In the research for this book, certain distinguishing features or attributes common to all Superusers were observed, again and again. Superusers exhibit a predilection and expertise, not only for the technologies they master but finesse with human interaction. While design technologists are needed for their computational skills and productivity, it’s their outlook and consideration for others’ interests and needs that separate them from ordinary specialists.
This chapter looks at the qualities and attributes that make the Superusers’ superpowers of Chapter 2 possible. These attributes – ten X-factors starting with the letter C – are the bedrock for what separates a Superuser from someone who specializes in technology. The chapter looks at what drives Superusers, their defining qualities, and sought-after differentiators.
Curiosity
Superusers are naturally curious – they’re driven by curiosity – particularly about the world outside of technology. It is not enough for technologists to focus exclusively on mastering technology and tools – for that to be the end of their interests. Some address this by adding “A” for art to STEM subjects, making it STEAM. “I’d add a ‘d’ for design and make it STEAMD,” says Dan Anthony, Design Computation Leader, NBBJ. “We need design. I’m personally very enthusiastic about the [Stanford] d.school approach. Experientially solving problems. Hacking out a process. Sometimes the exposure to the arts can be very narrow or cursory if you don’t want to apply it.” Anthony explains how curiosity led him to study architecture in the first place:
One of the things that came out of my experience at Stanford is an interest in graphic design – something I’ve always been interested in. One of the things that got me to the University of Oregon is that I continued to explore that space after I graduated from Stanford. I found that the thing that I wanted to learn more about was architecture and design. I went to California College of the Arts (CCA) for classes. I travel and go to museums, draw and photograph buildings. I realized I was gravitating toward the urban space and wanted to learn how to design it. I was driven by curiosity.
Superusers’ interests outside of technology have a positive impact on their work, providing perspective, enhancing their laser focus on a task, making their work more enriching by leveraging alternative reference points. And, as will be discussed in a later chapter, curiosity remains a valued characteristic that employers look for in design technologist candidates. “You’re just looking for curiosity,” says Brian Ringley, Senior Researcher at WeWork where he leads research efforts in the areas of construction automation and robotics, playing a pivotal role in developing and testing new methods of building manufacturing and working collaboratively with WeWork’s design, construction, and logistics teams. He continues:
You’re not looking for somebody who needs to be told what to do. You’re looking for somebody who has an extremely large appetite for knowledge. It’s not even problem solving so much. It’s just gaining knowledge, and the way you gain knowledge is to locate problems and wonder why it’s a problem, and decide if it’s a problem worth solving or if the problem is the problem. You’re just hungry for knowledge, you have that appetite and you’re a naturally curious person; if you have that attitude, that you should be able to pick things up. That’s how I felt about myself and that’s what I’ve noticed over the years, the students who are the highest performers are those who don’t wait for me to demo a tool. They have a problem that they want to solve and they go about solving it.
Outside of WeWork, Ringley recognizes the difficulty in nurturing curiosity in his students in the courses he teaches on data-driven parametric design, interoperable workflow convergence and vertical integration, and robotic automation for architectural manufacturing at Pratt Institute’s Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (GAUD) program:
I teach a lot of Grasshopper as part of various courses and it’s a good proxy for design computation and smart models and process in general, as well as also just being a useful skill to know Grasshopper. I know I should be more practical about it, but I’m just always heartbroken that people aren’t trying to figure things out and asking questions. It just seems like they, by and large, come in and it’s like they did what they needed to do to get to that point.
I’ve had a lot of advantages in my life so I don’t want to hold myself up, like everybody should be the same type of person I’ve been. I remember one advantage being that I learned Rhino in high school, which is a freak accident mostly. I remember just being bored with the assignment and being like, “I’m going to type in every command. I’m going to run every Rhino command and I’m just going to see what it does.” I tell my students that and they’re like, “Oh, Grasshopper’s so hard,” whereas I said, “Just put a random component down and see what it does, and then put another one, and just do that once a day, and just see what that leads to.” As an educator, that’s always been that really, really difficult thing to attain, which is “How do I nurture curiosity?” rather than “How do I deliver content?”
