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In the course of writing about this class I started following, inevitably, Fake Jeff Jarvis on Twitter. I’m not sure if it’s an accurate parody of Jeff, and I doubt this is the best venue to discuss that. But one of the reasons the account is so hilarious is that it keeps juxtaposing buzzwords with real-life events to create pithy prescriptions for the future. What’s so amazing about Fake Jeff is that it’s all ever-so-slightly plausible; in a different context, all of the ridiculous statements are in fact insights.

I was thinking about Fake Jeff because sometimes, I don’t share Real Jeff’s optimism about the future. This has come up recently in spades as we’ve started to develop our business plans in earnest.

Both Real Jeff and Fake Jeff love the word “disrupt.”

Let’s start here: I am a very bad entrepreneur. I am not good at thinking like an entrepreneur, to be exact. (Nor, if my life so far is any indication, am I any good at making money.) I am stubborn about even considering business practices when I am thinking about what to write. I have a strong and maybe ridiculous notion of the purity of the product, which should not be sold to anyone, be it a reader or an advertiser.

According to Real Jeff, I am the enemy. Though not, he would probably hasten to add, through any particular fault of my own. Journalism spent a lot of time being too high-minded to sully itself with business matters, and as a result a bloated industry is in the process of being slashed to ribbons by competitors who mostly operate online. I mean that somewhat literally—the single entity of the newspaper article, with its multiple functions: to inform, to provide background, to establish relevance; to offer quotes, maps, data. The internet is a platform that allows for the article to be blown apart into its component pieces. So we may use the Breaking News app to inform and Wikipedia for background and Twitter for quotes. We can use other services to break up the conceptual inverted pyramid that dominates news stories. This is called atomization.

The inverted pyramid of an article, and how it is now atomized. At the top, the newness of a story is now indicated by Twitter. Nut grafs are now explainers, tapping into a burgeoning market for creating explainer grafs. The background is a link to Wikipedia. The quotes come from Facebook (that's what that grid with the circles in it is, a grid of profile pictures). A map and a graph round out the very tip of the pyramid.

Business models must adapt when new media changes the problems (read: the opportunities) of the landscape. The internet was obviously a gamechanger. For media, it seems that the internet radically enabled atomization—a specialization of the different tasks of a news organization. A disruption, as it were! Fake Jeff Jarvis would be proud.

Our reading for this week included Real Jeff’s Kindle single, "Gutenberg the Geek." Gutenberg launched a new platform using some startup logic and elbow grease. It’s a story of a media disruption, again. A different one, but the lessons are there. Tech enables forms and new relationships. But it breaks everything, too. I feel like (in my indignant nostalgia) we are glossing over the breaking of all things. Disrupt is a nicer way of saying many things you have relied on, for your livelihood or entertainment, are about to not be there anymore. I lack Real Jeff’s sense of optimism—the entrepreneur’s general sense of optimism as the world shifts beneath us. Disrupting is not just about new opportunities; it can hurt. The inevitable grind of technological progress still incurs casualties. No wonder journalists are afraid of the future.

(“Technologists see a problem and solve it. Journalists see a problem and complain.”)

I am a grade-A complainer. If this class makes an entrepreneur out of me, that will be quite a feat. Fake Jeff and I have at least this in common: We are not very optimistic. Too invested in loss, too skeptical of the gains.

It occurs to me that perhaps the most important thing Real Jeff is trying to teach me is a sense of optimism. Jeff and Jeremy both seem to be extraordinarily convinced that the future of journalism exists in a way that could make me money. They don’t really know what it is yet, but they are beginning to have an idea of what it could look like. Maybe.

Then the professors reminded us that our market research reports were due next week. Talk about a disruption. I was not prepared for that. I have not been in a classroom for a long time and I forgot about, you know, homework.

*

Anyway, I did the homework. Because yeah, journalistic integrity, and also, maybe I’ll learn something. And also also, I wonder if I can really become an optimist. I’m not sure that I am ever going to be a good entrepreneur, but what if I come out as an okay entrepreneur? A writer with a passable flair for business? Someone who believes ever so slightly in the future of journalism?

