How to quickly onboard for a complex project?

You might be surprised by the skill I use most frequently in my design process. No, it's not my competence with Figma or Miro. It’s actually learning quickly.

Welcome to this week's 🔥 subscriber-only 🔥 edition of Alex's Camp. Each week I explore design’s interplay with product, business, and technology, and answer your questions about freelancing, career, and personal growth.

You might be surprised by the skill I use most frequently in my design process. No, it's not my competence with Figma or Miro. It’s actually **learning quickly**.

You see, I think it's really helpful to be able to tell the difference between what I know and what I don't know when I'm starting to work on a new project. When I start something new, I start by typing out what I already know. This may take the shape of a bulleted list, a user-point-of-view script, or something similar to a blog post. The important thing is that it expresses my knowledge concisely.

After outlining the most evident facts I can trust, I start outlining my assumptions. These are obviously near to the truth, but in actuality, I'm not sure.

As an example, let’s say I’m working with a product that handles complex data flows. A fact that I know is that people spend days and weeks manually creating those data flows. That’s a lot of work and is very time-consuming. I also know that they use tools like GitHub and Airflow, which means the experience for the product should be similar so that these people feel familiar with it.