Andy Polaine
In my coaching practice, I often coach clients through their This Is Me and case study presentation that’s asked for in interviews. They often present their work as a documentation run-through. But it’s really not about the work, it’s about the story of you.
In this Coaching Reflections video, I share a few pointers that I frequently share with coachees.
Find more of these here on my blog or my YouTube channel.
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Transcript
Intro
Andy Polaine (00:00) The design job market is fairly volatile at the moment, but I do see a lot of positions advertised in my LinkedIn feed. A little tip there is to like and share job ads and the algorithms very swingy now and it gives you a whole load more.
And this week I want to talk about talking about yourself.
The Story of You
In my coaching practice, I often coach clients through their This Is Me and case study presentation that’s asked for in interviews. Much of this is applicable to pitching yourself for a promotion and sometimes things you might write on your website or even present at a conference. There are a few things that I see often.
And the biggest one is just running through the case study as project documentation. This is kind of, this is what I did last summer. You need to think about the audience. So designers might want to know about your design chops, but you probably don’t need to explain the design process to them. Product leaders are more likely to be interested in your cross-functional collaboration, particularly obviously with product leadership. And the C-suite is going to be more interested in your contribution to the strategy, vision, or business outcomes.
Each slide is not just information. It’s a chance to tell your audience how great you are.
So it may not just be the project process, but how you’re able to turn the vision and strategy into actionable chunks of work that were delivered. Or not just working as a senior designer or a design director, but how you foster collaboration between design, the PMs and engineering. And you can look for things that were particularly difficult or specific to that project.
So it’s not just a kind of generic run through design as designers always done and how everyone understands it. And that’s often the case is that people do a deep dive into the process with no set up of the context . It’s straight into oh this is the research we did and this is the these all the kind of screens we did and where we went. But actually whoever you is interviewing you will have sat through several of these and sifted through even more. If they’re a senior design leader, they’re unlikely to scroll through or want to listen to all those details.
So what people tend to be interested in is what was the problem of the original ask? What was the context? Did you reframe it? What was your response? How did you then think about your design intervention? And then what were the outcomes versus the outputs? And not just a bunch of screens, but the business or organizational impact.
And the last mistake, is something that I do all the time in conference presentations is saying the same thing in different ways. So it’s often because, there’s this screen that I really want to show, or there’s this particular point I want to make, but actually it’s really kind of saying the same thing as a slide before.
This is the kill your darling’s moment. Have a look and see, am I really saying the same thing? If there’s something where they’re saying slightly similar things, then try and combine them onto one slide. Otherwise just consider deleting them. Nobody’s going to mind that you have fewer slides.
Interviews are not the time to hide your light under a bushel. I’m not suggesting arrogance or over claiming But you can tell and you can spin the story of a project in different ways that highlight your contribution depending on what you’re trying to highlight
Outro
I hope that’s useful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it’s at polaine.com and I’ll put the link below. If you have any of your own tips and approaches, please post a comment below. I’d love to hear them. Thanks very much and I’ll see you again soon.