But I also have to understand that, okay, well, if I have to get heads down work done, I should really plan on doing that at home and then free up my time for doing, you know, letting the, you know, the strengths of the environment influence what I plan to do.

This is a little bit tangential, but I think it brushes up upon the concept of communication and learning how your client and your team likes to communicate.

Do they really like the face-to-face? Do they like having meetings together? Do they like...

Emails are they on slack and I think some of that is you know client preference they have their different channels and you have to kind of get to know them and.

Also like who wants to know what you know because if you include everyone sometimes that's TMI for a bunch of them and they're going to get sick of you and sometimes if you don't they'll get mad and they'll feel like they're excluded so.

I feel like that's something that's always good to get a hold on as soon as you can.

But then also just even more client agnostic, something that I've been trying to work on is using the right medium appropriately.

And I think even though it may be a little while before you're doing the thing, you're still showing that you're taking their work seriously and getting in a position to do the thing.

Does that go live tomorrow or is it the next day? When do I get this?

True.

You learn really quickly to throw up a lot of disclaimers whenever you show those.

These aren't real.

These are just mock-ups and it's just proof of concept.

And even more than that, you always get technical buy-in on the feasibility of what you're designing before you show stuff too high up the chain because you don't want those things to get away from you and then suddenly expectations are way too high because it's just smoke and mirrors when it comes down to it.

But it's true that designers, like we've talked about, there's always been an appetite for like, I want this, I want exactly this, and I want it to be real without having to rely on anyone else, without having to rely on a dev team or doing that handoff because then I'm giving away my baby a little bit and what if they mangle it or whatever? Wouldn't it be so cool if I could just control the thing from start to end? There's always been this conversation about, given the right technology, the line between design and development could disappear and could be in the process of disappearing now that we have all these tools.

Alison, what do you think?

Allison, have you ever gone into a customer for the first time and the person you're supposed to meet didn't know you were coming, they didn't know you were gonna be there? [laughs]

Ooh.

Never had it that bad.

Um, I'm sure it happens.

[laughs] But I've, I've had, um, a similar spectrum, I would say, of readiness to not readiness.

Um, I think, you know, in the best case, it w- like, they had shipped all of my equipment to me ahead of time, so I just unboxed it all, and I had my account stuff, like, on a little slip, and it was all good to go.

Um, and more of the worst is we showed up, and we didn't, um, have any of our account access figured out yet.

100%.