February 26, 2020

335: Giving Better Upward Feedback

43 minutes

This week, we discuss strategies for giving better upward feedback to senior designers. We also share our thoughts on how to name your spacing components, list our favorite design podcasts, and as always, share this week's cool things for your eyes and computer.

Golden Ratio Patrons:

Sisu is looking for a thoughtful and data-savvy designer to help build the next generation of analytics software. You can find out more at sisu.ai. (You might recognize Sisu from our interview with Michie Cao)

Pathrise is an online mentorship program that you land a great UX job. Previous fellows have been placed at Google, IBM, Atlassian and other exciting companies. You can learn more at pathrise.com/details

Latest VIP Patrons:

Huge shoutouts to our latest Very Important Pixels!

Guarang Alat

Dennis Cortes

Grovkillen & TD-er

Connelly Rader

Follow-up:

Elias Julian floated a very compelling idea for new merch...

Erik Bro brought up a great question about how to name spacing constants in a design system.

Tweets:

We were able to read Peter Reaper-Reynolds's new surname out loud for the first time on the web!

Manny asked if we'd seen Birds of Prey. No, no we haven't, but maybe will later!

Connelly Rader confirms that the best decision of his life is supporting the podcast. Think about that, everyone 🤔

Greg Danford took our advice to see Parasite blind, and still has anxiety. You're very welcome.

Phoebe Hogeland asked about that one YouTube channel that fixes movies with one small change. It's Nando v. Movies, and everyone should subscribe.

Bhawin J asked what design podcasts we listen to. Here you go:

Layout

Design Life

They recently had a great episode about developer handoff

New Layer

99% Invisible

News:

Brian published a new Figma plugin to populate layers with data from GitHub. Check out the code!

Listener Question:

kelle-yess asks about giving upward feedback to senior designers, and how to deal with resulting pushback. Good questions abound. A tl;dl of our advice:

Consider a matrix of the following

The person giving the feedback and receiving the feedback

The type of feedback, stage of product, fidelity of feedback, location of feedback

The Socratic method is a useful way to approach a conversation with good intent and having the intention to learn along the way.

Compromise and pick your battles. Losing in public gives you social capital. Figure out where you rank on the sliding scale of giving a fuck.

It's possible that you don't know everything about the situation, or the person you're giving feedback to is shielding you from unnecessary context.

Sometimes egos get in the way. But they're worth considering. Giving feedback in private, or in a way that lets your senior save-face, might be a better strategy and strengthen your relationship.

Also, sometimes people suck. Peer feedback and manager escalation are valid paths in particularly sticky situations.

Cool Things:

Brian shared EnChroma, after seeing a tweet from Kurt Varner. EnChroma are glasses that can help people with certain types of color blindness to see colors – pretty incredible!

Marshall shared a macOS tip about how to hide your menu bar – and enumerates all of the tradeoffs for doing so. Proceed at your own risk, but let us know if it sticks!

Design Details on the Web:

📻 We are @designdetailsfm

🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin and [email protected]

🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock and [email protected]

🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️

❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)

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BYEEEE?

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By Brian Lovin, Marshall Bock

4.7

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