Most job descriptions focus on visible work. We talk about research, strategy, prototyping, design systems, and 0 ->1 facilitation because those activities produce artifacts we can point to. But after enough years working on products and teams, I’m convinced that a surprising amount of design happens somewhere else. It happens in difficult conversations, in moments…

When someone says, “Let’s think from first principles,” what do they actually mean? First-principles thinking is often presented as a way to reason from fundamental constraints rather than assumptions. In practice, team discussions usually fall into one of three situations: someone has a mental model they haven’t explained yet, someone is still developing a model,…