Product strategy consultant | Helping emerging tech & innovation discover the right users | Spatial computing | Physical AI
The more senior you are, the less likely you are to attend professional events. So where do senior tech professionals find community? I was sad to learn about #IxDA's shutdown. IxDA was a big part of my professional identity as a junior- to mid-level UX researcher. At the same time, it’s also been 8 years since I attended an Interaction-style conference, and nearly a decade since I attended an official IxDA event. There’s been a lot of talk lately about how #UX as a discipline has changed. But I’ve found myself thinking more about professional community, and how the needs of senior practitioners are so different from when we are earlier in our career. Way back in 2011 and 2012, Vitorio Miliano and I collaborated on large-scale surveys of the Austin UX community, and we noticed this trend: the more senior you are, the less likely you are to attend professional events. This is not because senior practitioners don’t need community, but because the kind of community you need is so much harder to get. When I was a junior researcher, IxDA gave me two things I needed: 🤝 Professional connections 📈 New professional skills Senior professionals need these things too, but as you become more experienced, the bar gets higher: 🤝 You have less time and more people wanting it, so it’s more important for each new connection to be meaningful. 📈 When you’ve been working in industry for years, it gets harder to find skills training at your level (or that is even relevant when you’re no longer executing, but directing). It’s an interesting coincidence, then, that IxDA is folding at a time when the original audience it served in 2005 is now in senior roles, with needs that are much harder to address. But the need for professional community is still there; senior professionals just have to address it in different ways. I’ll talk more about what the research says about this in a future post, but for now, I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you’ve been in the tech industry for 10+ years: ❓ What human connections do you value most at this point in your career? ❓ Are there professional organizations you’re still active in? ❓ Where do you turn for help and support?
Product strategy consultant | Helping emerging tech & innovation discover the right users | Spatial computing | Physical AI
1moI’ll start! I strongly value my connections with former colleagues and am trying to do better at maintaining them. I no longer participate in UXPA, IxDA, or any local design org, although I miss them. As for online communities, I’m most active in the XOXO Slack rather than UX- and product-focused ones because these days I’m less interested in specific design methods and more interested in running a creative and humane business. I get a lot of professional support from my husband because we happen to have a lot of overlap in our work, but I also regularly run ideas by folks from a UX book club formed by Sara Telfer and Kristin Johnson.