How Coaching Basketball Helped me Become a Better Design Manager
The 2019 NBA playoffs are in full swing and even though the Lakers once again are nowhere to be found in the playoff field, it’s been fun to watch all the current matchups and trying to guess the outcomes of each game. Watching basketball also reminds me of all the years I spent coaching basketball. Before I really kickstarted my design career I spent 15 years coaching basketball at the highs school and AAU levels. While I enjoyed coaching, I had to make a decision to fully commit to my design career so I hung up my whistle and clipboard a few years ago.
I definitely miss coaching sometimes but I love what I do as a design leader even more than what I was doing with coaching and recently I have been learning that there actually is a ton of overlap between what I do as a leader with Toi and what I used to do as a basketball coach. Here are some experiences and lessons from coaching that I am bringing to my design practice today.
1. Managing super talented people- I tell people that my coaching success mostly was based on the very talented players I had the privilege of coaching. The players put in the hard work of becoming great players, my role was to put them in the best positions for them to be as successful as possible. I try to do the same thing with design, like coaching, I have the privilege of working with some talented folks and I do my best each day to do my part to put them in a position to just let them be great at what they do best.
2. Running design workshops- During my last few years of coaching, I had my practice routines so flushed out to the point where my players knew how every second of every practice was going to be like. I have been able to treat running workshops like the design sprint the same way I used to coach practices. Stakeholders get to see how the day is going to go the way my players knew how the practices are going to go.
3. Responding to failure- While I was fortunate enough to experience my fair share of winning as a coach, I definitely experienced a ton of lost games and massive failures. Each loss, while painful, gave myself and my players a chance to learn and grow in ways winning can’t provide. I bring this same mentality when working on problems in my design process. Each iteration of a product, website, or challenge I am working on gives me an opportunity to fail and learn from that failure. I, of course, want to build a successfully designed experience but I also understand that the best way to experience that success is through iteration and failure. I know that my first pass at a solution is probably not going to be the best solution in the same way I know the first week of a season is not going to be the best version of the team I am coaching.
4. Taking responsibility and sharing the wins- I admit that one of the reasons I am writing this article is that a lot of my former players are graduating high school or college and a few of them were nice enough to reach out to me to thank me for coaching them. I’ve said thank you to all of them and reminded them again that they put in the hard work and this about their success and not mine. As a coach, I was the first one to take the blame for the losses and to give all the credit to the players for the wins. I approach my design practice in a similar way in the sense that I look at what I am doing wrong first before others when something isn’t going the way it should go and I rarely take the credit when things are going well.
Coaching basketball helped make these philosophies second nature to me, I am never forcing myself to respond to failure in a certain way or to give credit to others, it’s just a part of who I am as someone that at the end of the day is still just a coach trying to help others succeed.
See what else I am up to at zrhill.com and toi.io
