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As much as having multiple job offers can stroke the ego, it can also cause great anxiety.  Reasons vary for the root of this stress. People will often court a variety of job-seeking sources on the down low. A person might want to hold out for something better instead of settling on the first offer that comes. A fear of commitment might stall a person from taking pro-active action. Being sought after is a good problem to have, but if you don’t know how to play the field appropriately, your reputation could end up in the dog house and you might just let the best opportunity get away from you. Here is Part One with talent Manager, Trish Chua, who offers advice on how to best navigate the waters when there are plenty of fish trying to bite your line.

Question: Where are you specifically seeing that there is not enough talent to meet demand?

Trish Chua: Since we focus on the creative and everything that touches it, we are seeing an uptick in demand for usability — user experience designer, information architect, and even in some cases, user research. We are also experiencing a big demand for developers. Mobile is really hot right now. Everyone has a cell phone or a smart phone. A person who can design for mobile, the UI designer, or can code for iOS or Android is really in demand. The demand continues to grow in this city while the pool of talent gets narrower. 

Q: How should one juggle potential job offers versus actual written job offers? Meaning, you’ve been offered one job, but the one you really want says they’ll get back to you in another week.

Trish: What we tend to have happen with our candidates is that they may be juggling a couple opportunities, but haven’t actually interviewed for them yet. For example, when a hiring manager has expressed interest in the candidate and the candidate is considering the position. Or, when they are working with an agency in addition to searching independently for work. It’s in this space where things can get complicated. It feels counterintuitive, but when a candidate is looking at a couple of opportunities, or in the interviewing process, or close to accepting an offer — it’s really important that you keep in touch with your Talent Manager. Transparency is really important when working with an agency like ours.

Q: What if a person has accepted a job offer, but the job they really wanted finally reaches out with a job offer. How should this be handled?

Trish: Once you’ve accepted a job offer, you need to honor that commitment. If you are at that stage where you receive an offer, but you know there’s an opportunity you are waiting to hear back from — you should be honest about that, especially if you are working with an agency. The Talent Manager could actually help communicate to hiring managers for you if you are still interviewing for other jobs. Don’t accept an offer unless you are completely sure you want that gig. A candidate should never accept a job offer and then go back on it because it could come back to haunt you. Even if you handled the situation gracefully, hiring managers remember those experiences and could impact that company’s decision to work with you in the future. You also never know where that hiring manager could go next, so you could burn bridges because you didn’t have honest communication.

Q: Would the outcome be different if a person accepted an outside job offer, gave notice to their current company, to which they counter offered in order to keep that person. Is it understandable to back out of the outside job offer, or could you suffer the same repercussions?

Trish: We’ve run into that before where a candidate decides where they currently work is no longer a good fit for them, or that they want to look for a higher rate. They start looking for a new job, and then a counter offer will come through. It happens, and depending on how honest you’ve been through the process, you could possibly leave that situation unscathed. The key is to be forthcoming. Being able to communicate is the most important factor in your job search. Whether it’s a specific company, job function, company culture, or salary — it’s really important to share that information with a recruiter or Talent Manager you are working with so that you don’t find yourself in this situation to begin with. It’s important to weigh the factors when you are considering a move so that you make the right moves, and stick with your commitment. 

Stay tuned next week for Part Two as we cover some of the more common mistakes candidates make in juggling multiple job offers, and how best to turn an offer down without burning a bridge.  

How often have you seen a job description that reads like this?

Seeking User-Experience/Visual Design Guru with rock star coding skills to join our team. 
Responsibilities will include hand coding HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and working with AJAX technologies.  We also look to you to design cutting edge design concepts incorporating best practices of visual and user-experience design.  Desire degrees in HCI and MA in Visual Design from leading design school.  Rate: $25/hr to start.

Or something along those lines…

All too often the recruiting team at Filter takes calls from clients looking for what we call a “Unicorn.”  A unicorn is a designer that can solve every company-wide design problem, while writing code, solving complex server-side problems, and developing brand messaging, along with attending multiple meetings per day; in other words they are mythical.  THEY DO NOT EXIST. And that few and rare that do are so busy (usually with their own projects) that they don’t entertain staff and contract positions and it is usually a waste of time and money to pursue them.

