Product + Design Resources: Volume #2
Product + Design Resources is a series of newsletters with – you guessed it! – product, design, and career resources that I’ve found helpful recently in my work as a product designer.
This is the second installment of Product + Design Resources, a series of newsletters on product, design, and career resources that I’ve found helpful recently. It’ll include everything from readings and podcast episodes to Twitter threads and more — with the goal of sharing what I’ve found useful, interesting, or important in my work as a product designer.
Reading 📚
Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies For Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark
Mockups, prototypes, graphics only go so far in communicating what we want to say. To take our points the rest of the way, we might give a presentation or jump on a call. Or, as is more frequently the case with remote work, we write.
And we have to write a lot, as well as in various forms. For quick notes or discussions, we write short-form content — comments in Figma or Google Docs, threads in Slack or email. For more complex topics, we opt for longer-form content where we can fully express our ideas — case studies, design documentation, or product requirement documents (PRDs). And in each of these scenarios and more, we need to reach a broad, diverse audience — engineers, product managers, stakeholders, researchers, executives, hiring managers, and users, to name a few. How do we choose the right tools for the task at hand to successfully explain our thoughts, argue key points, or resolve any miscommunications?
Writing Tools provides bite-sized strategies for improving your writing. Each chapter covers a different tool with literary examples and tips for applying it. What I enjoy most about this resource is how easy it is to digest — each chapter is only a few pages long, which means you can squeeze one in before or after work, over lunch, or even in those odd 15-minute gaps between meetings. And after, when you’re able to communicate better and get your point across faster, you’ll find that improving your writing provides a huge return on investment — even boosting your confidence at work!
Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind by Jocelyn K. Glei, featuring over 20 contributors
“Because we each have a unique set of strengths, weaknesses, and sensitivities, it is impossible to prescribe a single approach that will work for everyone. The right solution for you will always be personal — an idiosyncratic combination of strategies based on your own work demands, habits, and preferences.
So rather than lay out a one-size-fits-all productivity system, we provide a playbook of best practices for producing great work.”
Creativity can be notoriously finicky. Sometimes it flows naturally, as if it’s second nature; other times, it doesn’t want to show up no matter how hard we might try to command it into existence. And when you have a deadline looming or if you’re trying to make progress on a personal project, this process — and the unpredictability of it — can be frustrating and discouraging.
I’ve been doing creative work professionally and personally for a while, and recently have scaled up my creative work considerably. With that, I’ve been looking for ways of better using my own time effectively in pursuit of my long-term goals. That includes setting up good personal practices in addition to rethinking how I approach my creative work, both of which (and more!) are covered in this collection of essays.
I appreciate the book’s theme around understanding yourself and your preferences first (i.e. “notice when you seem to have the most energy during the day”), and then using the practices (i.e. “dedicate those valuable periods to your most important creative work”) to build lifestyle habits around your creative goals.
Plus, there’s a lot of hands-on, tried-and-true, advice, like:
“Find a good stopping point on a project — one that frees your mind from nagging questions — before moving onto another task,” the author Christian Jarrett writes in “Banishing multitasking from our repertoire.” In the essay “Scheduling in time for creative thinking,” author Cal Newport describes the approach of creating “daily focus blocks,” chunks of time where you can apply sustained focus to creative tasks. In those focus blocks, he recommends to “tackle a clearly identified and isolated task. If you have to write an article, for example, do the research ahead of time,” so that when you have uninterrupted time to write, you can just focus on writing.
It sounds simple, but the ideas covered in this book break the mold of how we traditionally might think to approach “creative work.” And when you want to accomplish an ambitious creative endeavor, like designing a personal website, launching a project, or making a big career move, these are the project management tenets that make those efforts more successful and less stressful.
Resources ✨
The State of Pay for Women in 2022 on Elpha
Elpha, an online community for women in the workplace, surveyed over 3,000 women and aggregated over 7,000 women’s salaries to generate this report, which they published for Women’s Equal Pay Day on March 15th.
In addition to highlighting trends overall, they reveal the delineations along intersections like race and sexual orientation — with the overarching picture showing that the gender wage gap is more significant for women of color. It’s an illuminating report overall, and definitely a required reading for anyone in their career.
Videos 💻
How I changed my remote work daily routine to avoid burnout by Charli Marie
For many of us, fully remote work has really only been a thing for a few years.
I started a new remote role a few months ago, which has spurred my interest in re-evaluating how I separate my work and my personal life. What I liked most about this video was the advice around envisioning what your ideal morning looks like, and using that as a starting point to create the steps toward replicating that every day. (My ideal morning includes spending time with my cats, having tea, and getting some personal work done.)
We might have off days, like when we just want to sleep in — but at the very least, we’ll know what we want to aim for, each morning, to set us up for a better day.
Colors of Chloe
I came across Chloe’s channel thanks to the ✨ YouTube algorithm ✨ and I was immediately hooked. Her videos cover everything from candid, personal stories of navigating toxic workplaces to advice for pivoting career paths. But what I appreciate the most about her content is her genuine approach. It’s refreshing to find someone online, in a similar career path, whom I feel like I can deeply relate to. Would recommend checking out her content on Youtube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok!
Social media 💌
No-Frills Process & Portfolio Design Advice & Other Stuff, by Kritika Kushwaha, Sr. Product Designer @ Asana
For students — this is a great resource if you’re looking to expand or improve your portfolio. If you want to take steps toward crafting a product design portfolio, but you don’t have experience of working in an industry environment, this post and accompanying resource offers some great pointers!
This article and the full tweet thread were thought-provoking reads on the history behind the term “imposter syndrome.”
As our conversations around diversity and inclusion become more nuanced, it’s also equally as important that we get more nuanced around the systemic causes of why those goals are challenging. That includes developing alternative, and more accurate, descriptions of what we’ve traditionally considered “imposter syndrome.”
Being more straightforward and calling it what it is — like self-doubt, social anxiety, or trauma, as examples — can also open the door for more thoughtful discussions about how to address and design better solutions around those problems, rather than it remaining as nebulous as “imposter syndrome.”
I hope you found this newsletter helpful! If you’re interested in reading more, subscribe here for free and share it with a friend. You can also find me on Twitter (@wontonface).