What's on my mind

Do you ever feel like your job consists of fighting fires? "Fires" being internally generated crisis orchestrated by leadership, who opt to change direction?

Three years ago, I wrote an article called Applying a firefighter model to the UX Research practice.

In the article I propose three ways researchers can reframe a firefighting company culture:

• Embrace the Firefighter Model (accept what we can't change)
• Practice knitting in the fire station (use our time to strengthen research operations so we're better equipped for the next fire)
• Accept our firefighter identity (our role, in this company, is to help put out fires, but also to help prevent future fires)

Unsurprisingly, I wrote this article when I was working in a firefighting environment.

How did I find the time to write the article? The tech organization had a culture of "crafting days," where all employees got two days per month to work on what they wanted to.

I chose to write this article - for my team, but also for myself, perhaps as a coping strategy.

A few realizations I've had since then:

• This environment is very common - in fact, in my coaching and networking conversations I rarely encounter someone who's not experiencing some level of firefighting
• This is not unique to researchers or UXers - everyone feels the pressure, all the way up to the CEO
• People have varying levels of tolerance for a firefighting environment, and it's deeply personal. Where one person thrives another may be overwhelmed
• As I read the article again, I'm even more convinced by the power of building strong foundational research operations - or design ops, or product ops - solid operations strengthens the ability to cope with sudden, inevitable change.

How about you? How have you learned to cope with this environment? And what do you do to better understand a company's firefighting culture when you're looking for new roles?

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Thought-provoking LinkedIn posts

I see a diverse range of professionals come across my LinkedIn feed, and this week, I want to share some posts from many of them - product managers, strategists, (content) designers, researchers, and AI experts. These posts made me stop and think, because they framed the issue in a way I hadn't considered:

So tired of the design community’s need to make every argument binary - Mia Blume​

Research IS continuous discovery. What’s challenging is that if it’s only part of your job, there’s a good chance you’ll struggle to do it well - Sam Ladner​

Last week I found out that my first novel, The Atlas of Forgotten Places, was used to train Meta's AI - Jenny Williams​

The more time we spend trying to “prove value,” the more focused we become on obtaining validation - Abby Bajuniemi, PhD, referencing the article Hey designers, they’re gaslighting you by Sara Wachter-Boettcher​

Can we stop overcomplicating UCD discussions? [It's] simple - it’s based on balancing business needs, technological needs and user needs - Robert Powell​

PMs: How we talk about working with UX Designers matters - Jennifer Moore​

To understand users, you need to do research. But you can do a lot of research without ever understanding your users - Austin Yang​