Hiring. Many of us want to get hired at some point. Some of us want to do the hiring eventually. Karen takes us through the mindset of someone who is looking to hire designers, and how we can best position ourselves to work for the companies we like.

"They need you more than you need them."

This, Karen says, is one of the hardest things for new graduate to wrap their heads around. Companies looking to hire are usually desperately trying to fill a role. Maybe someone just left and projects are piling up. Maybe the company is just growing quickly. Thinking more broadly about the industry, there is simply more new technology coming into the world than their are qualified designers to design them. Just think about all the new products and services that are being created everyday.

That said, to maximize our chance of getting the jobs we want, Karen wants us to:

Understand the mindset of the person doing the hiring. i.e. the hiring manager

Understand yourself, your skills, and how you communicate your fit for the company

Make a connection

Job postings are a complete and utter waste of your time. Personal contacts is the only thing that matters in getting a job. -Karen

Don't spam fifty companies with generic, carbon copies of your resume and cover letters. Focus on a handful of companies, find out as best you can who is hiring and what their needs are. "If you don't care enough to put the effort into finding the hiring manager's name? You don't care enough about the job."

Most importantly, make a personal connection with people who work at places that you're interested in. Start doing this now, even if you're not actively looking for a job. Meet them at conferences, go for a coffee, reach out on twitter. A personal connection  builds a stronger case than any resume or cover letter you can put together.

Have empathy, be human. We hear this all the time as advice for designers, but this theme comes up again and again in this class on hiring. Keep in mind that the hiring manager has their own problems and pressures to deal with, and their own desires and needs. The better you can empathize with their position, and shape your approach accordingly, the more likely you will stand out.

Build a Reputation

Ideally, when your resume comes across the hiring manager's desk, you want your name to ring a bell. To get there, you need to start building your public reputation. How? Talk to people. Network at local events. Volunteer. Talk to people during breaks at conference. Don't be a wall flower. Have a strategy for talking to people. Is there someone you want to meet? Shoot them an email before hand! Also, 

"I can't tell you how many perfectly lovely people I've met at conferences and forgotten. Send that person a note once in a while!" -Karen

It's hard to build a public reputation without some conference speaking. Fortunately, many conferences have opportunities specifically for less well known designers. Make plans for getting yourself in front of the design community. Finally, Karen cautioned us that personal brand building eventually reaches a point of diminishing return. Don't get yourself over expose at the detriment of your design practise.

Resumes

Let's get the general tips out of the way:

Start with why you're awesome. What makes you stand out? It's not because you're "passionate about user experience." That's the baseline.

Organize your resume according to positions held, or relevant skills. Position held is simpler, but you might want to organize according to relevants skills if you are just starting out, or if you have odd gaps in your work experience

Put work experience first, education credentials second.

Use action verbs to describe your accomplishments. Start with the hardest hitting verbs you can find. If you want to describe a collaborative effort, put the collaboration stuff in the second clause. e.g. Designed awesome sauce pan, in collaboration with materials engineers.

Thinking of doing a fancy infographic style resume? Don't. All that says is that you want to stand out more than efficiently tell me how you're going to solve the hiring manager's problems.

Check your spelling and grammar. Imagine you're looking at 50 of these, you'd be looking for reasons to throw resumes out too. Don't let silly mistakes be the reason your resume gets tossed.

Send your resume as a PDF, and name it with your name. "I get a pile of 50 resumes. How many do you think are named resume.pdf?"

"I am busy. I am tired. All I care about is the problem I need you to solve."

Think about writing your resume as a design problem. What are the goals of the hiring manager? They want to quickly shift through a pile of resumes and find the few they will investigate. The resume that helps them do that is scannable, concise, and written for the needs of the role. Design your resume accordingly. Plainly communicate through information design and good writing why you are fit for the role.

