Process

The Design Squiggle is a simple illustration of the design process. The journey of researching, uncovering insights, generating creative concepts, iteration of prototypes and eventually concluding in one single designed solution. It is intended to convey the feeling of the journey. Beginning on the left with mess and uncertainty and ending on the right in a single point of focus: the design.

I believe the way most organizations produce digital products is fundamentally broken. The elephant in the room is a dated understanding of the role of both design and engineering, which in turn shapes how organizations hire, manage, and produce digital things. These companies invest billions of dollars building teams, processes, and tools on top of an immature discipline and an outdated waterfall model that ends up being detrimental to productivity, team happiness, and ultimately, the resulting experiences we bring to life.

• Figma produces an intermediate product that requires translation to become a website or app, and project handoff is baked into the process. The effort that designers pour into Figma is ultimately throw away work, and unnecessary handoffs are not an efficient use of our time.
• Figma outputs also require mental translation to be understood by all parties. While everyone knows how to ‘read’ a website, not everyone can immediately read a mockup or understand the designer’s intent.
• Figma doesn’t directly contribute to the goal of rapidly iterating, testing, and improving increments of code. Figma is more aligned with waterfall processes that front load design.
• Figma is a tool for visual design, and while it does not dictate a polished outcome, it certainly encourages it. Design is a powerful tool of persuasion. A good looking artifact too early in the process gains buy-in too quickly and kills discovery. In this sense, it is anti-iteration.

There is a disconnect between product design and product engineering.

This book is a guide to how we do product development at Basecamp. It’s also a toolbox full of techniques that you can apply in your own way to your own process.

...You can think of this as two books in one. First, it’s a book of basic truths. I want it to give you better language to describe and deal with the risks, uncertainties, and challenges that come up whenever you do product development. Second, the book outlines the specific processes we’re using to make meaningful progress on our products at our current scale.

Here’s a short overview of the main ideas in the book:

• Six-week cycles
• Shaping the work
• Making teams responsible
• Targeting risk

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

We follow these principles:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.

Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Working software is the primary measure of progress.

Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.

Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential.

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

1. Make the requirement less dumb.
2. Try to delete part of the process.
3. Simplify and optimize.
4. Accelerate cycle time.
5. Automate.

If I look at things that have turned out well in my life (my marriage, some of my essays, my current career) the “design process” has been the same in each case. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an unfolding. Put simply:

1. I paid attention to things I liked to do, and found ways to do more of that. I made it easy for interesting people to find me, and then I hung out with them. We did projects together.
2. I kept iterating—paying attention to the context, removing things that frustrated me, and expanding things that made me feel alive.
3. Eventually, I looked up and noticed that my life was nothing like I imagined it would be. But it fit me.

...If you cycle through this feedback loop ferociously for ten years, you will end up with a well-designed life. It will not look like you imagined it would. It will have unfolded around you, and you will struggle to wrap your head around how you ended up where you did.

You will have lost track of all the experiments and insights that led you to a fit. But the good news is that you don’t have to remember. The form does.

So much about [Gerhard Richter's painting process] reminds me of designing and building for the Web: The unpredictability, the peculiarities of the material, the improvisation, the bugs, the happy accidents. There is one crucial difference, though. By using static wireframes and static layouts, by separating design and development, we are often limiting our ability to have that creative dialogue with the Web and its materials. We are limiting our potential for playful exploration and for creating surprising and novel solutions. And, most importantly, we are limiting our ability to make conscious, well-informed decisions going forward. By adding more and more layers of abstraction, we are breaking the feedback loop of the creative process.

Ahh… Project handoff. That universally hated period of inefficiency and frustration, throwing your work over the fence hoping there is someone on the other side to catch it.

Imagine a project where teams work together at each stage, progressively improving the end result based on qualitative and quantitative data. Project handoff is inefficient, risky… and unnecessary; a result of our stubborn insistence on siloed working patterns. As Adam Brock says, “the distance between design and production should be zero.” Today, we need closer collaboration than ever before. No Handoff is the next logical step in how we build and deliver value.

Eliminating waste is the key to efficiency – in the Toyota Production System, this is termed as:

Muda (waste),
Muri (overburden),
and Mura (irregularity).

It may seem obvious, but a screenplay is not a film. It’s a tool in service of making a film.

...When a movie is released in theaters, it would be silly to think of its screenplay as the “source of truth”. At that point, the finished film is the “source of truth”. Anything left in the screenplay is merely a reflection of previous intention.

