Product Innovation Series with Aram Melkoumov

Jeffrey Greene, Director of Product and Design @ NinePatch, and Aram discuss how designers can have a bigger voice and stronger influence within their teams. They chat about why you should question your executives, why it helps to think in verbs rather than nouns, why you shouldn’t accept all the work sent your way, and what questions you should prioritize. They also explore how to translate the pitch deck into reality and how to visualize ideas so that they become tangible rather than abstract.

Show Notes

About Jeffrey Greene
Jeffrey Greene is the Director of Product and Design at NinePatch. He has been working in the design space since 2006 and held roles such as Senior User Experience Designer at Quantros and Director Of Product Design at Stella Technology. He holds a Master’s degree in architecture from Harvard but didn’t work in architecture. Outside the office, Jeffrey enjoys reading books that expose people’s diverse life experiences from notable activists such as bell hooks, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin.

Links We Mentioned:
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others/dp/0066620996
In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing https://www.amazon.com/Pursuit-Elegance-Ideas-Something-Missing/dp/0385526504

SHOW NOTES:
00:00 | Who is Jeffrey Greene
00:31 | How to get leadership to hear you out
03:54 | Being heard as a designer
08:35 | How to translate a pitch deck into reality
14:55 | When things don’t go as planned (technical debt)
19:01 | Why push design work to the end
22:56 | Mental models are so underrated 
24:35 | Complex problems need simple solutions
26:47 | Method acting for product managers: why it works
28:45 | Saying no to yourself
31:22 | The joy of prototyping
32:29 | Personal fireside questions: street food pub, leaving architecture, not having a “real job”...

QUOTES:
[02:17] “You have to try and get on leadership’s radar somehow. And hopefully, if you have good ideas, you just try and figure out a way to get those heard in any venue possible. Hopefully, there's at least one executive out there who's open to hearing things.”

[25:08] “The more complex the problem, the simpler the solution has to be. You can't chase complexity with complexity so the more complicated something is, you have to really try and distill it down.”

Follow Jeffrey Greene:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/archisonic/ 

Work with Crowdlinker: 
https://www.crowdlinker.com/contact 

What is Product Innovation Series with Aram Melkoumov?

Product Innovation Series is an in-depth interview series featuring product & innovation leaders from small startups all the way to Fortune 500 behemoths. Our guests share their battle-tested perspective on what prevents teams from shipping a great product.
The show is hosted by Aram Melkoumov, the CEO of Crowdlinker.