Curiosity can also help develop one’s ability to adapt to change – something of particular import given how quickly technology and processes change today. “That goes with the curiosity, because inevitably that’s going to lead you to try new things,” explains Ringley, citing his leaving Woods Bagot for WeWork:
It’s like coming to WeWork. It was hard not to notice them, and it was hard not to notice they were doing the types of things I wanted to do and they were really, really good at it. That’s exciting and that curiosity takes over and you’re like, “Well, I have to go do that now because that seems like where all the smart people went, and where all the big things are happening within this industry, so I’ll pop in over there and see what happens.”
Contextualizers
Woods Bagot Principal Shane Burger has talked in the past about object intelligence, situational intelligence, and systemic intelligence in terms of building components. Could these three qualities be a way of describing the people you want to work with? “In a way, it’s talking about the different scales of collaboration, communication, or connection,” says Burger. “There’s always that moment when someone has to put their head down, their headphones on, block out the world, and get something done. But at the same time, I never want somebody who cannot contextualize their work.”
Contextualizers look at their work in larger contexts that spiral out from the problem they are trying to solve, beyond themselves to larger and larger reference points. Contextualizing means to always ask what does my work mean beyond what I am working on now, in ever-increasing questions of beyond? Burger adds:
They ideally know what this means for their individual project. Hopefully they do, beyond themselves. What does this mean for the work I’m doing now? What does this mean for the larger project team? Beyond that, what does this mean for this typology or this sector? Is there something here I can learn from? Beyond that, what does this mean for the practice, or even beyond that?
Figure 1.1
Wynyard Walk. (2018) Credit: Woods Bagot.
Image credit © Trevor Mein
Connectors
Arguably, people enter the AEC industry because they like working with things, objects, or places, not for the interaction with people. For some, people are an unavoidable liability of working in a profession or industry.
There are a surprising percentage of Superusers that could be considered people-persons. They like people, are energized – not drained or exhausted – by being around people, and thrive in an environment where they daily have the opportunity to be in service to others. Skilled in pattern recognition, their interest in serving others goes a long way to help explain why Superusers are – whether connecting people, tools, processes, or just the dots – considered connectors. Shane Burger explains:
That is a big part of what I do. I constantly look for connections and problems to solve. Sometimes applying something that happens over in the Perth office to something that happens in London. I absolutely encourage the team to do that. I don’t want them to become overwhelmed. You don’t want to over-weight the individual task that they are doing at that time that then might be used to solve 10,000 other problems. That’s where there are two mindsets between the 50/50 of the work. The one 50% that’s focusing on the individual project, and the other 50% that’s to say, alright, let’s back up. Let’s look at this from a 10,000 foot view. What am I doing now that can go bigger?
Here’s an example of what is meant by connection. “We were seeing a lot of problems happen on projects related to some aspects of interoperability and some very common workflows from Grasshopper into Dynamo into Revit that were happening on a very regular basis,” explains Burger. He continues:
Because we were using Flux at that time, we added on top of that some concerns about where Flux was going from a big picture point of view. That then turned into Brian Ringley and Andrew Heumann building some aspects of the Wombat toolkit that we then released publicly. These were some utilities that we were using again and again and again in the practice. We didn’t see anyone else with them out there. They are not really that complicated in terms of IP, but they are really handy utilities. Where this went after this was saying OK, now wait a minute. We’ve fixed some of that for us. But is that really a long-term solution? Additionally, we have this design research group based in our Sydney studio called SuperSpace that is running into similar paradigms, but not quite the same solution space. There are some similar conversations happening. That then sparked a conversation around, let’s start thinking about a future system that might be similar to Flux. We started having very serious conversations with the team from Speckle, in particular Dimitrie Stefanescu. We started talking with Jonatan Schumacher with where Konstru was going in its next steps. That went from single project tools, to multi-project tools, to enterprise tools that we pulled out, developed, and then released, to then start thinking about platforms. So it went at that point from plug-ins to platforms. That’s a good conversation to have. I don’t want to saddle a particular project with a platform-level conversation, but there does need to be that moment where you can back-up and think at platform and infrastructure level, asking: how does this actually impact how we do our work on a regular basis? And is there some amazing opportunity that we could have by thinking about it at platform level?
