Self-disruption

Issue 234: Finding new ways to re-invent yourself

Disruption is a word used for startups—sometimes excessively it becomes cringe. The word means introducing an innovation or new business model that fundamentally alters an industry or market, often displacing established companies or methods (e.g., streaming services disrupting traditional television). As a result, startups typically replicate a company that's viewed as leading that disruption. In the 2010s, many marketplace startups began calling themselves, "The Uber of" to create a relationship to the intended disruption. I’m now hearing, "The Cursor of" as a comparison for AI-powered software tools.

During paradigm shifts of economic changes and new technologies, companies need to adapt to the new environments to be disruptive. There is also another important thing to disrupt...yourself. Doing this is high risk. It requires you to take familiar tactics you've found success in exchange for unproven tactics.

So why self-disrupt? Because it's important to anticipate where the industry is going. One of the best examples of this is Apple making a bet on the iPhone. Though in hindsight it doesn't appear to be, Apple making a bet on launching a phone that would cannibalize iPod sales was a huge risk. This example is precisely why self-disruption is important. What could be the iPhone moment in your career and craft that you may miss if you resumed maximizing iPod sales?

Let's look at key areas to disrupt yourself. The first is disrupting your craft. The infamous Marshall McLuhan quote remains relevant: “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” Whether you're a designer, engineer, marketer, or any role, the way you make artifacts of impact will change. The tools we use today will be previous iterations. Therefore it's important to find new tooling that fits the new world and material. In the early 2010s, this tool for me was Framer Classic and Origami when it was a Quartz Composer plugin. They allowed me to prototype different interactions in a dynamic way on mobile. It ultimately led to prototyping UI in Xcode to get even closer to the material. Find what that is for you in the era of AI.

Next, disrupt how you operate. The standards and procedures to scale were best practices for the previous era. Organizational debt is a costly item if you don't pay it off. Identify the areas in how you run your team (or yourself) that are no longer effective. When I was at One Medical, our design team had a lot of challenges seeing what other team members were working on. Pair designing in the office worked well to share context, but the content was stuck in local systems. In 2017, I switched the team to a new drawing software called Figma. During that era, it was a big risk to switch from Sketch and InVision; the industry standard at the time. Looking at ways to disrupt your craft allows new tooling to affect processes and ways of operating.

Finally, disrupt how you lead. Do mix up leading with managing as the two aren't mutually exclusive. In the age of economic austerity and new technology such as AI, we are in the era of individual contributors leading impact. This may seem strange coming from someone who is not an IC, but I have to lead with an IC mentality of managing the work.

Sometimes to create, one must first destroy.

Hyperlinks + notes

A collection of references for this post, updates, and weekly reads.

• Thank you

  Maheen Sohail
  for inviting me to speak with your class yesterday! Becoming an AI Product Designer

• Congrats Anne-Laure Le Cunff on the launch of Tiny Experiments

• Common misconceptions about the complexity in robotics vs AI

• You Are Chief Momentum Officer by

  Dr. Julie Gurner