Aboot*

I don’t know what to call this.

This site doesn't have a clever name, It isn't really a blog but it is blog-ish. It is just a collection of thoughts that I wanted to share.

While I am not sure what this is, I can share where it comes from.

Through the pandemic the Meta Reality Labs Design team grew in size and geography. As the org grew, in person interactions shrank. It was tough to meet with people and discuss the work we were doing.

I never liked "all hands" or large meetings. I find them theatrical, largely more for the people on stage then the people listening and not very effective. I prefer meeting with teams in smaller forums where we can discuss specific challenges.

In these meetings I found myself repeating concepts, frameworks and context to people in an asymmetric way. Sometimes I would relay the same ideas to three different teams inside a week but that left the majority of the team not involved in the conversation. This led to a lumpy distribution of information where teams lacked mutual knowledge.

At the suggestion of Michelle Cortese (my Business Lead at the time), we set up a bi weekly meeting for me to share some of these thoughts. It wasn't an all hands, it was optional, it wasn't a review. We called it Design Time with Jon which had a non threatening, kindergarten energy to it that felt right.

I would offer my take on whatever was going on, answer questions but mainly I would share what I had discussed with teams that past week so everyone could hear it. A forum for mutual knowledge.

When I announced I was leaving Meta, in January of 2023, the most common question I got was how could people continue to get access to the things I discussed in Design Time.

Usually people would say “you should write a book” but I don’t think I have an actual book in me.

With the time afforded to me in "retirement", I started to write down many of the ideas I shared in Design Time. I also started to write on the ideas that have shaped my thinking and approach to design.

There is no order to these. Read one, read them all, there isn’t a coherent linear narrative. While lacking a linear narrative these thoughts overlap and connect to each other. I have tried to link between the ideas as best I can.

The connections between the ideas, I believe, are valuable. They attempt to form a world view that is coherent. I encourage you to use the links as a means of navigating this site.

Many of these posts reference “Designers”. I wrote this with the idea that Designers would be the primary audience. My career and experience has been inside Design organizations so I thought it would be presumptuous to claim that these ideas can be directly applied to Engineering or PM. Having said that, I am confident that most of the ideas here transcend any discipline since they deal with systems.

The topics here are not typical of what design leaders write about. I have avoided writing on the craft of design or specific design instruction because there is already a large body of writing, YouTube videos, influencers and endless courses out there if you are interested in that.

Instead, I wanted to offer writing on the underlying systemic forces that design and Designers operate in. These forces include economics, human dynamics and technical architectures. In my time managing Designers and teams I felt that this is one of the most underdeveloped skills of designers. They spend a disproportionate amount of time on craft and ignore the broader forces impacting their work. This makes them less effective.

The best Designers I have worked with have an understanding of economics, platforms, systems and human behavior that they apply their design talents to.

I believe that understanding these forces allow Designers to do their best work. It helps focus their energy in ways that can improve their chances of building a successful product.

Some of this writing is abstract or deals with frameworks that need to be applied to your specific situation. I have tried to provide examples to bring some of these concepts to life but a lot are left to the reader to find application to their situation.

I don’t pretend that this is absolute advice or some how-to manual. My thinking and these posts are formed through my 29 years of making things on the Internet. My career is a product of immense privilege, luck and timing. The idea that I have the answers is wrong. At best, I can provide a perspective that might be useful. A way to look at a situation you are facing. To quote the Grateful Dead… "once in a while you can get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right."

— Jon Lax

Sept 3, 2023

*this is a joke for Canadians