Category: Concepts
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Products are Commons
A product rarely becomes hard to use in one dramatic moment. It gets there through reasonable decisions made by people under pressure. Products are shared finite resources, not just collections of screens and buttons, and many quality problems are the visible symptoms of many people making individually reasonable decisions in isolation, which damage the shared…
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Invisible Relationship Work, Part 1: Stakeholders and Power
How do you work productively with people who can change the direction of your work? I find that, usually, designing the interface isn’t the hardest part of the job. The harder part is working with the people who can change, delay, redirect, or even cancel a project altogether. Every one of those conversations carries an…
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Invisible Relationship Work (series intro)
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…
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The Missing Step in First-Principles Thinking
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,…
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How to use active listening with clients & stakeholders, part 1
Listening is a cornerstone skill that both design and therapy depend on. It’s the difference between clarity and confusion. The difference between getting a creative brief right and unnecessary rounds of revision. A major similarity between therapy and design is that both professions work with clients who don’t have the technical vocabulary to describe things.…