Advice

2024-07-01

The following collection of advice, quotes and rules were originally compiled by Marcel Levy.

Table of Contents

Promotions

https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/

Rules

Force multiplying Activities

"Force-multiplying" is manager-speak for making everyone around you better at their job. But how do you do that? The following is written from the standpoint of a UX designer, but you can easily adapt it to your domain.

Share best practices

Pro tip: Don’t just share a best practice or a link to an interesting article, describe the thought process behind it and why it’s relevant to your audience. This makes advice more useful—nobody will be solving the exact same problem as you in the future, but the approach can be similar.

In all these examples: When you document a best practice, others are able to learn from you without the need for a face-to-face interaction

Create templates

Pro tip: Create a template whenever there’s an activity that happens over and over again and is done by different people. Combine sharing best practices (#1 above) with creating templates to make your guidance easier to copy and more actionable

Code templates make it easy to reuse patterns. Patterns may reduce unnecessary overrides of the design system.

Build tools

Pro tip: Great tools apply best practices automatically to someone’s document, code, or designs.

Introduce a new mental model

Pro tip: Great mental models are principles and frameworks that set a new, higher standard for the team’s work quality. With all these examples, it takes documenting and then proposing the new mental model to your peers or leaders to get buy-in.

Propose new goals and metrics

Pro tip: Goals are a great way to influence: they add a target and ongoing accountability to meeting a certain outcome.

Create or modify a mechanism

Pro tip: Mechanisms provide solutions to recurring problems and don’t require you to be in the room to affect positive outcomes. But you don’t always have to create new mechanisms, start by first thinking about whether you can adjust an existing one.

Pro tip: Modifying a mechanism always starts with (a) identifying what are the existing mechanisms (b) changing it get better outcomes in the future. The “Modify” tactic also applies to existing tools, templates, goals, and metrics.

Propose organizational changes

Participate in strategic sessions

Create durable deliverables

Most "project" deliverables only advance the current project from one stage to the next. "Durable" deliverables on the other hand—are useful during multiple stages of your current project as well as during future projects.

3 Steps To Apply a Force-Multiplying Activity

Examples:

Measuring Impact

To ensure your force multiplying activity is working, you should have a way to audit its effectiveness on a consistent basis. Data will help you adjust along the way and it will allow you to show the impact of your work. Here are several ways impact can be measured:

Pro tip: Since being an effective force multiplier requires adoption, collaboration, and usually buy-in from your peers and leaders, regular Earn Trust-building activities are key to maximizing your impact!

Advice

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