I care about building trust…
…with both the folks I’m working with internally, and with the folks I’m designing alongside—I believe it’s at the core of every successful project.
During the first few months of my co-op at Keurig Dr Pepper, our company shared a building with a hardtech and manufacturing innovation center called mHUB—filled with folks from all sorts of different backgrounds, with all manner of different skills and experiences, all working on different startups. It was a unique space to be in, with so many smart and motivated folks putting their all into developing these new technologies and products.
I was eager to learn more and to meet some of these folks, and I took the opportunity a few different times to go to events hosted by mHUB meant to build community and facilitate skillsharing between members. It turned out that someone I got to know during one of these events signed up to participate in a user study I conducted later on—part of the project I was heading at Keurig. It was really cool to see that community and collaboration at work!
During my second quarter of Design Thinking and Communication at Northwestern—a class in which teams of engineering students from all different disciplines work with an outside client on a design project—my team and I worked with the Friends of the Chicago River to design a sustainable system to inflate several hundred floaties given time, space and logistical constraints.
I really enjoyed working with our project partner (it was my first time designing for a real, right-now problem alongside a client) and I relished the opportunities we had to visit the event site and communicate where we were at with our design, share out our ideas and hear her feedback as we worked through the problem together. However, our course ended in June, and the summer float event we were designing for took place in July or August.
Curious to see how our design fared in-situ, I took the additional step of reaching out to her at the end of the summer to see how the event went and to learn what we could have done better. This type of communication and follow up I find valuable and want to carry into my career, not just for what I learn from it, but because it communicates ongoing care and interest in those we've worked with.
Before kicking off a group project…
…there are five key topics I like to discuss with my group.
What do they individually want from this project? What do we as a team want from the project?
What are they good at? What aren’t they good at? How can we support each other throughout the project when things get busy, and push each other to grow in areas where we have lots to learn?
What are their expectations for communication going forward? How often do we respond to emails or text messages, and how long before a deadline do they want to prepare for and submit deliverables?
How are they used to working within a group? Do they gravitate toward a certain role—facilitator, communicator, talker, time-keeper? Do they want to take on a role they’re not as confident in yet, for a chance to develop those skills?
Last but not least…favorite snacks?