This week I passed my first 90 days as Head of Product Design at Vercel. I’ve found that starting a new challenging job can feel a lot like recovering from major surgery. 🫠

Being in recovery feels like starting from zero again—relearning to walk with no muscle mass, taking two steps forward and one step back with every new PT session, and giving myself a pep talk every morning.

Except that with a new job it’s: rebuilding trust with a new set of strangers, injecting domain expertise and institutional knowledge as fast as possible, and…yeah, also giving myself a pep talk every morning.

My new job pep talk:

• Like Marie Kondo to a hoarder: one drawer at a time. Reduce the paralyzing anxiety of overwhelm by taking one step forward on your prioritized list.

• Relationships and trust building are the most important natural resources. When everything else around us swirls, being a dependable peer/leader is invaluable.

• They literally hired you to have an opinion. Don’t be afraid to ask the dumb newbie questions and share your perspectives early.

To cause insult to injury, starting a new job in this environment of the AI emergence is harder than ever. Every new tool that launches antiquates the brand new skill we just learned yesterday.

We’re all in surgery recovery, new job or not.

Aside from “this is hard”, I’ve also been reflecting on new insights I’ve gained in these first few months here, including about what it takes to shift to strategic design and wrote that up in another blog post.