Focus on Being Useful, Not Impressive
Impressive work and useful work are not the same thing. Impressive work is optimized for the person looking at it. Useful work is optimized for what happens next.
For a long time, I oriented around being a "great designer." Strong outputs, speed, a reputation built on craft. That still matters — but it can no longer be the primary orientation.
The shift I've made — and that I think this moment demands — is toward usefulness as the organizing principle. Am I helping the team make better decisions? Am I clarifying the problem before anyone tries to solve it? Am I shaping the direction before it calcifies?
“The shift I’ve made — and that I think this moment demands — is toward usefulness as the organizing principle. Am I helping the team make better decisions? Am I clarifying the problem before anyone tries to solve it? Am I shaping the direction before it calcifies?”
In practice this looks like less time polishing deliverables, and more time structuring the conversations that determine what gets built. It looks like getting in the room earlier, even when the problem isn't fully formed. It looks like treating the brief, the framing, the question itself as design material.
And in a world where AI can generate the deliverable, the conversation is often the real work.
The output still matters. But it's downstream of something more important: whether you understood the right problem, whether you helped the right people see it clearly, whether the work moved something that needed to move.
That's the version of this job I want to be good at.