When work happens in public, the quietest strong thinkers can disappear. Making their work visible is a leadership job, not a performance to assign back.
Half my team took to building in public right away, and the other half went quieter. That split is the thing I’ve been thinking about a lot this month. When prototypes and explorations get shared the moment they exist, the designers who are naturally gregarious get seen constantly, and the heads-down folks, who are often doing some of the most careful work, can disappear into the feed.
I love these people, and I’d argue the quiet ones include some of my strongest thinkers. Designers skew introverted more often than not, and the new default of narrating your process in a Slack channel rewards a personality type as much as a skill. That’s the part I want to be careful about. If building in public becomes the only way work is legible, you’ve turned visibility into a performance, and you’ll lose the people who do their best thinking before they’re ready to talk about it.
So I’ve stopped asking the quiet half to become the loud half. The job is to build paths where their work shows up without requiring them to perform it. A few things have helped. I’ll surface someone’s exploration myself in a review and credit it by name, so the signal travels without them having to stage it. We’ve leaned on async recordings and short Looms, which give a more reflective person room to show their thinking on their own terms. And I’ve started treating ‘make this visible’ as my problem to solve for them, rather than a growth area I assign back to them.
Confidence and quality aren’t the same thing, and in a room moving this fast it’s easy to confuse them.
The version of this I’m trying to avoid is the one where the most confident voice in the channel sets the bar for whose work counts. My belief is that part of leading through this shift is building a system where a quiet person’s good idea is just as likely to surface as a loud person’s decent one. That’s a design problem, and it happens to be one we’re well suited to solve.
The teachable part
If building in public becomes the only way work is legible, you’ll lose your quietest strong thinkers. Make their work visible for them, rather than asking them to perform.