When a company goes on a unicorn hunt the normal result is frustration, slipped deadlines and a missed opportunity to hire resources that can bring value and new ideas to the table.  Why spin wheels and precious time hunting a unicorn that can design an elegant and cutting edge website when you could hire a rock star designer and a code ninja that can work together to achieve the same result?  Budgets you say?  You only have enough for one resource?  We say, think outside the box.  Use that project budget to hire a part-time freelance designer and developer at 20 hours per week each.  Work with a Project Manager to understand the project schedule (design hours typically drop off when a project is in development and vice-versa) and create a team that leverages the individual skills of several different people with limited hours. 

When a candidate tries to become a unicorn the normal result is frustration, money spent on becoming something unattainable, and a missed opportunity to build on existing strengths.  If you are a strong visual designer with a solid understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the current coding languages -  leave it at that.  Don’t sign-up for an advanced JavaScript class to only find you have spent $500 to simply bang your head against your keyboard.  Instead spend those resources on ramping up on the new trends in design, and improving your baseline knowledge of current web technologies.  You don’t have to be able to code a website to create an elegant UI design and a rich user-experience.

At the end of the day you will save yourself time and money whether you are a client or a candidate by giving up the quest to hire or become a unicorn. 

Filter will be leading a panel discussion about unicorns and why we should stop the unicorn hunt at WebVisions Portland on May 18th.

One of my favorite courses in college was (no kidding) Operations Management 230.  I was fascinated by the challenge of gleaning efficiency from various systems.  Little did I realize that much of what I learned in that class would be useful during my design career.

No seriously.  The rules and theories I learned in OM230 were very specific to the world of tangible supply and demand, but they can easily be applied to other areas.

Take one of the most well-known:  the Law of Diminishing Returns.

The Law of Diminishing Returns states that in all productive processes, adding more of one factor of production, while holding all others constant, will at some point yield lower returns. While it does not imply that adding more of a factor will decrease the total production — a condition known as negative return — this condition is in fact quite common.

“But how does this apply to the design discipline?”  I hear you ask…

Well, let’s take a look at a classic paradigm:  the client/designer relationship.  At the beginning, everything’s great.  We dive in and start work based on the kickoff meeting and as much information as we’ve been able to glean.  Things are running along smoothly at first, but as the project progresses creativity and productivity can often hit a peak and then taper off — this is most often caused by designers working too long without input/feedback from the client.  This is universal among all designers, regardless of their level of experience.  “Working in a vacuum” is one of the main causes of designers missing the mark when it comes to client expectations.

We’ve all had an experience like this: at some point during your work effort, you hit this feeling that you’ve spent all your creative fuel and continuing to bang away at this particular problem space in a vacuum will not be as productive.  It’s at this point when we seek out our peers, team members, or mentors to get “a gut check” or solicit feedback.  This effectively refuels us creatively by injecting new thoughts and ideas or a different perspective on the problem space.

But this is only temporary, and is no substitute for direct client interaction.  It is far more valuable to “bring the client along on the journey” of the project.  While the goal is certainly to surprise and delight the client, the surprise should come from exceeding their quality and creativity expectations rather than springing something on them after three weeks of no interaction.

The same can be said for other activities like brainstorming, color explorations — even image searches.  In our experience managing the stock and news imagery needs for MSN over the years, we have found that the vast majority of “suitable image choices” are found within the first few minutes of a search (if the search criteria are clear and accurate).  We realized this because when we reviewed the choices to make a final selection, the image chosen most often by the stakeholder (a.k.a. the “client”) was one of the first 3-5 offered.  And the occasions where none of the images where deemed “suitable” at the time (often due to the feeling that “something better must be out there”), a subsequent image search rarely produced a superior result (except in cases where the search criteria was altered).