So do people take the time to go back and retroactively update the screenplay to accurately reflect a finished film?

No, that would be silly. The finished film is what people pay to see and experience. It is the source of truth.

Similarly, in making websites, the only source of truth is the website people access and use. Everything else — from design system components to Figma mocks to Miro boards to research data et. al. — is merely a tool in service of the final form.

A collegiate course in filing systems and procedures.

One of the most common mistakes I see people make when looking at data is incorrectly using an overly simplified model. A specific variant of this that has derailed the majority of work roadmaps I've looked at is treating people as interchangeable, as if it doesn't matter who is doing what, as if individuals don't matter.

Individuals matter.

If just is context-free, then but is context-heavy. If just is biased toward action and simplification, then but is biased toward questioning and exploration. Just and but are polarities: you need both. Just has answers. But has questions.

...Justers and butters save lives in different ways: one by acting fast, and the other by preventing the adverse drug interaction. Put justers and butters together—provided they trust each other—and you're in good shape. Without trust, a juster and butter will just butt heads incessantly.

In 2024, I must admit I am having a bit of a personal crisis regarding continuous improvement. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about "high performing" companies and teams, or companies seeking to transform how they work—there is very little talk of continuous improvement.

The language around layoffs in tech is rife with talk of operational efficiency gains, achieving profitability targets, rightsizing, and high-interest rates. There is very little sense that employees were allowed to be part of the solution or path forward (e.g., by recommending areas of cost savings, quality circles, taking pay cuts, etc., similar to Harley-Davidson in the early 1980s, Southwest Airlines in 2001 or 2008, or countless companies mid-pandemic).

...Meanwhile, among companies less impacted by the ups and downs (real or imagined) in tech and deep in their respective transformations, we see the same old copy-paste approaches, outdated practices, and "changing but not really changing." On some fundamental level, when it comes to continuous improvement, there is no real difference between the two: in both cases, you have change imposed on teams and a lack of engagement to co-design the way forward. In both cases, existing power structures remain entrenched.

I opt to proceed by redoing the entire database. It takes a while. Then we rework the Angular app (also very painful) to work with the new (correct) data model. The decision to just do the right thing here instead of limping on forever gave us huge speed benefits later on, and I think it's one of my proudest professional accomplishments even though it sounds simple. It was boring, painful, and no one other than my friend would ever appreciate it. I knew that going in, and I still did it.

Incidentally, I was allowed to do so only because management had been so negligent in allowing things to get to this state that they also didn't notice I was getting them out of this state, and thus couldn't insert their asinine opinions on how good practice is actually too slow. We've got to ship.

In the short term, learning to reach the peak of visual fidelity in the complete absence of conceptual fidelity was a very useful capability. But in doing so, we compromised the very thing that made design valuable.

The value of design isn’t actually in producing visual artifacts, but in the process that leverages those artifacts. Documenting a design decision in a visual artifact — that can be disseminated among appropriate audiences — is what makes that decision tangible and testable. Cycling through that feedback loop between design decisions, visual documentation, and the audience — and increasing the fidelity of both your thinking and your artifacts — is how design works.

Media and legal scholar Cornelia Vismann, in Files: Law and Media Technology, explains that institutions can develop ordering systems that precede the existence of the material files themselves. These procedures for "uniform and precise handling," documentation and archiving can "ensure that files already assume an orderly shape when they are being compiled," rather than requiring that they be tidied up afterward (100).

The files themselves display directions for their own movement through this chain of operations. "Address, location, and hold-file notes belong to the arsenal of operators that process the automobility of files," Vismann writes, and that allow those files to "move themselves from department to department" (138). Sometimes even the form of the record embodies cues for its handling. Consider the McBee Key-Sort, which is used to organize filing cards. The edges of the cards have holes, some of which are notched. When a long needle is inserted through one of those holes and lifted up, only the non-notched cards rise, thus filtering out the irrelevant records.

Framing is all about the problem and the business value. It's the work we do to challenge a problem, to narrow it down, and to find out if the business has interest and urgency to solve it.

The framing session is where a feature request or complaint gets evaluated to judge what it really means, who's really affected, and whether now is the time to try and shape a solution.

In software development deadlines are a necessary evil. It is important to understand when they are necessary, and it is important to understand why they are evil.

As Nosrat provides a simple list of essential ingredients for any great meal, can we describe a simple list of essential components for digital products?

