I don’t always know the destination, but I definitely know the importance of having a valid experience train ticket. (Sometimes train access felt a lot less like having a ticket and more like nervously jumping onto a moving train, Mission Impossible style, albeit slightly less heroic than Tom Cruise.)
You’re here. You want to get there. And you don’t have the experience or know the route. Today I’m surrounded by very smart, capable, talented people with a ton of ability to flourish in ambiguity or trouble shoot when things go off track. That’s because we all went through the unglamorous reps. Nobody starts out knowing how to triage; you earn it one fire drill at a time.
I learned to triage through a nauseating amount of data validation and a bunch of user acceptance testing in cubes, shoulder-to-shoulder with coworkers. Years of late-night testing of customer experience flows during high-stakes tech implementations, troubleshooting all the “uh ohs.” Marketing campaign performance for conversion optimization… don’t even get me started. Fail and survive. Triage and fix.
Same is true for decades of building presentations. When you build a slide yourself, you’re forced to answer a question before you ever touch design: “why does this fact matter, and what does it prove?” Every slide is a small argument you have to construct. You don’t even know this when you first start out. It’s why your manager made you redo it so many dang times. The deck isn’t the main deliverable; the thinking that produces the deck is.
I love AI-enabled assistance today. The way AI visualizes a 1–2 slide concept that my brain would rather write a 10 page essay about… brava. But I come pre-loaded with a zillion rides on the experience train, and if I never make it past slide 3? I don’t care. Let’s just chat through it (because I can).
Back to getting a train ticket in the first place: a junior employee recently Slacked me and asked, “Hey, I don’t really understand what you all were talking about with that upcoming delivery challenge, or what a Tiger Team is, but can I sit in?” Then she asked me six questions of vocab she didn’t know, why one thing mattered, and this brilliant question: “Oh, so who decides if…”
YESSSSSSSS. This right here is how you get your experience train ticket. Go ahead, ask! Ask to join the meeting or clarify what you don’t know.
And for my global co-workers in London, another thing about the train…I also learned to Mind the Gap.
Jourdan Marie Hathaway 