Category: Concepts
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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.…