Here are four elements that I believe are the foundation of great digital products: Research, Empathy, Simplicity and Speed.

A 215-page comic book about comics that explains the inner workings of the medium and examines many aspects of visual communication.

Topics include:

• Definitions, history, and potential.
• Visual Iconography and its Effects.
• Closure, reader participation between the panels.
• Word-picture dynamics.
• Time and motion.
• The psychology of line styles and color.
• Comics and the artistic process.

Engineers are especially susceptible to tearing down Chesterton's Fence, simply because they have been so successful doing it for so long. Many processes could be immediately improved just by making them digital. But understanding why a fence was put up in the first place is always a good exercise to start with.

Larry Page famously fired all the product managers at Google in 2001. Why should engineers have to report to someone less technical? At first glance, not a terrible idea. How many of us have had non-technical product managers who fail to fundamentally understand a technical product? In practice, it was a decision that was quickly reversed.

Chesterton's fence is a concept that's closely related to the Lindy Effect – things that have been around longer tend to have a longer future life expectancy. These things are more likely to have an important underlying reason why they exist – and as a result of their longevity, that reason is often forgotten or not known to new generations.

For many things, I believe we have to figure them out ourselves from first principles. But Chesterton's fence gives us a good counterbalance to prematurely changing things that we don't immediately agree with.

The method for how you write is not that important. What’s important is having a point of view and doing the work.

I sit down every day, whether I’m feeling it or not, and write something down.

I see people talk about the apps they use to track their notes, methods for organization, strategies for productivity, tracking their habits and so on.  

But my writing process is haphazard and scattered.

I have a cork board with a bunch of index cards full of scribblings and bullet points.

When I’m on the go and ideas come to mind, I’ll tap them or dictate them onto a simple note-taking app.

Design means something even broader now. Sometime around World War II, it came to mean making things that “solve problems.” With the influence of mid-century global social movements and the rise of digital technology, it began to mean making things that are “human-centered.” And as of recently, design doesn’t have to involve making things at all. It can just mean a way of thinking.

Of all these developments, the idea of design as a broadly applicable way of thinking—the idea of “design thinking”—may end up being the most influential…At Stanford’s d.school, as cofounder Robert Sutton has said, “design thinking” is often treated “more like a religion than a set of practices for sparking creativity.”

recap: what is software?

software is, yes, text files with instructions to computers
it’s also an expression of our understanding of a real-world problem
and an expression of our analysis from a computing perspective

recap: how do we build it?

there’s no perfect answer to this
building software requires a team to

• align on their understanding
• plan an approach
• coordinate with each other
• iterate in response to feedback

recap: what happens after we ship?

software lives on long after we build it
most of its cost is maintenance
you have to understand it to maintain it
eventually we need to replace it

And that’s how we turn a napkin sketch into something that affects the physical world.

About once a year, I like to take a step back from the news cycle and write about a different kind of platform: the productivity tools that attempt to harness artificial intelligence and other innovations to make us better at our jobs.

A year ago this week, I wrote here about why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter. In short, it took me too long to learn, software can’t automate your thinking. But I do think it can create the conditions for improved thinking: for making new connections between ideas; for reducing the number of times during the day that your attention flits from one app to the next; and for organizing your reading and making it more useful to you in the future.

With that in mind, here are three apps I started using since I last wrote about that subject — and some free alternatives for folks seeking cheaper alternatives.

Today's real world of technology is characterized by the dominance of prescriptive technologies.

The temptation to design more or less everything according to prescriptive and broken-up technologies is so strong that it is even applied to those tasks that should be conducted in a holistic way. Any tasks that require caring, whether for people or nature, any tasks that require immediate feedback and adjustment, are best done holistically. Such tasks cannot be planed, coordinated, and controlled the way prescriptive tasks must be.

Prescriptive technologies eliminate the occasions for decision-making and judgment in general and especially for the making of principled decisions. Any goal of the technology is incorporated a priori in the design and is not negotiable.

And the rest is history. The “Tech Debt Friday” was born. Why Friday? I do not remember, but it had something to do with the fact that some people were off on Friday so in practice, tech debt would not “steal” 10% sharp. Still a victory!

It is apparent that the unfolding of the design process assumed a distinctly episodic structure, which we might characterize as a series of related skirmishes with various aspects of the problem at hand.