Cover letter

"Write to me! As a person! Karen, this is what I know about you. This is why I want to work with you. Show me that you care! A cover letter like this makes my day!" -Karen

Once again the theme of empathy comes up. You cover letter is your opportunity to tell your hiring manager what you know about their needs, and why you are the right person to solve their problem. This is, of course, premised on your research into the company you are applying to. Do you research!

I've hired people who are technically less qualified, but whose passion for the work comes through in the cover letter. Remember there's an actual person at the other end of the hiring process, who is excited when they find that other people want to work with them. -Karen

So, write like a real person. Sound like yourself. The cover letter is where you voice can really come through.

Karen's Tip: Make your cover letter the email, and the resume your attachment. Make it as easy as possible to see the cover letter.

Portfolio

Don't assume people will look at your portfolio. For some hiring managers, this might be the first thing they look at. For Karen, the portfolio is looked at if you survive the resume and cover letter filtering.

Tips:

Must be easy to navigate. A basic scroll navigation is great. No one has time to figure out your revolutionary navigation scheme.

Organize by clients and deliverable types e.g. sketches, wireframes, prototypes, user research, etc.

Unless your client is the CIA (or Apple), don't let NDA's stand in the way of showing at least some of your work. This is especially true if your work is public for the internet to see anyways.  Find a way to anonymize the work and still let your design process show through.

You've only got the hiring manager's attention for a couple minutes, and they are there to establish your basic credibility i.e. can you demonstrate basic coverage of the skills that the company needs. Keep it simple.

Interview Portfolio

"I don't really want to look at your portfolio. What I really want is to have a great conversation." -Karen

Your interview portfolio serves a completely different purpose than your online portfolio. The interview can potentially be awkward, and in this situation your interview portfolio is the number one social glue. It's your tool to structure the conversation about your skills, and direct that conversation to your favor. So tell a good story about your portfolio.

"And I mean stories! I want to know, of all the work you've done, why are you presenting this piece? I want to see how you got here, not just where you got to." -Karen

Tell stories about your process, stories about lessons you learned. The principles of good storytelling applies. Don't show everything, curate! Build a narrative. Think of your interview as a sort of performance, so rehearse it if you have to. Come prepared; orchestrate the story and the pieces required to tell it. For example, don't awkwardly navigate through the file system to find the piece you want to show. Have them lined up and ready to go.

For extra credit, "Tell me what went wrong, and how you dealt with it. This way I can really get to know how you deal with obstacles. Show me you can roll with it when things go wrong."

More Interview Tips

A classmate asked, "How do we deal with 'do you have questions for me?'"

Have questions to ask your interviewers. Good standard questions include, "Where does the role sit in the company? Who do we report to?" You want to take this chance to get to know the company, the role, and the people better.

If you are ballsy and motivated, ask something along the lines of, "How does this role contribute to the boss or the boss's boss's bonus?" Essentially, you want to know how the work you do contributes to your company's success. You want to know what the company's success metric looks like. (See last week's notes on why.)

Finally, make sure send thank you notes and follow up. Get the contacts of everyone who interviewed you, and send them a brief thank you the next day. Remind them of who you are. Follow up again in a week, and then once every month if they haven't gotten back to you. (Any more than this is annoying.)

Working with Recruiters

A company that works with external recruiters is either a really good or really bad sign. The problem is that it's hard to tell which it is.

Good scenario: The company is so good and so busy that it is will to invest significantly in recruiting top talent.

Bad scenario: The company cannot attract and retain people through natural recruiting means, and have to resort to external recruiters.

Once again, do your research and find out about the company. Either way, don't be rude to recruiters, even if they can be annoying sometimes. You simply never know when they would come around again with a good offer.

Let’s play a game.

[This is the phase of the class where we’re brainstorming our business ideas. We spend half of class learning how to research market data. We talk about our pitches and the other students rip them to shreds (but in a nice way). We’ve got to start learning how to think beyond just content production, Jeff argues. So for an hour we sit down in groups and free-associate startups.]

Here are the rules of A-Ha:

You have color-coded cards. Some are information processes (X). Some are computing technologies (Y). Some are consumer needs or consumer values (Z). Take one from each pile. Create a product that does X using Y in service of Z. You have five minutes.

