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In the tech industry, we worship the knowledge transfer document—a sanitized collection of links, credentials, and project statuses meant to encapsulate years of accumulated wisdom. At my last job, when my manager asked for mine (“just send me a document with links”), I delivered this instead.
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 just sophisticated avoidance of the actual work. Farmers don’t rely on Gantt charts. Their estimates evolve daily based on something called reality. If forced to adhere to a fixed “plan,” all crops would fail. Excessive planning isn’t prudence—it’s waste. 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’s a fundamental divide between ask culture and guess culture that creates invisible friction. The former values directness at the risk of boundary violations. The latter prioritizes empathy at the risk of conflict avoidance. You must choose one—and accept its consequences.
“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 isn’t about making you jump through arbitrary hoops; it exists to prevent you from falling into the lava. If it fails this test, it’s not protection—it’s persecution.
“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
If design systems were truly valuable, people would use them enthusiastically without coercion. At best, they represent optimistic misallocation of company resources. At worst, they’re top-down expressions of design colonialism that insulate designers from thinking about context and customers. The fact that they need evangelists should tell us everything.
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. One perspective among billions. Nothing written is “real” because all prose is fiction. This has profound implications for design work that most teams don’t want to confront.
“Vanity and pragmatism wrestle for control of the act of naming.” –Venkatesh Rao, How to Name Things
Naming things is eternally difficult. But attaching a label isn’t the hard part. What’s hard is carrying to term a baby you do not get to snuggle. The act of naming is about everything except the name itself. If you’re debating whether a name is good or bad, you’ve already lost. The true magic is aligning a group of strangers around a particular collection of phonemes—that’s politics, not linguistics.
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 that undermines our default individualism. This should be the central conversation in design—yet somehow, it rarely is.