As the scope of the problem became more determined and finite for the designer, the episodic character of the process seems to have become less pronounced. During this period a systematic working out of issues and conditions took hold within the framework that had been established. This phenomenon is not at all surprising when we consider the fundamental difference between moments of problem solving when matters are poorly defined and those with clarity and sufficiency of structure.

Within the episodic structure of the process, the problem, as perceived by the designer, tends to fluctuate from being rather nebulous to being more specific and well-defined. Furthermore, moments of "blinding" followed by periods of backtracking take place, where blinding refers to conditions in which obvious connections between various considerations of importance go unrecognized by a designer.

“CEO-ification” refers to the trend of nonprofits and charities to increasingly mirror corporate and military structures. Often they will adopt similar language, hierarchies, and strategic approaches.

...In truth this stemmed from Taylorism, also known as Scientific Management. This theory was developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the late 19th century, but influenced today’s corporate language by introducing efficiency-focused terms like “time and motion studies” and “optimised workflows.”

...I spoke to Bryony Shannon about this on the Let’s Talk Ideas podcast. Bryony argues that the words we choose reflect our values and feelings, and shape how we think and act. She argues that when language focuses on processes, bureaucracy, and transactions, it can reduce people from individuals to labels – like “service user” or “case.” These words distance us from the very people we were employed to develop relationships with.

Those relationships then become mere transactions. As Rob Mitchell has said, when you’ve got a form and a process for every relationship “Love becomes relationships. Relationships become processes. Processes get processed.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor would have loved today’s world of process, customer segmentation and journey mapping. Such methodologies can approach humans lives as something that can be managed just like a car production line, or a canning factory producing baked beans.

It’s done, I’m just waiting on a review
It’s complete, I just need to do some final testing
It’s ready, I just need to merge and deploy

End users do not care. Nor should they. Nor can they. To the end user, this work provides no value. It doesn’t exist.

Work in progress has zero value. Ship!

• Before a task is shipped it provides zero value.
• Any work in progress is pure cost.
• Two tasks in progress adds cost, for no value.
• Only after shipping do you create value. Always ship.
• One task shipped is infinitely better than 4 tasks “almost done”.
• Ship something of value first. Then begin something new.

I don't exactly outline, but I do write in some sort of iterative top-down way. I'd already noticed that I tend to write in three rough passes for most of my writing, both technical writing and blog posts. This isn't some method I stick rigidly to, it just seems to work out that way for me.

Pass 1: landmarks
I paste in all the things I already know I want to cover, in roughly the right order.

Pass 2: everything else except the annoying bits
Then I draw the rest of the owl, except the absolute worst parts of the owl, which I mark with a couple of blank lines with "!!" between them. These are all the annoying bits that I come back to in pass 3. Anything that significantly interrupts my flow gets a "!!" and I move on.

Pass 3: the annoying bits
Pass 3 is a small-scale version of Finishing The Project mode, where I backwards-chain from the goal of getting the damn thing finished. [Connective tissue, facts and precise statements, images]

Holistic technologies are normally associated with the notion of craft. Artisans, be they potters, weavers, metal-smiths, or cooks, control the process of their own work from beginning to finish. Using holistic technologies does not mean that people do not work together, but the way in which they work together leaves the individual worker in control of a particular process of creating or doing something.

The opposite is specialization by process; this I call prescriptive technology. Here, the making or doing of something is broken down into clearly identifiable steps. Each step is carried out by a separate worker, or group or workers, who need to be familiar only with the skills of performing that one step. This is what is normally meant by "division of labor".

I wrote this after having a number of people ask me about Shape Up. It is in bullet and notes form. Basecamp is doing something right, because this has come up in conversation multiple times.

My key argument is that you cannot make predictable delivery the goal. You have to put value front and center and put sustainable and differentiated growth front and center. Predictable delivery needs to be in service to that, not the end goal. Because if you don’t, then one day you wake up and predictable delivery is impossible.

By making it possible for the photographer to observe his work and his subject simultaneously, and by removing most of the manipulative barriers between the photographer and the photograph, it is hoped that many of the satisfactions of working in the early arts can be brought to a new group of photographers. The process must be concealed from—non-existent for—the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in taking and not in making photographs. In short, all that should be necessary to get a good picture is to take a good picture, and our task is to make that possible.

More than making money… more than that feeling of launching a new product, feature, website, or app… the idea I am coming to value most in my professional life is the feeling of “play”. Sometimes play is being on my own with high autonomy and low consequences, sometimes it’s getting to choose new and fun technologies, but where play is most valuable is when it involves other people.

