Do you ever feel like your job consists of fighting fires? "Fires" being internally generated crisis orchestrated by leadership, who opt to change direction?
Three years ago, I wrote an article called Applying a firefighter model to the UX Research practice.
In the article I propose three ways researchers can reframe a firefighting company culture:
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Unsurprisingly, I wrote this article when I was working in a firefighting environment.
How did I find the time to write the article? The tech organization had a culture of "crafting days," where all employees got two days per month to work on what they wanted to.
I chose to write this article - for my team, but also for myself, perhaps as a coping strategy.
A few realizations I've had since then:
How about you? How have you learned to cope with this environment? And what do you do to better understand a company's firefighting culture when you're looking for new roles?
I see a diverse range of professionals come across my LinkedIn feed, and this week, I want to share some posts from many of them - product managers, strategists, (content) designers, researchers, and AI experts. These posts made me stop and think, because they framed the issue in a way I hadn't considered:
So tired of the design community’s need to make every argument binary - Mia Blume
Research IS continuous discovery. What’s challenging is that if it’s only part of your job, there’s a good chance you’ll struggle to do it well - Sam Ladner
Last week I found out that my first novel, The Atlas of Forgotten Places, was used to train Meta's AI - Jenny Williams
The more time we spend trying to “prove value,” the more focused we become on obtaining validation - Abby Bajuniemi, PhD, referencing the article Hey designers, they’re gaslighting you by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Can we stop overcomplicating UCD discussions? [It's] simple - it’s based on balancing business needs, technological needs and user needs - Robert Powell
PMs: How we talk about working with UX Designers matters - Jennifer Moore
To understand users, you need to do research. But you can do a lot of research without ever understanding your users - Austin Yang
The Problem Space is where we go to learn about our users’ problems so we can design and develop meaningful and profitable solutions to solve these problems. It’s also where we go to learn about our companies, our employees/coworkers, and ourselves, so we can create the best organizational conditions for success.
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What's on my mind There's a crisis in tech roles - from product to research to design. All of these skills are essential, but how these skills are deployed in an organization - as roles, as parts of roles, and as complimentary with other skills and roles - are all part of a growing conversation. photo by Brendan Church I jumped in with a recent post, written in a moment of reflection on what I've been hearing from coaching clients, people in my network, and seen passing by on LinkedIn: The...