Beginner’s Mindset

It’s intimidating when you are new to a company or product and feel like you don’t know anything. Early in my time at Paylocity I was assigned to the payroll team, and felt bad whenever I thought about how everyone on the team knew so much more about payroll than I did. How could I ever know as much as my product owner, who’d been leading the team for several years, or our customers, who were payroll professionals? What could I contribute?

That knowledge gap between my and the incumbent team members weighed on me. Then I realized something—that competing on domain knowledge was a race I couldn’t win, and that it was a waste of energy to worry about trying.

I changed how I approached the situation. I was not hired or assigned to the payroll team because I was a payroll expert. I was hired because I am a user experience expert, someone who excels at taking complex ideas and translating them into clear and simple experiences. The only way to design effectively in the short term, and the fastest way to close the knowledge gap, was to embrace a beginner’s mindset.

I started to own the fact that I was a beginner in payroll. In meetings with the team I began to freely admit what I didn’t know. This changed everything. Becoming comfortable with my status as a beginner created space for me to ask questions, and my innate designer’s curiosity emerged. I stopped being ashamed of my inexpertise. Instead, I embraced it and used it as a platform to ask important design questions. And I translated the answers to those questions into experiences that made sense.

When domain expertise seems like the currency for your product team or organization, it can make you feel inadequate, and that imposter syndrome starts to sneak in. It becomes hard to position yourself as a beginner. But if you can get comfortable with that idea, it might give you permission to be the designer you really are.