Be a designer people want to work with.
All of my success as a designer can be boiled down to one crucial skill, my ability to align with a product's long term vision and to communicate that vision into even the smallest details of my designs. While I have spent time upgrading my visual design skills, I have found the best use of my time has been spent taking communication course and reading on business strategy. Designers are faced with the tough task to gather buy-in for design initiative but the general visual appeal is almost never enough. I've learned that my ability to get to the core value add of a feature and design around that value, as well as, make it very apparent through my deigns that I understand it has made me a well trusted designer on my cross functional teams.
Simple asks are sneakily complicated.
Whenever anyone suggests adding a simple interaction to a product, I never take it at face value. The easy path would be to accept the suggestion and find the most visually appealing way to implement it. But I've learned the hard way that appealing to everyones suggestions is not scalable. I would approach this by first getting down to the reason why we need this interaction. Once that is answered, I need to evaluate whether that reason is truly a valuable use case for the resources we have at the time. If it is, I need to see if the initial interaction suggestion is the best way to get the desired result in that use case or if it will require more thought from a design perspective.
Design success depends on user validation
Being a designer, to me, never means that I have all the answers. Designers have special skills that allow them to get to the answer through a repeatable, generally reliable process. This mindset has allowed me to attach the success of my designs to how much I would prefer the design as a user. Depending on the team I'm on, user validation can look like user testing and discover sessions before a design is completed or monitoring interaction after a design has been released in the wild. Both in my personal designs and when giving feedback to others, I rarely rely on my personal preference unless asked specifically. I will often ask more questions to get better insight into the users, their work style, general tendencies, and work set up to try and see if the answer to those questions would lead a design to be structured one way over another.
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