So how do we “bring the client along on the journey”, so to speak?  The easiest way is to establish a series of regular interactions where the client is invited to share their thoughts and feedback as a part of the creative team.  These interactions should be frequent and early enough in the project to glean the most benefit — doing so introduces a compounding factor, thus increasing the marginal return of each effort-curve, and by extension, the overall return of the collective effort.  As with any relationship, interaction encourages intimacy.  As designers become more intimate with the needs and preferences of the client, the interactions may become less frequent but more productive as trust is built.

The effect of these interactions is that they reset the effort-curve, and any effort applied to the project after each interaction point builds on the effort before — thus elevating the project progressively closer to the client’s level of expectation.  Additionally, subsequent effort-curves have a longer span — more “staying power” if you will — due to increased clarity on the part of the designers (and increased comfort on the part of the client).  Interactions can take many forms — be they face-to-face, remote, or email-based— but the key is to interact and do so as often as possible over the course of the project. 

So how will we know when we have met or exceeded the client’s expectation?  More often than not, the client will tell us — often enthusiastically.  And over time, reaching that level of expectation becomes quicker and easier because of your collective shared journey with the client.

The Law of Diminishing Returns as it relates to the creative process is much more subtle and much harder to quantify than in a tangible process like manufacturing, so it is important to “design consciously” — staying aware of how you feel as you progress through various phases, and knowing when to “refuel” will help you avoid designing in a vacuum.  It will make the best use of your time, and ensure that your work yields the optimal return.

As many of you may already know, Microsoft has a rather large, and talented, design community.  Their latest offering is public-facing version of the Toolbox site, a repository of training and resources for creating Silverlight applications in Expression Studio.  Their online courses are totally free, and even include the ability for you to "gain street cred" by completing tutorials and earning badges. For more details, go here:  http://www.microsoft.com/design/toolbox/about/

Recently, Microsoft has started to dabble with a new tagline, “Be What’s Next”.  Intended as an inspirational call-to-action for consumers and developers alike, this resonates with us at Filter.

We know you have to build and deliver what’s next, whether you are a company or a team member supporting the efforts to deliver a product, service or the next big idea.  The very essence of our business is to support you in this mandate and help you get it done.

Companies today are innovating, innovating fast, and looking for ways to get the job done with excellence, expertise and with speed.  Gone are the days of assembling a team over a long period of time as your competition may get to market before your team is assembled.  Markets leaders are extending the enterprise by using outside resources and integrating their supply chains.    This capability is critical if companies are to avoid capacity issues (workload stacking up) and expertise issues (lacking the needed skill for the job).

How do you extend the enterprise to avoid capacity and expertise issues and ultimately gain a speed advantage?  The model for this has changed significantly in the past few years. Some may use a design and development agency when they have a need, another may use contracted staff or consulting services to balance their teams, and others may outsource production services to handle high-volume tasks.  The most sophisticated companies use a strategic mix of all of the above.

Filter has pioneered a hybrid model that enables companies to access these offerings in any combination, using a flexible system.   Ultimately, it takes talented individuals to create What’s Next, and companies need to be free to access that talent on a flexible basis using the vendor model best suited to the need at hand.  Filter’s strategy is to offer the best platform for connecting the companies with a need to the talent with the expertise and capacity.

We have been on the forefront of the creative and technology industries and have participated in the boom of demand for user experience design, prototyping, mobile, cross platform application development,  Our service offering includes staffing of onsite resource, staff augmentation service for onsite or offsite consulting, and digital services for projects and production services.  In essence, these are all talent delivery services, each using a different structure and pricing model.  If our clients want to hire an agency that already has the expertise assembled, we can provide that solution, or if they need to augment their team with staffing solutions onsite at their location, Filter can supply that talent.  Each solution is fashioned to fit the needs and requirements of our customer.

It’s a new world of work today, and with thousands of creative and innovative minds under one virtual roof, we help our customers get it done.  We exist to help you “Be What’s Next” so that you don’t “Be What’s Late to Market”.

No.

