Catt Small

And the design director who's running that crit saw that.

And those are the little things.

So I think there's essentially an investment of sorts in relationships so that you have the information from across the company, and then you can utilize that at certain points in time.

I totally empathize with that feeling of potentially I like to describe it as being allergic to politics.

So I also was at certain points in my career, especially early, like when I was a senior designer, I would say the same thing like, oh, I don't want to be political about stuff.

That stuff's annoying.

Like, I just want to do the work.

But then I realized that.

to do good work to actually get work shipped a lot of the times you do have to understand the priorities of the people who are especially above you and you have to treat them as a sort of customer and figure out the right way to convey information to them so they actually hear you and then you have to of course you know gather information from them

and make sure that you're prioritizing and appropriately integrating them into the process.

So when I realized that if I actually wanted to get good work shipped, that I would have to figure out how to politic, it kind of changed my mind a little bit and made me recognize that it is there.

I can't change that politics are part of the process.

So how can I learn

how it works in and figure out a little bit more in detail about ways that I can still operate with integrity and transparency.

But, you know, to actually benefit my customers, I do need to figure out a way to navigate the system.

So that was

The big thing for me was just accepting that I can't change politicking and that I need to... Yeah, if I still want to be a designer and I want to have more impact, then I've got to figure that out.

So the things that I started working on, it was all communication investment for sure.

One thing I started experimenting with was, okay, if I say...

something in a particular way, how does it change the way that it's received?