Everyone’s a good manager when their team is functioning perfectly. But what do you do when your team screws up? Liam Nugent tells how to face reality when work goes poorly, and shares practical steps to get your team back on track.
Topic: Project Management
Better collaboration through good planning. Product management for the web. Become a better communicator. Control agreements and expectations. Learn the key questions every client needs answered—and how to use them as the basis of a proposal that convinces your client you’re the right team for the job. Just say no to bad ideas. Dr Strangeweb, or How I Learned To Quit Worrying And Love Scope Creep.
Navigating the Awkward: A Framework for Design Conversations
We’ve all been there: a client or coworker shows you something they’ve worked on for hours or weeks, and your brain screams because their idea sucks. Author Ksenia Cheinman shows how the right conversational framework can help you navigate these all-too-frequent design interactions.
Jobs To Be Done
Ever find solutions before you find the problems? In this excerpt from The Jobs To Be Done Playbook, Jim Kalbach gives some advice on aligning innovation to customer needs, including creating a jobs-driven roadmap and using job stories to solve specific design problems.
Planning for Everything
Time taken to reflect, whether in the shower or conference room, gives us opportunities to learn from our successes and our failures. Peter Morville emphasizes the importance of reflecting in this excerpt from Chapter 7 of his new book, Planning for Everything.
Meeting Design
Good meetings stick with you and ultimately lead to better outcomes. Find out how to make your meetings more memorable in this excerpt from Kevin Hoffman’s new book: Meeting Design.
Feedback That Gives Focus
As creative professionals, we might see ourselves as the hero of our work’s story. But this can make feedback—an inevitable part of our work—seem like the villain. Learn how to reframe your relationship to your biggest nemesis. Make feedback your trusted sidekick instead.
Project Management for Humans
Staffing teams can feel a bit like a game of Tetris, but don’t forget your teams are human beings. They have interests, strengths, and qualities that should be considered above their availability.
Team Conflict: Four Ways to Deflate the Discord that’s Killing Your Team
Interpersonal relationships and team dynamics can be tricky. We often eschew the values of team work and working together, but balancing relationships when everyone has a good idea is tough. Jessica Hall shares some thoughts on how to navigate those tricky spots so your team can start communicating and get back to what they do best.
Managing Ego
Any of us can be that irrational colleague who makes for an interesting day at work. All it takes is low confidence and high anxiety—and that comes with the territory. Brandon Gregory shows us how we can bolster and validate our coworkers and strengthen our own emotional resilience so we can avoid unnecessary drama and produce happier relationships.
Insisting on Core Development Principles
The expectations for our work have matured significantly over the last couple of decades. If this overwhelms those of us who build the web day in and day out, imagine how our clients must feel. And yet time and again, we fail our clients by offloading too much responsibility for the development process onto them. We need to build best practices into our workflows from the start, Kendra Skeene reminds us—not wait for our clients to request specific core practices.
