Andrea Buran’s Site ^5.0

[…] and I realized that we’d stumbled onto one of the biggest problems in our entire company: we had no idea how to define the role we’re trying to hire for and grow our developers toward.

A re-invigorated broken employee is a corporation’s most powerful force.

Don’t make your (often shy) natural leaders ask for a promotion—just do it. The icing on the cake for you—as their manager—is the loyalty you’ll receive in return.

The problem is that if animation (and therefore the spatial structure of an interface) is an afterthought, it’s all too easy to create contradictory behaviors.

[…] the worst possible work environment is one in which visual designers are permitted actual autonomy over their domain.

Although handoffs are difficult to avoid completely, the more they happen the dumber an organization gets resulting in failure. Individuals who are are handed off work take longer to get up to speed through (relearning) and crucial knowledge is lost.

One day, you won’t buy a movie. You’ll buy the right to watch a movie, and that movie will be served to you. If the companies serving the movie don’t want you to see it, or they want to change something, they will have the power to do so.

You set the expectation that you’ll be making recommendations, not taking orders. You made it clear that you’ll be discussing and agreeing on ideas before anything gets refined.

The thing is, being connected doesn’t magically enable effective communication.

If you are embarking on a rewrite journey, all the power to you, but make sure you do it for the right reasons, understand the risks and plan for it.

Paradoxically, change only has a chance of succeeding if failure—at least a little bit of failure—is also okay.

Visual design should never be left until the end of the process.

[…] Still, seeing it isn’t the moment of resignation. The moment happened the instant you decided, “What the hell? I haven’t seen Don in months and it’d be good to see him.”

Your shields are officially down.

People under time pressure don’t work better—they just work faster.

Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.

Best I can tell, getting fired and dying are one of the few burdens that are yours and yours alone.

[…] More than 120 takes. Those kind of scenes, you say “Oh, Jackie’s good.” It’s not good. You can do it. Except do you have the patience or not?

[…] a claim to be pragmatic is implicitly an accusation that says that whoever disagrees is dogmatic […].

The dysfunction in the organization became the dysfunction in the product, and that was passed on to the customers.