Module 1 - Why Designing You?
Module 1 walks you through the seven key attributes of a product designer and why you must adopt these to become the champion of your life.
Value in this Module:
An overview of the Designing YOU modules.
Key characteristics of great designers.
In the new turbulent world of work, you have a lot of options to consider regardless of whether you are in high school, university or have been working for 20 years. So where do you start?
Start with Designing YOU.
Designing YOU is an important tool to support making decisions big and small—it is a tool that helps you address the relentless questions and unsolicited advice about your future you’re getting right now.
If you are a young adult, chances are that your parents or others may have had the wheel for much of the journey until high school graduation. Then suddenly, after graduation, the situation changes and you need to make some weighty, often intimidating, decisions for yourself. That’s why building a journey map is so critical right now. In the absence of a guide, you might be swayed by a lot of well-intentioned advice about your life decisions.
“You should go to X school”
“You should become a Y”
“You should study Z”
Here’s the truth: Your world is very different from those before you. What makes you different, interesting, and valuable isn’t coming from any textbook or a diploma. So now is the time to make some weighty, often intimidating, decisions for yourself. That’s why mapping your journey right now is so critical. Think of the journey you map as less a map and more of a compass. A compass that will point you in a direction to explore some important questions you may be asking yourself:
Should I go to school or go travelling?
What should my next career be?
What competencies am I good at today?
Why do I like certain things and not others?
What is a mentor?
What makes me happy?
What big trends do I need to be thinking about?
How can I tell my story?
Designing YOU helps unlock the person that you’ll launch into the world. We’re not going to give you a simple quiz that will spit out six jobs you might be good at or tempt you with some secret to success and happiness. You’re more complicated and interesting than that, and so is life.
Designing YOU is composed of a series of modules that include a series of activities. Each module can be done at your own pace and you can go back at any time to adjust or make changes. Ideally, they are done in order, but you can also jump around and explore. Each module is described below:
Module 1 — Why Design YOU?
Module 1 walks you through the seven key attributes of a product designer and why you must adopt these to become the champion of your life.
Module 2 — Exploring Who You Are
Module 2 is about reflecting on the you that you are today. It involves exploring your personality, and competencies right now.
Module 3 — Why Mentors Matter
Module 3 focuses on the team effort required to design you. We’ll explore the value of your relationships and from this, you’ll form your design team of experts who will support and guide you through the Designing YOU journey.
Module 4 — Exploring Career and Job Pathways
Module 4 focuses on exploring career options. First, you’ll evaluate what you love to do and what you’re good at, then you’ll explore how to leverage it to make a living. By the end of Module 4, you will start to have a vision of the future Professional YOU.
Included in the Professional YOU is a series of Designing YOU Career Guides written to support your work down this path. These Career Guides deal with some of the crucial questions facing anyone exploring their Professional YOU.
Each guide includes a series of career mission maps that provides examples of how you can chart a course to achieving your professional mission. If you'd like to start by exploring our range of career mission maps, click HERE to search our Designing YOU Mission Map Gallery.
Module 5 — You are More than a Job
Module 5 is when you will discover how your Professional YOU fits into your Whole YOU. The Whole YOU is about how you define success. You’ll think about where you want to live, the people you want to be around, the importance of your bank account and other factors that matter to you.
Module 6 — Designing your Journey
Module 6 is possible after you’ve identified a potential destination in Module 5. The journey map will allow you to implement the Whole YOU. Every decision you make in pursuit of the destination now has a purpose.
Module 7 — Telling Your Story
Module 7 recognizes that having the best product that no one has ever heard of or cares about is called “going out of business.” Your story is how you’ll connect to the audience you care about and how you’ll make them care about you. You’ll figure out what you can offer the world and develop a strategy to communicate it.
You Are More Than a Job
In order to launch yourself into the so-called real world, it’s useful to get out of your own head. Take a step back and imagine yourself as a product in a store. When you buy a product, whether it’s a latte or a laptop, the people who are responsible for creating that product know exactly why you bought it. Their design decisions weren’t accidents; every tiny detail was intentional.
Product designers, the people who are responsible for creating everything you use, recognize that delivering something valuable is rarely about a single feature or clever advertising. Rather, it’s about the whole product.