“Think wildly,” he added.

Well, we did.

Here’s our class’ ideas—haphazardly brainstormed, named, and input. (My group was group #3, and I have to say, I think our product-naming skills were in top form.)

It was a card game, yes. But it really made me think. In tech and in entrepreneurship there is a very high bar already in place. Google and Facebook and The New York Times all already exist. Creating something new in that environment is nervewracking. The stakes are high and this is a world of savvy, literate experts who have rules, guidelines, ideas, criticisms, best practices, and worst-case scenarios for you to think about as you’re trying to start a new. I’m all for media discourse and making successful companies, but sometimes it’s incredibly valuable to shut the door, limit your time, and play with the concepts at hand. (Maria Popova would approve. So would Austin Kleon.)

I was surprised by how many information processing ideas I’d never even considered before. I’d given some thought to new technologies—ooh, wearable computing!—and a lot of thought to journalistic needs—truth, for example, or impartiality. But I had not given a lot of thought to a process like “summarization” or a computational value like “currency.” In part this is because information processing is not just limited to computers—we do it, too. We’ve been doing it forever. For a journalist, it’s an inherent process, built on experience. It had never occurred to me to break that all down, to associating, adaptability, reliability, enriching.

[Here’s the list of all the cards in the deck. It’s a pdf.]

There was a good reason for playing this game early in the class. As I said above, we're all working on our business pitches. So far they've all sounded something like this: Let’s make a website. An app. A daily email. This is what we’re comfortable with, something that sits easily in our hardware and software, that has sort-of adapted to what we used to see in print. The game gave us a few very concrete parameters—and then constrained us to coming up with a product in five minutes. A wearable computing device that utilizes information currency to serve the public good. Go!

[The best part about that combination: It turns out the simplest answer is... a watch. It could be like this kind of watch. But actually this kind of watch also fits the bill.]

When we were done we looked at a chart of all of the cards in the deck, compared to each other. Given the technologies and processes available to us, we are not nearly exploring the breadth of possible innovations in journalism.

Source: “Cultivating the Landscape of Innovation in Computational Journalism,” Nicholas Diakopolous. Link to pdf (with larger image of chart) here.

Working in isolation, it’s not difficult to imagine ways we could design a better world. In many cases, coming up with a design for a better product or service—one that’s easier to use, more engaging and less frustrating—is the easy part. Designs (and designers) succeed for reasons that go beyond just the quality of the work. Getting a project implemented and launched requires designers to work in teams of people, manage schedules, budgets, and resources, and above all, demonstrate how their work contributes to the overall success of the business.

From Karen McGrane's Design Management Class Syllabus

Design Management is about the strategic, operational and tactical considerations of design. How does design actually get done? How does it get proposed? How does it get budgeted? How does it get communicated? How does it get buy-in? How does it get managed? How does it get paid for? The course is written with the design-as-a-service business model in mind, but will be applicable to design work of all kinds.

Karen began the class with discussion,

"What does good work mean?"

The class had a number of answers. Good work achieves a predefined goal. Good work is finding a well defined problem. Good work is the best that could be done with the given resources and capabilities. etc.

"How many of you would like to make money?" Most hands go up.

"What does it mean to make money, in the context of your work? What does it mean to have your work be valued?"

One of the clearest demonstration of the value of your work is money. Money may not be the goal. It is, however, a yardstick. It is also an input, and it is required to keep doing good work. You can also see that you work is valued when you are given responsibilities.

(My take: At the end of the day, you want to do good work, work that you can be proud of, and you want to get paid for it. Design management is about the methodology of that.)

This is pretty much the entire class. You start with an idea. Some shit happens. If things go well, money pops out the other end. Design Management is about that messy process in the middle.

The False Spectrum

Many young designers thinks that there's a spectrum between doing good work, and making money. On one hand you have good work that is sexy, high profile, and pushes the envelope. On the other hand, you have boring work, production stuff, crappy projects that makes money.