Two simple letters.  One syllable.  So simple.  Yet this word is one of the most powerful in the English language.  Few other words wield such impact and finality.  As children we are conditioned to understand and respect the power of this word.  It allows us to draw clear boundaries with others, and helps us maintain some semblance of control over our surroundings. “No” is most often perceived as a limiting factor, but can the word “no” have a positive impact on collaboration?

When used appropriately, the word “no” can actually serve to foster more effective collaboration.  And by “appropriately”, I mean that the word should not be used on its own.  The effect of “no” on its own is very different from saying “no, I can’t take that on as I’m <insert reason here>”.  The former acts as a barrier and does not extend the understanding or respect that the requestor deserves – it leaves the requestor wondering why you cannot or will not take on said task.  The latter acts more as a course-correction, especially if you are able to append an alternative solution such as “<Co-worker> may be a better choice anyway as she’s more adept with <the necessary skill> and is available between now and your deadline”.  When used in this manner, the word is a gift to both you and to the person you are saying it to.

If one were to extend this paradigm into a group setting, we can see how a roundtable discussion of “who can take on what tasks” can be facilitated by the diplomatic and moderate use of “no”.  If everyone is honest and humble with the group about what they can/will take on at that moment, the group can make a collective decision on how to proceed – they may come to the conclusion that they need additional resources to fill a skill/availability gap, or even realize that certain tasks can be set aside.

Saying “no” is not an easy thing, especially to those in positions of seniority/authority over you, but it benefits both you and the person requesting something of you.  If you start saying “yes” to every task you set a precedent that is very hard to break.  Others will begin to expect you to take on the burden all the time, or come to you to take on their extra work for them (and there will be those who will always have a “good excuse” for why they cannot do it themselves).  Learning to respectfully turn others away when you are unable to assist (or feel the request is unreasonable) will safeguard your sanity, and your credibility. 

What does your credibility have to do with saying “no”?  There are only so many hours in a day.  Work/life balance means different things to different people but everyone needs and deserves it.  At some point, saying “yes” will overwhelm that balance, and one of two things will happen:  [a] you will find yourself working excessive hours to accommodate the grocery list of tasks you have agreed to, or [b] you will be unable to complete some/all of the tasks by the required deadlines.  Both have serious negative implications.  The first will negatively impact your personal life — and possibly your health due to more stress and less sleep — as well as others potentially perceiving you as “a pushover”.  The second will negatively impact your credibility by sending the message that you are unreliable (remember, each requestor is not privy to what other tasks you have already taken on because you haven’t said no to anyone).

Many of us (especially those in the creative field) believe that we know how to do things in the best way and have a difficult time letting go.  This may be because we think that others will do things “wrong” or “poorly” if we don’t do it ourselves – the result is we often take too much on and we often have the opposite result:  spreading oneself too thin runs the risk of poor performance/quality on any one task.  If we remember that in any collaborative effort everyone has something of value to contribute, our approach to “ownership of tasks” will shift. 

A truly collaborative effort thrives when every participant of that effort acknowledges [a] that we are all striving toward the same goal and we all have something of value to contribute, [b] that no one participant has complete control/authority (i.e. titles don’t matter), and [c] understands how/when to leverage the skills of the other members in the group.

If you’re ever uncertain about how much uncertainty impacts business, just talk to someone who creates content for a living.  In the last decade, no sector of the economy has been disrupted more. And the reason the recorded music and print publication businesses have virtually collapsed is well documented – they failed to adapt to sweeping technological change. 

The creative services business, by contrast, has a long history of adapting well to change.  Media as a delivery mechanism has been in flux for the better part of a century.  This has forced purveyors of creative services to innovate and develop new methods, techniques and procedures to deliver creative products for new media.  Their success may be because the nature of the creative endeavor requires a certain skill – the ability to assimilate inherent conflict, uncertainty and ambiguity.

Creativity and Ambiguity

If you’re a creative professional, you’ve likely been confronted by ambiguity often.  Sometimes your goal has been to extinguish this ambiguity.  But more and more, ambiguity is an unavoidable part of design. Things just move too quickly, and are too complex, for full certainty in the practice of design. 