Communicators
How do colleagues and firm leaders inside the office become aware of Superusers’ superpowers? “They probably walked past my desk and said, ‘Hey, what’s that?’ And I said, ‘here, watch this.’ That was how it happened,” says Ryan Cameron, Project Architect at DLR Group who actively shares what he is working on, online and off, with others. He says:
We have an Intranet that all the big firms have. I will post occasionally, “For the next episode of Dynamo Next we have this going on. Here are some cool things we can do with data, some basic steps you can learn.”
When it comes to communicating what design technologists or computational designers do, many clients wouldn’t know what to ask for. So it falls on Superusers to be able to clearly explain what it is they do, what problems they can solve, and just what value they bring to assignments, projects, and their clients. It may be hard to communicate the focus of one’s work to outsiders when design technology is focused on internal research and development. Early schematic design on a project would fall within the firm’s visualization guru, or architectural designer, explains Jordan Billingsley, BIM Coordinator with Hord Coplan Macht:
We would only need to bring in the computational designer when they’ve settled on rough rules for what the design of the façade should be, and then trying to get a transparency versus opacity percentage, and that’s when you’d need the computational designer, which would still be in the CD phase, so at that point you’ve already got the client to agree to do something more computational.
Superusers are able to get the word out to others, whether via intranets and internal presentations, or by hosting parties at industry events, teaching in a university, delivering a podcast, participating in public speaking, engaging in social media, or being featured in articles and books. WeWork’s Brian Ringley does, or has done, all of these. He says:
Your personality is your personality. I’m often surprised with what I get away with in terms of just being flippant with people. Then you become a little conscious of the fact that you’ve got a little bit of charm and then that’s when you have to watch yourself. I feel the same way about my relationship with Twitter over the years. I started with Twitter in 2009 or 2010 when I was at the University of Cincinnati managing the lab there. I believe my first tweet was about some conference we were participating in. It was a mold-making conference we were doing in Cincinnati and I wanted to get the word out. Then I was like, “Oh, this is a way for me to connect with other people who know Grasshopper or know how to do CNC machining,” because at the time that was an imported skill brought to me by visiting professors from University of Michigan’s Taubman College. When I was in grad school, Karl Daubmann and Craig Borum came down to Cincinnati and that was my big introduction to that world. Then it was lonely when you’re doing it by yourself, plus you have no one to learn from, so the learning is really slow when you’re isolated like that. Then I realized Twitter was a tool for connecting to that broader community. Then even before I came to New York I saw CASE popping up and Designalyze with Zach Downey before I had anything to do with it. Today I’m conscious of the fact that Twitter is a medium that also promotes your personal brand. I’m not going to lie and be like, “I’m just still innocently sharing knowledge and connecting with the community.” It’s like, “No, I know that is a way to make sure that I have a certain amount of visibility.” Granted it’s in an extremely bizarre and small sub-pocket of one industry, but still.
How important is it that Superusers find a way to communicate what they’re doing? Is it their job, or somebody else’s job, to do that? “It’s part of our job,” says Hiram Rodriguez, computational design group leader at Thornton Tomasetti:
Whoever is the computational designer should be able to clearly state what their role is and how we are solving geometry and data problems in the industry, and how we’re coming out with these tools and develop new plug-ins. If you want to talk about that, you can clearly say, “Okay, so what’s your role?” The role is to come up with noble ways of interacting with data from various platforms where we can rationalize that.
