Just about every product professional I have personally worked with had some kind of creative interest outside of work. I know many musicians, painters, actors, and dancers in the product space. It makes sense that if you spend your day solving problems, that you would spend your free time solving creative problems.
Right now, for me it has taken the form of a messy office that I am trying to organize. I draw illustrations in my spare time, and over time this has meant piles of art supplies everywhere: pencils, paint, printmaking materials, rolls of film, even boxes of ephemera that I use to make collages. If you can’t tell by that above list, I’m interested in mixed media.
For me, I see product strategy as a type of organization project. I’m trying to organize things in the digital world in a way that makes sense to people. If my office is disorganized, it makes it difficult for me to to my job. If I get inspired to do something, if I can’t find my tools quickly (including the books I often use for ideas), the inspiration fades.
To organize my office, I borrowed a strategy from my product strategy practice: I took everything out in a pile and made a real-life affinity map to sort related items. At first, I sorted everything by type: watercolors in one pile, acrylics in another, etc.
While I was doing this, I noticed a trend, and this gave me clarity going forward. I had a lot of piles of things that I had already done, and what I really wanted to do was to put things in piles that would help me do new things.
After that, I organized things by emphasizing putting materials closer to my desk that I can use to make new stuff. Now I have sketchbooks, pencils, and even a small paint set within an arm’s reach on my desk.
After that, I thinned out the work that I had already done - the old portfolios mainly - and put those in a storage area on the other side of my office. I can still access them, but the things I can reach and see every day are mostly materials.
I firmly believe that having a daily creative practice helps me with my “day” job in product strategy. I see creativity as a muscle that you need to exercise every day. They are both related in that in both you are essentially telling a story and placing emphasis on what’s important.
I have yet to meet a product designer who saw themselves as “just as designer”. Creative people have a lot of layers. However, when we are at companies, our co-workers tend to want to put creative people in one box. In my case, people who don’t know me well can’t believe that I am capable of guiding and managing a product even though I have been doing that job, and even have a certification that shows my strength.
Creativity and organization can exist in the same person, the same team, and in the same product, and that creativity and organization often feed off of each other. To build successful products, this is the energy that is needed, not a designer stuck in a box.
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