Ambiguity may be a condition that persists during the design process, or it may be manifest in design itself. Let’s talk about the former first. 

Ambiguity in the design process can take many, many forms.  It can arise from a deficit of requirements, a lack of clarity in defining requirements or lack of consensus on what requirements ought to be.  It can arise from flawed communication between the customer and the designer, or among different functional groups within a design team.  It can arise from project realities, such as lack of time or access to critical information about the project.  It can arise from a lack of preparation or research.  It can arise from technical complexity.  It can arise from choices and tradeoffs designers must make where there’s no clear or obvious solution.  It can even arise from process itself, for instance when design iteration introduces ambiguity about requirements that were previously thought to be clear.

Ambiguity in this context is almost always considered a risk that threatens success.  But it’s also common and nearly impossible to avoid. 

Teams that confront ambiguity must ask themselves how best to manage it, how the negative effects of ambiguity should be mitigated, and if it’s possible to use it to their advantage.  Without inevitable ambiguities, if every project were managed as a rigid march to inalienable requirements, the discovery that’s inherent in design wouldn’t have an opportunity to flourish.  Innovation can be uncomfortable, but if the end result is a better product, users of the product will benefit.

Now let’s talk about ambiguity that’s manifest in the design itself.  This kind of ambiguity actually has much more potential to be positive. 

Almost no digital product is created entirely to serve machines.  There’s almost always a human end user, even when there are layers of machine interactions between the provider and consumer of a product.  And humans are notoriously imprecise.  Ambiguity, both of thought and of purpose, is a fundamental facet of the human condition. 

Designers of digital products and services increasingly must confront this reality by accommodating human ambiguity in the design itself.  This is not just a question of acknowledging the impossibility of predicting all possible use cases.  Designing for ambiguity means creating dynamic systems that adapt.

An Example of Designing for Ambiguity

There’s an instructive recent example of designing for ambiguity that could have a profound impact on a common behavior that has become an integral part of most people’s lives – Internet search.

Google recently introduced a product they call Instant.  Before Instant, every Internet search engine featured a common basic interface – enter text into a form field and click a button.  But what if you didn’t know what you wanted?  What if you thought you knew but weren’t sure?  In other words, what if your goal was ambiguous?

With a seemingly minor interface tweak – results now populate with each character typed - Google has made the search interaction model profoundly more dynamic. If you goal is ambiguous, no problem, just start typing, and the predictive search engine will start guessing what you want.

This design accommodates ambiguity much more efficiently and holistically than the standard but aging design it replaced.  Users can explore the meaning space around what they are seeking instead of having to guess what will produce the correct result.  You might find something you didn’t know you were looking for.  You might find many things closely related to your original thought that deepen your understanding of it. 

Strategies for Accommodating Ambiguity

As a design professional, or an organization that practices design, it pays to embrace ambiguity, or at least confront it head-on.   Here are some tips:

• Focus on goals.  As a precision discipline, task analysis is comfortingly scientific.  But goal-directed design is a better way to accommodate and provide for ambiguities in execution and implementation.
• Iterate a lot.  Iterative design surfaces both ambiguities and the design solutions that can accommodate them.
• Launch and layer. As Google Instant shows, there’s always room for innovation – even with the most successful and mature products and services.  Incorporate that philosophy into the launch process by getting the product in front of users early so they can show you how to refine it.  Expect that the design will not be perfect at launch, provide for continuous improvement.
• Build adaptable systems that don’t force users down a single path.
• What happens offline is just as important as what happens online.  When designing, think about the entirety of the interaction, not just the part that the system or application facilitates.
• Design for ecosystems that are composed of many different applications and subsystems.  Users don’t always perceive themselves interacting with a specific system as much as they perceive themselves as agents within an ecosystem.

Ambiguity is inevitable and it’s not going away.  In fact, it will very likely increase as technology evolves.  Innovations like Google Instant will introduce their own new ambiguities that will require adjustment and adaptation.  So the cycle continues; innovations will spawn myriad new design challenges, each of which represents an opportunity for a designer comfortable with ambiguity.