Figure 1.2
Web-based dashboard to visualize project program analysis. (2018) Credit: CO Architects, Robert Canfield Photography, Frank Oudeman.
Collaborators
Collaboration is a critical part of practice for all industry players but especially for Superusers who are the rare combination of a specialist that is often integrated on a team. DLR Group’s Ryan Cameron sums it up nicely when he says, “I’m interested in providing value to architecture – value created with better design through increased collaboration, new techniques, and time for reflection. Future designers will need all three if they strive to create a better world.” Collaboration, techniques, and time: Is one more important than another? Ryan explains:
They’re all dependent on one another. There’s an order of operation that almost has to happen with these. It’s the dewy kind of collaboration that happens between everybody. What are the best techniques you’ve used to fish-out those best design ideas? You need to do this as quickly as you can to give your brain a chance to catch up with the speed that’s out there now. That’s the part that is the time for reflection. You really need all three. It’s stepping back and describing the process as simply as possible. It’s a bunch of people in a room, scrambling, mad, doing all kinds of sketches, or modeling, whatever the process is. It’s enhanced by technology. We’re still jotting ideas with pencils. We probably always will. Then, stepping back, we think “OK, we finished an 8-hour task in an hour. Let’s take a moment to reflect on what we just did. Maybe what we just did isn’t the best answer.”
Firms struggle with promoting the idea that star employees, not teams, are behind the success of projects. Projects have become just too complex not to collaborate. For this reason and others, firms describe themselves as collaborative entities. “Over our history, LMN hasn’t placed a lot of emphasis on self-promotion and in our office, there’s no single star,” says LMN Architects Principal Stephen Van Dyck:
There’s no one person who’s the author. We don’t work that way. We make good on the idea of architecture as a collaborative endeavor, and that collaborative endeavor isn’t just about the architects in our studio. Everyone we work with in the process plays an important part in the process. As architects we are all educated in school to believe that architects are the only part of the equation that matters. I sometimes feel like design awards reinforce this, implying that the architect is the reason that this is all happening. At LMN we have a general discomfort with that concept.
Van Dyck believes so much in the collaborative nature of practice that he was asked to pen the Foreword for Erin Carraher and Ryan E. Smith’s book, Leadership in Collaborative Architectural Practice, about the fact that architecture now is no longer this top-down process. “It’s much more collaboratively fostered, and there are systemic differences in how firms like ours work compared to other firms,” says Van Dyck. “Their attempt in that book was to begin to codify that concept. It’s no longer architect as genius. It’s architect as orchestrator.” Whether leadership in collaborative architectural practice is a contradiction in terms, the ability to collaborate with others is a critical capability that requires a collaborative mindset, one that the best Superusers deliberately practice.
Figure 1.3
Superuser model. (2018) Credit: Deutsch Insights.
Collaboration also has a place in the design technologist’s toolbox, alongside virtual reality (VR.) “The key to everything is collaboration,” says Ana Garcia Puyol, Director of User Experience and Integration at IrisVR:
So have everybody around. Gather everybody around the table. And to do that, you need a meeting. One of the key issues that we’ve seen is that VR might feel very isolating. And only by providing a way in which everyone can be in the VR meeting, then you’re staying in the same space and you’re not just looking at somebody with a headset on, but you’re part of the conversation. You see their avatar, you can hear them. It’s like a chat.
Garcia Puyol was trained in music and went to music school for 11 years. She was trained in classical music and studied piano on weekends for 6+ hours a day. She says:
It was insane. And my sister and I are twins. When we were 14 years old, we started learning jazz. And this was such a mind opening moment. We started learning improv and how to play blues. We would play together, four hands. One of us would do the bass or the bossa nova, and the other one would improvise at the top. And then we started playing in a big band. And there was a sense that there’s a baseline, and then you get to do what you want.