Take the iPhone. The iPhone as a whole product includes the iOS software, iTunes and Apple Music, the App Store, the multimedia conversations you can have via iMessages and the million-plus apps that customize your smartphone experience. The whole product is everything a consumer needs and expects to get when they buy the iPhone, plus the promise of everything it could become.
So, let’s apply the whole product concept to you. If you view yourself as a product that you’ll launch, what is the Whole YOU that you’ll release to the world? How will you make a valued contribution? How will you be different? And how will you design and build this compelling Whole YOU?
Education alone doesn’t set you apart. There are millions of people who will graduate (or already have) with the same education as you. Be proud of your accomplishments but know that a piece of paper is not enough.
Think of your formal education like your physical phone: the plastic, aluminum, glass, and microchips. Your education is an important part of you, but it’s certainly not the Whole YOU.
This is why your formal education needs to be combined with other “apps” that will create real value and make you different from people with the same coursework behind them. Discovering the Whole YOU requires a thorough understanding of the people and world around you. The Whole YOU is at the intersection of four elements:
What you’re good at.
What you love to do.
What you can make a living doing
How you define success.
These modules will guide you through a rigorous (and sometimes uncomfortable) journey to identify the Whole YOU at the intersection of these four elements.
Characteristics of Great Designers
Unpredictability is totally normal for a modern product designer. On the surface, the job of a product designer sounds straightforward; take a rough idea and turn it into a product that is so valuable that lots of people pay good money for it. But to do this well, product designers need to consider a lot of factors within their volatile, hyper-competitive markets:
Who is the target customer and why do they want to buy our product?
Does the current product meet the customers’ needs today? What must change in the current product in order to meet those needs?
What are the competitors doing and how is our product different?
How do we ensure the world knows about our great product?
Product designers today have to work with customers at every stage. This not only results in a better product but also delivers the right product to market a lot faster.
A generation ago, people went to a college or university for four years focusing on little more than their next exam. Upon graduation, they would launch the “new” them to the world. Their first job turned into a career.
Those days are over.
If you approach life like that today, you’ll be shocked and unprepared when you graduate into the hyper-competitive market. Instead, approach life like a modern product designer and work collaboratively with your customers to meet their ever-changing needs. Design a you that will meet the changing and competitive market that you’re about to enter.
There are some common characteristics amongst all product designers that are both critical to being a great product designer and essential to designing you. The exercises in this guide will help you develop these characteristics.
Common characteristics of a great product designer include: Being Intentionally Curious, Thinking About the Whole, Being Empathetic, Getting Feedback Early (And Often), Relying on Evidence Not Simply Intuition, Being Resilient, and Being Accountable.
Click on the button below to gain a better understanding of these common characteristics.
Why Journaling Works
All the characteristics have one thing in common—great product designers are great listeners. They listen to others and themselves and they act on what they discover. Listening to yourself is tougher than it sounds. It’s called reflection and is critical to continuous learning. Reflection ensures you’re always gathering new information, analyzing it, and evaluating what should be done. Reflective thinking tells you to step back, analyze, judge, and learn from both good and bad experiences. Reflection also allows you to think about the big picture and small details and how they may be related.
Over the next eight steps of Designing YOU, you’ll be reflecting a lot with the goal of trying to connect it all together. To do this, you need to ask yourself three basic questions: What? So What? Now What? To help you, here are a series of questions to keep handy.
What?
What happened?
Why did it happen?
What did you do? What did others do?
What was your reaction?
So What?
What were your feelings when it happened?
What are your feelings now? Are there any differences? Why?
How do you think others feel?
What was the impact of what you did?
What worked well? What didn’t?
What did you learn? How did you learn it?
Now What?
What are the implications for you and others?
What would you do differently next time?
What information do you need to move forward?
Why is this learning important to you?
How will you use this learning?
What actions are you going to take?
To facilitate this reflective thinking, you’ll need a Designing YOU journal. This journal is your home base for all your Designing YOU work. Though there is no shortage of digital tools to capture thoughts and information (iPhone Notes, vlogs, blogs, Google Drive, or a combination), we find that an old-fashioned handwritten notebook is the most effective. There’s something rewarding about filling a little book with your questions, thoughts, ideas, and interests. Notebooks can be powerful tools for reflection—especially when you go back and reread them.
There are no rules for what or how to capture information in your journal, but it’s a great place to quickly jot down questions to pursue when you have time. You might be amazed at how many little thoughts pop up in a day that would simply be gone if you didn’t capture them.