How does your organization address ambiguity?  We’d love to compare notes, hear feedback or exchange tips in the comments, or on twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Khoi Vinh has been touting Grid Layouts for years. From his efforts there have been many, many solutions to helping people use Grid layouts successfully. Thanks to a brilliant idea of Jon Hicks and code execution by Teevio, Grid Layout JS is now available.

The Grid Layout Javascript enables web-developers to stick to a Grid Layout quickly and simply by including the Grid Layouts Javascript file and simple XHTML code. Currently, the Grid Layouts Javascript relies on jQuery.

Additional resources for grid layouts:

• The Grid System : an ever-growing resource where graphic designers can learn about grid systems, the golden ratio and baseline grids.
• Myths and Misconceptions about Grid Systems

It’s become a cliché in today’s marketing landscape that the only constant is change.  It’s also widely recognized that since the Internet became a fixture in business environments during the mid and late 1990’s, the rate of change has shifted into a higher gear.  In the decade just completed, a further wave of innovation led by widespread consumer adoption of social media has permanently altered the landscape in the direction of openness and transparency. 

The era when businesses could tightly control their relationships with their constituents is quite simply over, and it’s not coming back.

What’s less obvious, but just as profound, is how businesses and professionals must adapt to these new realities by changing the way they work together.  We’re in the midst of an inexorable shift in the dominant workflow paradigm away from from large, centralized, tightly controlled initiatives, to smaller, more ad-hoc and distributed teams that can be more nimble, innovative and productive. Today’s more fluid, less centralized environment demands a more collaborative, less hierarchical approach to digital property development.

Collaboration vs. Control - A Long Running Debate

In digital production, the tension between collaboration and control has a history that dates back to the dawn of computing.  In his pioneering essay, The Mythical Man Month, Fred Brooks describes the challenges he faced managing a software development project all the way back in the early 1960’s.  Many of Brooks’ observations (the oft-repeated production aphorism “9 women can’t make a baby in a month” originated here) are eerily prescient and just as true today as they were half a century ago.

Later, at about the dawn of the Web, Eric Raymond’s landmark essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar described a nascent open-source software movement that upended traditional assumptions about what distributed, decentralized teams of like-minded developers could accomplish when they collaborated over the Internet.  Raymond argued that tight control over development teams and source code actually undermined innovation and efficiency.  Now entering its third decade, the collaboration style popularized during the open source software revolution is a central component of Google’s success, and arguably has even influenced traditionally tightly controlled businesses like Apple and Microsoft.

This shift has reached perhaps its most extreme expression in businesses that are explicitly contrarian in their approach to product development.  37 Signals, for example, advocates principles that seem counterintuitive, such as “meetings are toxic,” “separate your team members from each other,” or “don’t ever let more than 5 people work on anything.”  Founder Jason Fried paints this in the starkest terms: “Collaboration and control are like oil and water.  They don’t mix.”

Parallel Trends

It’s still true that projects should be carefully managed, but there are new and evolving methods that can free teams from rigidly defined roles and responsibilities resulting in increased productivity and innovation.  There are a variety of trends that parallel the shift from control to collaboration.  Agile development, user-centered design, telecommuting, the transformation of office applications to cloud-hosted multi-user collaboration tools (for example Windows Live Office and Google Docs) are all manifestations of this shift. 

There is also a strong generational component to this shift.  Called “digital natives” by some authors, the first generation that grew up with the Internet is just starting to hit the workforce in numbers significant enough to influence it’s makeup.  As a group, digital natives seem to be less motivated by traditional rewards and measures of success.  They operate with an attitude of abundance because the commoditization of intellectual property has made barriers to innovation lower and access to powerful technology more widespread.  With their high-degree of participation in social media, collaboration comes naturally to them.

Businesses looking for a road map for how to succeed in this new environment would do well to recognize the new reality and move away from control and toward collaboration.  There are a variety of things to consider when making this shift, but the key is not to be afraid of relaxing control. Collaboration doesn’t mean lack of discipline - often truly collaborative teams are highly disciplined and structured, but a collaborative, iterative process is at the center of this structure - agile development methodologies are an instructive example.