There are few analogies more targeted to how Superusers work. As Garcia Puyol explains:
That’s what I find so empowering about computational design, that you have to meet these goals, but hey, maybe this time we’re going to use this two-by-four grid and then you know, there’s this other option that might work a little bit better and it’s using a grid that is three by six. The way I feel about design is that I just didn’t want to be caged by the tools.
Working traditionally in architecture vs. having at your access emerging technologies, is the difference between playing classical and four-hand jazz piano. “If you do it the traditional way, you just do what’s in front of you,” she says. Garcia Puyol continues:
Whereas, if you learn certain technologies, then you’re free to do whatever you want. So just put that into practice. And this is why this is not for everybody. Not because some people are not capable of doing it, but rather because their ambition, their philosophy, their take on things, they might be more comfortable doing just what is asked of them. There are a handful of people, not so many, that want to do more. They just feel like they want to be able to play a different tune.
That is why collaborating with others is a defining quality of Superusers.
Capacitors
As you’ll sometimes hear Boomers and Gen-Xers tell it, if a project took four years from concept to realization, you worked on it for four years. That timeline’s got to be harder for the current generation coming in. “Oh, yeah. I see it,” says Hilda Espinal, CTO at CannonDesign “I see them getting excited about what’s the newest, coolest thing, and running out of patience about always doing the same thing, all the time, for extended periods.” Part of it is stick-with-it perseverance, some patience. But it is just as important that design technologists feel as though they have time – time to explore, time to inquire, time to search, and time even for downtime. A capacitor stores (electrical) energy and gives it off to the circuit when it’s needed. Call this quality capacity: having the capacity to take on another assignment whether or not you actually have the time to do so. Having capacity means there is always time and energy, because you’ll make it. A mindset, it’s less about multitasking, which is seldom productive, than working smart.
“Architecture is at times like a puzzle where you have pieces but don’t know their shapes yet,” says Matthew Krissel, Partner at KieranTimberlake. He continues:
The shapes emerge through a research, discovery, and exploration phase. They often slowly come into focus and even shift and change throughout design as things come together. We must remain open and flexible as we learn more about the place, people, their relationships, vision, and desires.
This ability to remain open, this agility with time, this abundance over scarcity mentality that is required to accomplish great work, this is capacity. As defined by Carol Dweck, it’s the difference between having a fixed and growth mindset. Krissel continues:
I remember one of the first people I met when I came to KieranTimberlake was Richard Maimon, who incidentally is now one of my partners. We were working on a project together and when we completed a significant milestone, we talked about how we can all expect excellence from each other to do really good work, and it doesn’t always have to be a linear relationship to time. An important lesson I learned early on was to become better at prioritizing the work and the importance of learning how to consistently do the right amount of work at the right time. Knowing when to unplug from a bad idea and how to not over-develop a concept in an iterative design process. Getting the right material at the right time, whether it’s the tool you choose to use, your capacity to bring clarity at a time of uncertainty, or how much you model and simulate to make the pitch to move an idea forward matter. All these things impact our ability to be efficient with our time and impact others around us and their capacity to do great work …
Obviously, no one hits every single attribute, especially people right out of school or new to the field, so you want to see their capacity to evolve and acquire these qualities.
Figure 1.4
Diagram describing attributes of KieranTimberlake’s digital design platform is a touchstone for the group. (2018) Credit: KieranTimberlake.
Continual improvers
What is it about people like IrisVR’s Ana Garcia Puyol, who upon discovering VR for the first time was so excited she stayed up all night dreaming up ways to apply it to architecture, whereas her sister, who introduced VR to Ana, didn’t? “Through my architectural education I became a design thinker,” explains Garcia Puyol. “So the moment my sister gave me a Google Cardboard and I put it onto my phone, it was like thinking about design. How design could be improved. How we could take things to the next level.” This quality, to always strive to improve what already exists, is continual improvement, and the Superusers who have it are continual improvers. What makes someone a continual improver is having grit. Matthew Krissel explains:
Grit is a talent accelerant. It is taking talent and learning how to improve swiftly from mistakes, importance of persistence and working iteratively and the value of enjoying the churn and challenge of continuous improvement. Good design is hard – you have to be persistent and enjoy that persistence.
