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When I left my job my manager asked me to hand over the standard doc full of links. This is what I shared.
Here are seven things I know. Provided in ascending order of WTF.
“A guiding principle should be that a team’s energy is better spent creating things rather than estimating, planning, and scoping.” –Rune Madsen, The Gulf Between Design and Engineering
Most planning is a way to avoid actually working on the thing. Farmers don’t have Gantt charts. Their estimates change day by day based on a little thing called reality. If forced to work according to “plan” all crops would certainly fail. Trying to plan out every little thing is a waste of time, and it’s OK to make fun of people obsessed with doing this.
“Get more comfortable with people saying no to you. If people are not saying no to you, you’re probably still only asking for things that you already know people will say yes to.” –Jean Hsu, Ask Vs Guess Culture
There is a difference between ask culture and guess culture and that difference can trip you up. The former orients around directness at the risk of hitting boundaries. The latter embraces empathy at the risk of avoidance. You get to choose one.
“What”protect people” means varies a lot depending on the type of process. But really think about it. Is there any chance that a process you’re using is making someone’s life harder than if you didn’t have it at all?” –Mike Crittenden, Spotting broken processes
Processes should protect people. Process is about saving people from the tyranny of human minds (others’ or their own). Process should not about making you jump through hoops; it’s about preventing you from falling in the lava.
“No one will thank you for wasting time on an internal product when you could have been working on the actual product, getting feature validation, finding product market fit or helping marketing and sales achieve broader business objectives.” –Pascal Barry, Design Systems are Bullshit
Design systems are bullshit. If they were useful, people would use them enthusiastically. At best, they are an optimistic misuse of company resources. At worst, they are top-down expression of design coloniality that shield designers from thinking about context and the customer.
It occurs to me that to read everything, including the news, like a novel—to be cognizant and accepting of discontinuities and conflicts, of multiple interpretations, of symbol that sits alongside more objective truths—is maybe the skill we most need to employ in navigating the world of news today, when there is so much news, and so few ways of making it all cohere. –Mandy Brown, All Prose is fiction
You can be sure that every written thing, that tweet, that news article, that product requirements doc, this freaking document, was produced by a mere mortal without Dr. Manhattan-style omniscience. It’s just a story. It’s a take. It’s one of a billion, trillion perspectives. It’s not “real,” because all prose is fiction. This has tremendous implications for design.
“Vanity and pragmatism wrestle for control of the act of naming.” –Venkatesh Rao, How to Name Things
Naming things is hard. It’s always been hard, and it will never not be hard. But slapping a label on something isn’t the tricky part. What’s hard is carrying to term a baby you do not get to snuggle. Naming (the verb) is about everything but the name (the noun). If you think a name is good or bad you are sunk. If you can bring a group of strangers in alignment on a clutch of phonemes, then you have accomplished magic.
We do not exist as isolated individuals; just as we are committed to Being-in-the-world, so too are we committed to Being-with-others. –Andrew Royle, Heidegger’s Ways of Being
Your identity is radically dependent on the existence of others. The very essence of you necessarily depends on the perceptions of other people, whose identity you co-create with other (similarly constructed) people, and so on. Society is connected in a radically ontological way. Everybody should be talking about this all the time, especially designers.