  •      Hire people with varied skill sets.  Information workers with multiple skills (who are beginning to be called “multi-disciplinarians,”) thrive in collaborative environments.  Because many of them are self-taught and have learned on the job, they have the ability to sense where their contributions are complementary, when to lead and when to let others lead, and how to fit in just right to make a team well-balanced and high-functioning.   

•      Collaboration works better with small, narrowly focused teams.  Smaller teams, by default, require less communication, less policy, and less procedure.  They tend to manage themselves.  This lack of encumbrance allows them to move more quickly and respond to change more rapidly.  This is not to say that control works better with larger teams, or that tightly controlled teams can’t produce great things.  But breaking up large projects into smaller chunks run by smaller teams can reduce risk.  

•      Collaboration works better with a more iterative process. By now, many have heard about the perils of the “waterfall” process, where decisions or mistakes early in a process can be difficult to undo down the road.  An iterative approach can not only reduce this risk, but can also promote collaboration.  Instead of involving different team members at different stages, mini-cycles involving the whole team get everyone in synch quickly and reduce the potential for disastrous disagreements and misunderstandings.  Roles and a team collaboration culture take shape, and problems get ironed out during early cycles, so they don’t persist.  And there’s just something about meeting a series of smaller deadlines instead of one big one that promotes the collaborative spirit. 

•      Collaboration is a better solution for multi-stakeholder projects where communication and process overhead can be a drag on productivity.  When there are multiple stakeholders both within and outside of an organizations, complexities can proliferate. In such situations, misaligned goals and competing, or even conflicting agendas can make tight, hierarchical control unfeasible.  But it also increases risk, because the more elaborate a system of control is, the harder it is to fix when it breaks down.   

•      Companies should consider their customers collaborators. Social media tools have made listening to customers easier.  But its quickly becoming a necessity.  Moving forward, to truly differentiate, businesses will need to engage in real collaboration with customers, integrating them into the product and service development process as much as possible. In the realm of digital products, user-centered design methods such as ethnographic research and live prototype testing are proven ways to bake customer input directly into development. 

Finally, thriving in collaborative environments requires suppressing the ego.  Good ideas can come from anywhere.  When all constituents can see evidence that their input matters, they take their contributions more seriously.  And the days of the “big idea” are over.  Most great products don’t come from a big idea rammed through by a big ego - they come from teams that have trained themselves to come up with small, but innovative ideas constantly, because they’ve mastered the art of collaboration.

As marketing is increasingly dominated by digital delivery channels – and as the separation between marketing, product management, customer communication and content continues to blur – businesses are skill-challenged.  Most initiatives now have a strong digital component.  Yet top digital talent is truly difficult to find.

“Hire an expert” is the clarion call of some enterprises, which are typically dominated by boomer-generation managers who came into this world before television was invented.  Try as they might, many of these leaders do not have the digital DNA to adapt quickly to developing technologies and digital opportunities.  When Twitter broke onto the scene in 2007, there were no Twitter experts to hire!  When Microsoft developed and launched the now-defunct Kin mobile phone, presumably they hired nothing but mobile experts.  Yet they still failed to bring a successful product to market.

Hiring an expert is not a solution to the digital conundrum.  Instead, organizations must focus on their process and the efficacy of their talent and their teams.

Digital is Difficult! 

As if the pace of change in technology and resultant marketing channels is not enough of a challenge, the world of work is changing too.  How, when and where work is done has changed dramatically in the last ten years.  We have four generations working together who bring a vastly different and wide range of values and expectations. Millennials have grown up digital, with productivity tools, social and mobile communication a central part of their lives nearly from birth. Their expectations about work and the way they blend work, life, personal interests, and learning are unprecedented.

The brains of these so-called Digital Natives are well-adapted to these technological and social changes.  But the organizational structures of the companies they work for are not so well adapted. Herein lies the challenge and the opportunity.

