🤿 measuring sticks

Only a select few have multiple episodes on Dive Club and today Catt Small joins the ranks.

She has a gift for turning messy ideas into practical next steps so it’s no wonder her Staff Designer course is one of the top-rated on Maven.

In this episode we go deep into all of the ways you can make an impact by building influence on your team and effectively casting vision for your product.

Some highlights:

• The 2 ways to measure your influence

• Strategies for getting distribution for your ideas

• How to select the ideal format for casting a vision

• Storytelling tactics used by the best staff designers

• How to strategically invest in workplace relationships

• What Catt learned while interviewing staff designers for her new book

• + a lot more

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

🤝 WITH GENWAY

Alright here’s the thing… you don’t need another dashboard. What you need to do is talk to customers 👀

So I want to introduce you to Genway AI

You can think of it like vibe researching to validate your ideas quickly.

Just draft your questions, select an ICP, and their AI agent runs interviews on your behalf by pulling from a panel of global participants.

Set it up in the morning and get actionable insights by lunch time.

It’s validation at your fingertips and you can try it out free for 14 days just click the link to get started 👇

🔑 KEY TAKEAWAYS

Strategies for building influence

Catt shared a couple of simple measuring sticks for knowing how much influence you actually have as a designer:

1. How often are leaders asking for your input on product strategy?

2. How well do your ideas travel without you in the room? (read: the Secret to Great Storytelling)

So here are a few tactics that I saved from our conversation:

1 — Invest in social capital

Influence starts with relationships. Catt’s advice is to reach out to the leader most connected to your work and ask for a recurring 1:1.

You could frame it like this:

Once you’ve got that time make sure to ask “what can I do to help?”, take notes, and follow up on what you said you’d do (thank God for Granola lol). This is how trust compounds.

2 — “Manage up”

If you want to build trust with stakeholders, make it easy for them to see the value of your work.

Leaders are busy and constantly switching context. You can’t expect them to hunt down your updates in Slack. A simple summary goes a long way.

As soon as she said that I made a note to productize this for Inflight 😅

Not only does this build trust… it also doubles as a head start on your future portfolio and even your promo packet :)

3 — Prioritize distribution

Remember Kyle Turman? Their episode was all about going 0 → 1 on Claude. Catt highlighted an important idea that they shared during an interview for her new book:

We talk a lot about communicating the impact of your work, but Catt shared a smart tactic for making sure your ideas spread 💡

It’s not enough to share your vision once in a meeting. You need to place it where people will keep bumping into it.

That’s why Catt records Looms of herself walking through a deck or prototype, then drops them in PRDs, quarterly planning docs or anywhere else they’ll live on.

Tbh I can’t believe I never thought of strategically embedding Looms before 😅

There’s a lot more in the full episode. If you’re curious about the leap to staff designer or how to amplify your impact as an IC then I think you’ll really enjoy this one 👇

Meet the Dive partners 

I made a list of my favorite products and asked them to come on as sponsors of the newsletter/podcast. They said yes 🥹

The #1 way to support Dive Club is to check them out👇

Framer​ → How I build my websites

Genway → How I do research

Granola → How I take notes during CRIT

Jitter​ → How I animate my designs

Lovable → How I build my ideas in code

Mobbin → How I find design inspiration

Paper → How I design like a creative

Raycast ​ → How I stay in flow while I work

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