Catt Small

And again, if you're treating your manager like a partner and you're treating your PM like a partner as well in terms of how you spend your time, then they will understand what matters to you and they can help you prioritize appropriately.

So those are some examples of the way that I think about energy management.

And the only reason I can do the amount of work that I do is because I do put in a little upfront effort to make sure that I'm spending my time appropriately.

Yeah, this is something that comes up a lot in the course that I run about the same topic.

We talk a lot about

managing the energy of other people essentially by creating artifacts at the level of fidelity that reflects the fidelity of your current thinking.

And a lot of times what I've noticed is that designers will go from essentially having a conversation with their product partners, for example,

and then they will just start making everything in high fidelity.

But if you are still figuring out the concept behind the solution, like you may not even fully know what the problem is, if you're solving the right problem directionally, you know, if the broad concept is the way that you actually want to implement the solution, if you're still exploring, then

working in high fidelity can kind of pin you down a bit too soon and it can also lead to a situation where your leaders and conversations are focused on the wrong thing so sometimes what i will do is i will literally just make diagrams that are like here's like an icon of a person and here's an icon of a team and let's talk about the relationship between these objects like i just explain all the objects and how they relate to each other

And sometimes I'll do that even in the context of like, here's the first milestone, okay?

A user can do these things.

The second milestone, a user can do these things.

The third, a user can do these.

Is this right, you know?

Like, let me just show you at the level of fidelity that we are currently thinking

products like what we're thinking of doing, this is my reaction to these things.

And so because I'm removing a lot of the interface, we're able to focus the conversation at the right level.

And so I do understand that some leaders struggle unless they can really see the visuals of an interface.

And so I do think there are ways to get around that.