Being Digital: Critical Success Factors

Hard work, brains, maturity and luck still play major roles in the successful digital professional as they have through the ages.  But, in my experience, there are certain key skills that top digital talent has, and these skills enable them to thrive and be successful almost regardless of the team they are playing on or the product they are supporting.  Hire more of these talented dynamos, and you will magnify your success – overlook them because they lack “expertise” and you may doom yourself to a series of failures.

These skills include multidisciplinarianism, true collaboration skills, and the willingness to fail.  Let’s focus on Multidisciplinarianism for the remainder of this article, and we’ll cover other key skills in future editions. 

Dubbed the Digital M.D., this person has a variety of skills and interests.  They have a well-balanced perspective on problems (and solutions). They are grounded in a strong customer-centric sensibility, and have strong enough people skills that they are able to articulate goals and ideas in a common sense, practical fashion.  The Digital M.D. probably also has a variety of interesting outside interests, perhaps in the arts or volunteer groups, since they are constantly learning.

In fact, the single, strongest asset of the Digital M.D. is that they constantly seek to learn new things and are really, really, good at learning.  Thus armed, they are prepared to meet the technological challenge of each changing day without stress, fear or trepidation.  In fact, they look forward to change because it presents the opportunity to learn new things!

The Multidisciplinarian probably has been a designer at some point.  They are visually oriented – they pay attention to the visual presentation of things and are familiar with the tools used in the design trade.  But the Digital M.D. has also probably done some light programming or scripting and is familiar with development methodologies and tools.  Many of them have lots of experience bringing new software products through development and to market, so they’ve been exposed to marketing principles, channels and tactics.  Because of this, they’ve also learned the basics about SEO/SEM, especially as it informs site architecture and information design.  If you are lucky, the Digital M.D. might also be a subject matter expert in one or more content areas or industry verticals, just for good measure.

Put this Designer-Developer (“Devigner”) on a team for one of your key initiatives, and you will likely find that they are able to help streamline the development process and avoid a lot of landmines.  Without a Digital M.D, on the team, you may find the UX designer can’t communicate with the Developer, and neither of them can communicate effectively with the end-user customer to quickly identify the need and a successful solution.

In short, having a team of strong contributors in each discipline is still a fine way to go, but they will be even more effective if they have strong inter-disciplinary skills or, ideally, are led by a true Digital M.D.

Five years ago, what was then known as a “graphic designer” could succeed by building even one set of skills in one industry, for example doing newsletter design in the financial services industry.  Today, even the term “graphic designer” connotes an unduly limited skill set, even without that singular industry focus.  Today, even that newsletter designer (who is now doing electronic newsletters rather than print), must know a little bit about user experience principles, opt-in/opt-out methodologies and the federal spam laws, SEO/SEM and analytics, development challenges in getting newsletters to render properly in various email clients and browsers, mobile design for users viewing the newsletter on their mobile phone, the list goes on.

The designer having solely these newsletter skills would not qualify as a Digital M.D.  They would qualify as a good digital designer in the newsletter space.  The Digital M.D. would have these skills plus experience and skills to address all the other marketing channels of which the newsletter campaign is but one part.

Learning to Learn

This skill shift is about more than just “broadening your skills”.  It’s about learning to learn.  Technology changes constantly.  That changes our jobs.  The ability to learn, and to embrace the change that comes with learning, is core for the digital professional.

Millennials have this skill natively, so they have an inside track toward success.  If they can combine this advantage with professional dedication and proficiency, they have the potential to become Multidisciplinarians.  But the outcome is not a given.

In the marketing and design space, there has always been a role for “creativity”.  Thinking outside of the box, coming up with the killer idea ...  This need still exists and there is still a shortage of true creativity.  But it’s not enough to have a killer idea.  In digital, it’s about rapid, clever and successful execution.  Money can’t buy success.  People – the talent within the enterprise – bring about success.

In the Digital Renaissance, the Digital M.D. is king.  They can go anywhere, add value and gain job security because of their wide-ranging skills.