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🤿 how to make big ideas happen

🤿 how to make big ideas happen

+ how to get noticed as a designer 👀

Ridd
August 29, 2024

When I say “high-stakes design project” what comes to mind?

How about redesigning your company’s checkout flow (AKA the money-making machine) right before a $3.5B IPO?

Because that’s exactly the project that Ryan Scott owned when he was a design lead at Airbnb.

So I interviewed him to uncover what it takes to drive this level of impact, especially as an IC.

Here’s what I learned about making big ideas happen 👇

INTERVIEW OPPORTUNITY

I recently did an episode with Noam Segal who’s a long-time research leader at Airbnb, Wealthfront, Twitter, Upwork, etc.

Anyway… he kept raving about this new product called Genway. It uses AI-powered interviews to help you gather rich, qualitative data at essentially infinite scale.

Noam got me hooked 😆 So now I’m using the product to gather feedback from you and others listening to Dive Club.

So if you have a few minutes you should try it out! It’s actually pretty fun and you can get a little taste of what the future of research looks like 👇

TOGETHER WITH

📺 THIS WEEK’S EPISODE

Making strategic impact as an IC

This week's episode is with Ryan Scott who was an early designer at Doordash and then spent years as a design lead at Airbnb.

Nowadays Ryan teaches hundreds of designers ranging from seniors to VPs how to make a bigger impact at your company.

So this episode is jam-packed with insights about:

What it’s like presenting at Airbnb CRIT
Ways to unlock your credibility as a designer
How to mitigate risk when presenting your ideas
What it takes to speak the language of the business
Types of “PM-y” questions that designers should be asking
How Ryan led a massive redesign of the Airbnb booking flow
The right (and wrong) way to make a case for investing in UX debt
How to talk about your work in a way that resonates with non-designers
a lot more

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts 👇

One thing is clear after listening to this episode again:

The more business context you possess, the more credibility you have to propose ambitious design ideas 👀

📺 BONUS EPISODE

Grow your personal brand and get noticed as a designer

In 2020 I started consistently putting myself out there online.

That decision was the best investment I ever made in my career 📈

So I wanted to create a playbook for other designers to follow and decided that Oliur was the perfect person to learn from.

So we filmed an episode where he shares:

→ His keys to growing on social
→ Different ways to create leverage in your career
→ How he (accidentally) landed a billion-dollar client
→ How you can get more confident putting yourself out there
→ What you need to know to get better at marketing yourself
→ Specific ways to build meaningful connections with other designers

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts 👇

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

Help wanted: AI Designers

An AI designer at Google named Nick Hobbs wrote one of my favorite AI pieces to date.

It’s an attempt at explaining why too many teams get stuck in the “AI Swamp” and why designers are best equipped to unlock whole new types of AI products.

“There’s an alien in the middle of your software stack that defies all attempts to be specified…infinite possibility is awesome, but it also takes our industry’s tidy little user flows with 6 states and a dozen edge cases and throws it right out the window.”

Nick Hobbs

This is an inspiring look at the future of design and definitely one you’re going to want to bookmark 👇