Two weeks ago, I took a Design Leadership course at Cooper. So…what happened next?

1. A team lunch, because I realized that we’ve never held a team lunch before with everyone (six people, what!)
2. A calendar on our whiteboard so that everyone could share what they’re working on (easier to read it than remember what people said during standup)
3. A meeting with engineers so that we could have regular ux and eng syncs (I know, crazy).

I didn’t get better at design and none of these things are uber leadership-y. But what came out of the class was a realization about how much I need to understand my colleagues’ perspectives about their work. I need to understand their problems, their concerns, their thoughts about our process, all of it. It seems obvious, but it’s essential to doing the design stuff.