Concentrators
Even with the distractions of contemporary work-life, Superusers are able to focus. They see failure as part of the process, but when they do fail, they fail fast – and fail forward. They don’t waste time on dead-ends, chasing unpromising schemes. In this sense, the work they do is “concentrated” and they are concentrators. NBBJ’s Dan Anthony captures the concentrator’s ability perfectly when he says all effective design technologists share one quality, “To do the hard thing once instead of doing the easy thing a thousand times.” That’s a concentrator.
Too much in design is left to chance, leaving the owner – and often the firm – with risk. There’s too much unknown and at stake. Architects may be comfortable with ambiguity, while owners want clarity and certainty. Superusers are able to focus on, and interpret, what they are working on in terms of going from uncertainty to certainty, ambiguity to clarity; complexity to simplicity, and time-intensive to instantaneous and immediate.
Computational thinkers
To be able to use computational tools is a skillset, and to think computationally is a mindset. It means to ask, when confronted with a wicked (intractable, not easy to solve) problem: is this a problem that could benefit from automation, from computation? It doesn’t mean you’re a hammer seeing every problem as a nail. When Jordan Billingsley first started at Hord Coplan Macht, computational tools weren’t being used at all. “The BIM gurus and BIM power users, they were all aware of Dynamo, but nobody felt like they had the time to learn it,” says Billingsley. He continues:
When I came on I hadn’t used Dynamo either, but I kept getting these issues, and as I was documenting them I kept coming across Dynamo solutions, so I started working on Dynamo graphs, and shortly afterwards we hired someone who had used a lot of Dynamo in their grad school program and had some Python experience. He’s been taking that on as a leader so I don’t have to be as involved with learning the stuff, and I can start doing more recruiting of people and training to get people excited about it. Because what we’re trying to train people about is not how to use Grasshopper, not how to use Dynamo, it’s about how to think computationally, how to recognize when to ask, “Is this something we can automate?”
Automating processes is associated with deskilling of design tasks, sometimes seen as threatening to design professionals, that they will be automated out of a job. Others, like LMN Architects Principal Stephen Van Dyck, see automating as an opportunity in that it frees designers to think, including thinking computationally. “To me in that context, ‘skilling’ is just labor,” explains Van Dyck. He continues:
Nobody likes to labor, everybody likes thinking. We’re trying to do less labor, more thinking. That’s what new technologies are allowing us to do …
Of course, today, I’m pretty far off the curve of capability with these tools. In fact, I wouldn’t ever say that I was an advanced user of any technology. I just happened to know enough to be dangerous. That’s actually an important thing I would tell students. Then, you’ve got to say, “Okay, who else has this knowledge out there that I can collaborate with?” And if you don’t have these tools in hand, or people in the office with the corresponding skillset, maybe you need to make investments. Attract and educate for new skills to enable the implementation of new ways of working.
Over the years, Thornton Tomasetti’s Hiram Rodriguez has grown to look at problems from a computation perspective. He says:
This allows me to know what paths and how much time it will take to deliver a coherent scheme for a particular project. The key part here is that we can show that by using a set of tools we can save X amount of time and we can deliver not only one scheme but maybe we have 2 more options to show our client. So that’s a valuable thing that we bring into the industry and I can bring that into the project team and say, “Okay, well, here’s the base scheme, but because I have these tools, here is this other scheme.”
Figure 1.5
CannonDesign Yazdani Studio 2. (2018) Credit: Yazdani Studio of CannonDesign.
