Get out of your bubble

Get out of that design/product/digital bubble.

Think about a Venn diagram made up of 3 circles. The first circle represents the customer (is it useful?), the second represents the business (can it make or save money?), and the third represents engineering (can we build it?). 

Put yourself and your design superpowers at the intersection of those three circles. 

You don't have to be an expert—get as close as possible to the people who can help you understand it and learn from them. 

The magic happens when people with different perspectives bounce ideas off each other.

Choose pragmatism over perfection.

Everyone loves a highly polished visual, but knowing when good enough is good enough is critical. Keeping things moving and getting value from your work is more important than attaining pixel perfection (let's face it, you'll never be totally happy anyway). If you can foster that culture of continuous improvement, there'll be plenty of time to iterate.

Ask for forgiveness, not permission.

Connect the dots, build relationships, uncover problems and act on them. You might not always be right, but you won't always be wrong. And finding out and experimenting is half the fun.

Pick experimentation over ideology.

Having a North Star is great, but getting there in a waterfall style could cause problems. Instead, have a vision and take small bets on getting there – iterate your way to greatness.

Share, listen, take on board.

Get your ideas in front of your most important stakeholders—customers—and listen to what they say. You could share prototypes or just press the button and ship. There's no more valuable feedback than getting work out into the wild and learning from how it performs.

Embrace Ai, but remember that it's just a tool.

AI will be a great way of churning out variations of the same wireframes, layouts and visuals—and it will only get more adept. Whether any of it is good or not will be up to you to figure out. Make it your job to think and act like a researcher – there will be real value in figuring this stuff out and separating the wheat from the chaff.