Karen says no. It isn't a linear continuum, however, it is actually a matrix.

This is the matrix where you will spend the rest of your design career.  You will do good work, and you will do crappy work. You will make money and be valued, and you will also lose money and be devalued. The goal here is to spend as much time as possible in the top right quadrant, and as little time as possible in the bottom left. You will, however, spend time in each and every one of these quadrants, guaranteed. 

You will spend quite a bit of time up down in the bottom right. There will be times where you do good work, but over invest! You'll do more than necessary. You will make choices with the belief that, if you put a little extra effort in, you are making some contract with the universe where you will get some extra reward. This is nonsense. What you will end up doing is doing good work and losing money. That's ok. It happens. There are also good, legitimate reasons to be here. Make sure you know why you are doing it though.

Also, you may learn to love being in the top left quadrant. This is the "put gas in my car" quadrant. It will not excite you. It will not look sexy. It will not be worth telling your friends. Nonetheless, there will be days when you want a nice client with a problem you can solve who pay their bills on time. There is a lot to be said for doing work that solves a problem for someone, even if it is not the most exciting problem in the world.

Finally, you will spend some time in the bottom left. You'll find yourself doing work you hate for a client who is not paying you anything. It happens. It happens to everyone. One of the goals of this class is to teach you some tricks to recognize it, and get out of it as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Good Design Is the Easy* Part

(*Not actually easy, but it is not the hardest part.)

Coming up with an idea for a better designed service, or system, or product is often not the hard part. Working in isolation, we can come up with ways to solve most of the world's problems. Real world problems, however, do not get solved in isolation. To put our ideas to work, we need to invest money and resources. We need concerted effort from large, complicated organizations and system. This is what's called operationalizing design, and it is difficult!

Design gets done at three levels; the tactical, the operational, and the strategic.

Tactical: Your design may involve some high minded ideals and a broad vision. It ultimately gets done, however, at the tactical level. Tactics is about how you actually get design implemented in the real world. You will learn basic tactics about how designers manage scope, budget, resources, teams, and process. All of your ideals about what good work is, what a proper design process is - design tactics is about how to get all that done on a day-to-day basis.

Operational: This is design at the systemic, organizational level. How does design get done in the culture of a company and organization? How does design sync up and impact the work of other groups in the organization?

Strategic: What is the role of design across the entire organization? How does design influence and enhance the organization's competitive advantage? What role does design play at influencing the direction of the organization? Decisions at the strategic level determines not just how a project gets done, but whether a project event gets taken on or funded.

The bulk of this class will be about the tactical and operational parts of design.

Design at the Operational Level

Organizational Structure: How is an organization designing itself? An organization's orgchart reflects what it's priorities are. While the org chart cannot tell you in detail exactly where power and influence are concentrated in the company, it does tell you what the organization thinks is meaningful and important

Hiring and Staffing: How do companies thinking about hiring and staffing? How do people get hired and how are salaries negotiated? How do companies think about allocating design talent? Designers ought to understand how companies think about their exchange of value with you as a designer.

Managing People: Some of you will eventually take on management roles. So it is important to be aware of the issues on the human side of design that you will face. In managing design you will have to evaluate performance, provide feedback, give directions, manage conflict on teams, etc.

Design Process: We might know how we like design process to be, but how does it actually get implemented tactically? How long will it take? Can you staff it efficiently? Do people care about the process? Will the organization pay for it?

Design at the Tactical Level

Business Development: How do designers get work? How do companies decide how to hire and who to contract? The most common way that designers get work is business development through an RFP (Request for Proposal) process.

Legal and Contract: Designers need to have a basic grasp of contracts and how to protect themselves. Know what you are signing. You should have a lawyer, but you shouldn't feel like you're beholden to the high priesthood of the law every time a contract needs signing.

Design Briefs: This is essentially the tactical side of managing design. How do you wrangle all the components of a project together? The design brief is one tool to communicate expectations about goals, scope and budgets. A good design brief helps get all the stakeholder on the same page and headed in the right direction.

The Next Fourteen Weeks