peel back those layers until you have a nugget of actionable next steps that you can then implement into your own process.
Let’s illustrate.
You’re in a design critique, and Bob suggests we use a modal/popup to warn users when they land on the page that if they try to pay with Paypal they will be ineligible for the store’s promotion.
Jane throws a counterargument.
Instead of popping a modal for 100% of users for something only 10% of them will actually try (backed up by data), why don’t we only show the modal to people who click the “pay with Paypal” button? That way, the 90% of users who were never going to pay with Paypal anyway don’t have to get an annoying popup, while those who were going to will get the appropriate message.
Wow, great point!
The easy lesson here would just be to say “oh ok, so the next time I want to use a modal I should think about how many people actually need to see it.”
That’s like finding a gold mine and moving on once you’ve mined your first ounce.
Instead, ask some of the questions I mentioned above. How could I have come up with that? What processes would I have to put in place?
Well, perhaps if I had more knowledge of our data and how many people actually pay with Paypal I may have caught this. To go further, I could make sure I think through how many people will see anything I design and balance that with how many people need to see anything I design.
Some actionable next steps could then be:
- Make sure before I join a critique to always familiarize myself with user behavior data
- Make a checklist for myself so that anytime I propose a design I think through the frequency with which this design will be seen and how relevant it is given those frequencies.
Applications outside of Design Critiques
Another really great example in my past was my interactions with product managers. Often we’d be in a debate and the PM would reference the statistical significance of a piece of data e.g. “Sure a lot of people are clicking button X, but it’s not significant enough yet to draw a conclusion.”
I took it upon myself to reverse engineer that and come back to the table with an understanding of what actually constitutes significance. I learned about p-values and R-squared values and was able to level up my influence across not only design but the entire product development organization. I could now use that term with confidence in any interaction I encountered from then on and I still use it today.
You may be thinking “ok well isn’t this just learning from others? Can’t I read a book or listen to a podcast?”
While those aren’t necessarily bad routes at all, here’s the underlying beauty of this trick — whatever you learn will be perfectly relevant to what you are doing. The reason being — it came up while you were doing your job naturally!
Most of the time, 50–80% of what you learn in a podcast, article, or book may not actually be entirely relevant to your situation. But if you reverse engineer great thoughts from your peers at work — you will use those learnings again and again for as long as you perform your job function.
I’m building a library of the best design patterns in the world. Stay up to date with the latest patterns from the best products on Shufflepop!
I’m currently the founding designer of a startup backed by Max Levchin (Paypal/Affirm founder), previous Head of Design for a Series A startup. Join me for more product design insights on Substack!
