Burn after writing

On managing and making

In the winter of 2022 I was writing my first book.

Writing a book about what you do is a great way to figure out what parts of your job you really enjoy and what parts inspire you.

My book is about the relationship between language and (digital, product) design. I spent 2007–2018 working as a content designer, which means that I figured out what words should be part of a product design, and what things should be called, and how they should be organized and structured.

I became a general design manager after that (without that much forethought: I was trying to move home to Canada after a decade and a half in Europe; I was looking for a job in Toronto; I wanted to not have to explain to people what I did for a living for awhile). Today I lead teams of people who specialise in visual design, mobile design, illustration, research and technology, as well as those like myself who solve content and information problems.

I’ve been advised several times since becoming a design manager to immerse myself in the finer details of visual design (good advice) but also, sometimes, to “not talk so much about the words” (inherently dubious, also impossible?).

Yet it’s proficiency with language that made me good at being a design manager: it meant I was good at paying attention to detail, as well as how details placed far apart can echo each other. It helped me spot issues and frame things in a way that helped people see why something wasn’t working. I have plenty of weak points, but my background in writing also helped me get past them, by asking questions and not assuming I knew everything. It was how I built up empathy for all the other craftspeople I worked with, and learned how much we had in common despite our different sets of expertise.

So when I sat down to write a book, I realized that was what I wanted to write about: my point of view of how design problems work, and how good design emerges, squarely through the lens of the materials I knew best: themes and metaphors, names and style, and the way words evolve and degrade and change what they mean over time. Writing the book was a reckoning with all the work I’d done for a decade and a half, and all the contradictions I’d tried to hold in my mind and live with while working in tech from a period of naive but genuine optimism to, well, what we have today.

Now that the book is out in the world, I’ve started talking about it with people (see below), and it’s got me thinking about that management advice again, and contrasting the situations I wrote about with the management job I still do today. (Writing a book about what you do is a great way to have an existential and/or professional crisis.) Rather than crystallising my knowledge, the book opened me up to all sorts of new doubts and questions.

Every stage of a career is a process of self-definition. You study, and then you let other people and companies label the skills you have, and then mould yourself to fit those skills, and then fix that label to yourself as a self-identity. If you’re lucky—though it’s an uncomfortable kind of luck—you get to fit yourself into an odd corner of an industry and make your own path, even choose your own job title, as I have had to do more than once.

What matters, at least if you’re going to write about it, is that it resonates with you: that the choices you make form a story you can see yourself in. Right now, it’s hard to find that story in tech through the fog that surrounds it: it feels like we are reckoning, very slowly, with the difference between the world we thought we were building and the world we’re in.

As I’ve returned to my daily work as a manager, I’ve found myself pushing outside advice to the back of my mind, and drawing from my own expertise—again, now in book form!—with more confidence. Every day I see and hear countless examples of the same design and communication problems I wrote about, and every day I have a chance to try to solve them faster or better, as much or as little as I can.

Anyway, you should write a book, too. It’s a great way to remember what you care about, and why you show up to work every day.

I talked about some of these topics on two recent podcasts —Content Strategy Insights (podcast and transcript here) and with my own former manager, Emmet Connolly, on Inside Intercom (conversation below, transcript and podcast here).