You could probably be designing faster

Improving the speed at which you deliver design work is absolutely critical, yet often under-appreciated.

Why “under- appreciated”? When talking early career designers about skills they want to develop, the answers almost always revolve around  craft: "I want to improve my visual design skills, interaction design ability, etc." Obviously these matter! But very rarely have I heard someone say “I want to learn how to do great work in half the time.” Yet this is one of the exact skills that sets top performers apart. As a former boss told me, "The two superpowers of an exceptional senior designer: doing work that only they can do, and doing junior work in half the time other designers take to do it."

So why is this so important?

The obvious one: More shipping! If each project takes your team 6 weeks from start → finish, you ship about 8 projects a year. But if each project takes your team 4 weeks from start → finish, you ship 13 projects a year. This is a pretty meaningful difference to users! And I’d hazard that many projects have 2 weeks of fat that can be cut across the full project lifecycle: Use existing components, cut scope, focus on doing fewer things well.

Maybe more important than shipping faster is is learning faster. In the “8 projects vs. 13 projects” worlds, not only are you doing MORE projects, but each project benefits from the learnings of the previous ones. So the 8th project has 7 “lessons” informing it, but the 13th has 12 lessons informing it! (And this improvement compounds over many more smaller iterations). This is really important in a fast-changing landscape (like this current AI world)

Maybe least important but still helpful: Combating some common design team critiques. When I go for happy hour with a PM / Engineering counterpart, and after a few drinks they ask you the “real” questions that they didn’t ask during our weekly meeting, one of the first ones is always "What is taking design so long on this project?" There are usually very good answers, parts of hte process that others don't see that need defending. But there's also a kernel of truth to it

How do you do this? Well it’s just like any skill…

• Ask for feedback and advice on how to do it from people around you. Do some “pair designing” with a coworker and just watch their process: How do they explore ideas? How do they make decisions? How do they set up their days and weeks for maximum productivity and progress?
• Get feedback on your work and early and often. Most teams do weekly crits but you shouldn’t wait till then to get feedback. Find the obvious problems as early as possible and fix them. Use 1:1s, async chats, or huddles to gut check yourself before sinking a day into an idea that’s doomed from the start.
• Stress test your deadlines and see what happens if it’s more aggressive. If you only had 80% of the time to work on this, what would you do? 50%? Then apply some of these lessons to the overall project timeline.

This kind of improvement doesn't show off well on a portfolio, but I promise when you're interviewing for your next job and you show a killer feature and say "This only took 3 weeks from start to finish", people will notice.