Coders
The preceding nine qualities are considered mindsets or soft skills. There’s no way around it, the final attribute is a skillset: coding. Superusers are coders. Some are undoubtedly more advanced than others, some have more opportunities to lift the hood on the software they are using, but Superusers must be fearless in their pursuit of taking tool destiny into their own hands. A whole book could be written on coding – Amazon shows over 10,000 results for a coding books’ search – here we’ll try to sum up this final Superusers’ distinguishing characteristic.
On the one extreme are the software developers who are hired to code. Shane Burger explains:
When I am looking at hiring people within my own team, which serves more of a role as consulting specialists, there are two groups. One group is core software developers. I’m hiring for that position now. In the case of a core software developer some of the soft skills are a little less important. But they do need to be able to work with the team.
Tool maker is a skill but can also be seen as a mindset. He continues:
In the many years I have been involved in computation, going back to the first SmartGeometry, the designer’s a tool builder. And the designer is a person who can create their own design space. That hasn’t changed. It keeps going. It keeps developing. We’re seeing students and graduates out of the university coming with that as a default mindset. It’s fantastic that they’re continuing to do it. There is a lot more hands-on engagement today, which is good.
On the other extreme are the busy design technology leaders who, day-in day-out, don’t get to code and long for the opportunity to code more. When NBBJ’s Dan Anthony was asked, “If you could spend your time doing anything, what would you do?” He responded, “Frankly, I would love to be coding more,” and explained:
I know that sounds crazy. I often find that I am thinking: if I only had two more hours we could turn this from something that is just project-specific to something that could impact the next project. And I do that sometimes.
Coding can be leveraged for customizing tools and speeding-up processes. One example is where NBBJ recently built an easy technique for finding views from Revit that match Google Earth perspectives. Anthony explains:
So we can get a real-world view of the space. There are other softwares that do this, but we wanted to make it happen quickly for our team. Again, if I had a little more time, I’d automatically bring that view into Revit. Then it would be right there. Or maybe drop it into a VR environment.
Being able to code is seen as a basic, inalienable skillset by many design technologists. “We had architecture students from Iowa State come through DLR Group’s Des Moines office the other day,” says Ryan Cameron:
They asked, “If there’s one thing that we need to learn, what is it?” I said: “If you can’t code, I’m probably not going to hire you.” I was going to take it back right away, but I stuck with it. I’m going to let this sit and settle a little bit and see if it dissolves or not. I’m glad I did wait because, not only did the chaperone say, “yes, I’ve heard that too,” and all of the students nodded their heads: “Yeah, I keep hearing that. That we should learn coding.” I responded to them, I’m not expecting you to be a computer programmer and architect at the same time. But, having a basic understanding of how that system works – maybe they won’t use it for design – but people can take advantage of you if you don’t have this understanding, an ability to code and program. If you can do it yourself, you’re going to save a lot of time and money. That’s what it comes down to. I’ve been coding things myself. I’ll think, this is a $3000 software and I could basically rebuild the parts that I need from it for a hundred bucks.
Not having the ability to code and program puts you at the mercy of software manufacturers. If you can’t go under the hood and customize the product out-of-the-box, making the tool more accessible or do what you really need for it to do, it “puts you at a strategic disadvantage,” says Cameron. As for existing tools, “They are there to help provide a solid foundation for you to build off of but they can’t customize every unique button you want it to do,” explains Cameron.
To be sure, not every Superuser has all ten C-factors, or for those that do, not all are likely at the same level of development. Refer frequently to these competencies, qualities, and attributes – mindsets and skillsets – to identify areas for improvement.
An eleventh C?
There are undoubtedly additional qualities, or even Cs, that one could add to this list. “Sometimes they have a crowd,” suggests Ryan Cameron. “Just by being next to that person they will absorb knowledge or be more creative. Having a crowd gives you more opportunity for feedback, which is critical in design technology.”
These qualities help distinguish Superusers from run-of-the-mill technology specialists. The next chapter will look at specific Superuser superpowers – capabilities that make Superusers so valuable to the success of firms.