🧑🏻🤝🧑🏼 A project is just people
A project is just the reflection of the people behind it. Dig into a technical aspect, and you will find a people aspect.
One big motivation to create Zenned was to enable people to constructively exchange ideas, and easily experiment with them.
🔍 Details kill the mood
Quality is not the result of rigor, quality is the result of people having it easy to improve things.
The most common reason stopping people from improving things is having to agree minutia with someone else.
Most details don’t really matter. They just need to be nice, not perfect.
Agree in the big picture, and let the person doing the job decide the details. Keep conversations for the really important stuff.
🦉 See the real thing
To understand the nuances of something one needs to see the real thing.
If you jump into a conversation without the people having seeing it, or a prototype of it, the debate will be around what happens in another nation: your imagination.
🙊 Understand before being understood
The question is that we don’t know why other people do what they do. We aren’t into their minds. Our own views always make more sense, because we know all the motives behind them.
Hence make a habit of trying to understand the other person first, by asking them question. More often than less you will find you didn’t know their motives, or you make them reflect.
🙈 Allow yourself to be wrong
Conversations are just exchanges of ideas. More important than being perfect or accurate, is to enable people to share what they are perceiving.
If something is wrong, it can be corrected later on. Don’t let that prevent you to express what you are seeing, or take it as absolute truth.
Change seeing opinions from either wrong or right, to what useful info lies in them.
🙉 See if the person is willing
Many times it isn’t about jumping into debate, but about qualifying if the other person wants the same as you. Right or wrong it is their choice.
People may choose to favor different things, and both being completely valid. One may prefer to live in the city, other in the countryside.
Try to find what is common ground first. If there is you may collaborate, if there isn’t each one can do their own.
🙏 Error into kindness
Most communication is non verbal, yet most of the Internet communications are written.
Written communication is bad at conveying tone and mood. Hence it is way easier to misinterpret intention, and probably not the best mean to communicate anything too emotional.
So compensate for that. Error into sounding kind and welcome. And abuse those emoji.
🎯 Be direct in the right way
Say what you think, directly, in a proactive manner. Focus on the desired outcome rather than what is wrong with the current one, and in a way that implicitly conveys respect to other views.
Like “I suspect this may work better if done this way” or “my personal preference would be this, due to this”.
🖖 Sound human
The purpose of communication is clarity. And nothing better for being clear than writing as you normally speak.
Use technical jargon or extra words only when it simplifies the message. When read aloud it shall sound natural and conversational.
Use new-lines frequently. And only talk about a single aspect of a topic at a given time, treating further aspecs later.
🍨 Take sides
There is no perfect choice. There are resources, and how you choose to allocate them.
Choices are trade-offs, and how you decide to distribute them is ultimately tinted by personal preference.
Instead of creating something that will fit every possible scenario or liking, select what is most important to optimize for, what is most missing, and what you will be proud for.
However this isn’t at odds with designing for flexibility.