Dear readers & friends,
I took a little summer break, but have recently gotten back to writing articles. My latest piece “Designing together: the importance of shared principles for design teams” has been published by The UX Collective. It’s the fourth in what will be a series of five articles that deal with how to develop a comprehensive strategy for a design team, backed by real-world experiences from my current role as a Design Director. In other words: My team and I did all the things from the articles.
You can access the first three articles of the series—dealing with the Strategy House model, OGSMs, and team values—from my Medium profile, or via the links in the latest one.
As explained in detail in the previous edition of this newsletter, inspired by Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog I also wanna to share up to three tools from my personal digital toolbox and up to three recommended reads in each issue. I hope you find these helpful and/or interesting. 😊
Reading
In line with my own article series on design team strategy, today’s must-reads center around, leadership, building teams, and strategy in business.
📖 How Humble Leadership Really Works by Prof. Dan Cable argues that top-down leadership is outdated and counterproductive, and the key is to help people feel purposeful, motivated, and energized so they can bring their best selves to work.
📖 What science can tell us about Building Great Teams, published by the Kellogg School of Management, discusses the importance of diversity and inclusion in teams, and provides research-backed advice on how to create a team environment that is conducive to collaboration and innovation. The article also highlights the importance of leadership in building great teams, and provides tips for how leaders can create a positive and productive team dynamic.
📖 Strategy, Strategy Everywhere by Prof. Roger Martin tries to make sense of all the strategies out there: brand strategy, business strategy, client strategy, data strategy, go-to-market strategy, growth strategy, whatever strategy. If everything is strategy, does it mean anything at all?
On a different note, I also recently updated My ultimate list of books you need to read if you want to truly understand digital design.
Tools
Now, please don’t hate me for these since I assume they’ll not be news to many of you. However, I still encounter friends and colleagues who are very interested in AI and ChatGPT, but haven’t heard of one or more of these, which I’ve come to use on a very regular basis.
🛠 Microsoft Designer is allows users to create designs by providing text prompts or uploading images. The app uses DALL·E 2.5 to generate images based on the user's input, and then provides users with tools to customize and edit the images.
🛠 Bing Chat is a feature of the new version of Microsoft Edge that allows users to have conversations with a chatbot that can access and summarize information from the web. The chatbot is powered by GPT-4, the latest language model from OpenAI.
🛠 Google Bard is Google’s answer to ChatGPT, an experimental conversational AI service powered by LaMDA. Some of its unique features include voice input, the ability to generate multiple drafts, integration with Gmail and Google Docs, and the capability to assist in coding in over 20 languages
Enjoy reading and until next time. As always, I welcome your feedback and comments on my articles and this newsletter. Simply reply to this email to share your thoughts.
Cheers,
Max
This is an issue of my newsletter Tales of Design & User Experience (& Other Stuff)—abbreviated ToDUX—that has been cross-posted here for archival reasons. If you want to get my latest takes and writing delivered straight to your inbox, you can subscribe at maxspeicher.com/newsletter or simply follow me here on Buy Me A Coffee. 🗞