...If there’s a downside to the Hot Potato process it’s that there’s a lot of re-building mid-flight as new requirements trickle in or you discover new constraints. When you build frequent iteration and circling back into the process, it can lead to a feeling of never being “done”. That is a tax on cognitive load, like open browser tabs, that may not neurologically suit everyone. Others might even prefer a more linear assembly line process.

If I had to choose which process I prefer, I’d pick reworking a component over-and-over in a Hot Potato process versus other alternatives.

The Pursuit of Lossless Design-Development Handoffs.

In all fairness to PMs — in some companies, we have created a set of workers (developers, designers, etc) who no longer want to understand or contribute to the larger vision/goals of their projects. A developer who refuses to write code until they have extensive step-by-step instructions for what they need to do — well, ok, someone’s gotta write those steps out. I would urge, instead, for tech ICs to reengage with their labor, to participate in deciding if/when/how projects are built. Fight against the alienation of labor, if we want to get all Marxist about it.

Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”.

If you want to make an effective organizational change and are struggling, look at the communication structure and the culture. If you try to fight against this, you’ll hit significant friction, as I experienced this year. Thoughtworks introduced the idea of the Inverse Conway Maneuver to address this. It’s a framework for building low-risk experiments and autonomous teams that are empowered to make changes in an org while sidestepping the constraints of the existing communication structures.

Here’s the harsh truth: I’ve reviewed more than 1,000 portfolios in my design career so far and I turned 90% of them down because of one thing — the linear design process.

By “linear design process” I mean cookie-cutter case studies that always read the same. The designer learned about a problem, conducted user interviews, created user personas, proceeded to sketches, then mockups and wireframes, made everything beautiful through visual design, created a prototype, and tested it with five users. Everything was perfect so they also created a design system which is not a design system but a style guide. But they call it a “design system” because it’s trendy and a keyword for the recruiters. 

It’s like finding a product that you want to buy online and it only has 5-star reviews. When everything is shown as perfect it loses credibility — are the reviews fake? It’s the same when I review your cookie-cutter portfolio — when everything’s perfect I wonder whether it’s all fake.

...Here’s how you fix it: Include the messy details and tell a story

(CSS Meditation #4)

Select, style, adjust.
Select, style, adjust.
Select, sty…

I believe that many of the arguments we have around software development practices could be avoided by the simple understanding that all of our mantras need to be understood as proverbs and not laws.

If you understand proverbs, then you’ll know that every proverb has an equal and opposite proverb.

So, that means it’s fine to say DRY - Don’t Repeat Yourself, and also WET - Write Everything Twice.

It means it’s fine that we quote Knuth saying premature optimization is the root of all evil, while also believing that Performance is a Feature.

We can understand and apply separation of concerns, while also seeing the value of locality of behaviour.

There is a time to YAGNI, and there is a time to refrain from YAGNI.

None of the above involve logical contradictions. Proverbs encapsulate a small bit of wisdom in a pithy phrase, but you still need to learn to apply that wisdom correctly.

"If you develop a program for a long period of time by only adding features but never reorganizing it to reflect your understanding of those features, then eventually that program simply does not contain any understanding and all efforts to work on it take longer and longer.” — Ward Cunningham

How can we make the case for slowing down to speed up when we are already going slow, and when shutting things down and starting over is not an option?

Design, it seems, is not only becoming more methodical but also more scientific. This is not surprising. Design as a discipline has moved from “product beautification” to being a central part of product development. It has incorporated methodologies from human-computer interaction, sociology, and anthropology as well as advertising and management. And with the rise of design thinking, a wider range of professional disciplines are using creative methods.

I don’t want to criticize design methodologies. But against the backdrop of an overly structured design process, it is important to remind our community that there is one fundamental aspect to design that cannot be formalized in a methodology. And that is intuition.

Agile is a way of interpreting serious play. Collaboratively working in short feedback cycles to learn and improve is at the core of agile.

The first value of the agile manifesto says:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

The agile team is encouraged to actively evolve how the work is done. If you look at it this way, a team role named Scrum Master can be an impediment and might hinder the team to evolve! I'm not saying Scrum is false or Scrum is not agile. Scrum is agile. Scrum can work. But practicing it by following the process rules without connecting to each other, without acknowledging the current situation, is theater communication. The members of the team will behave accordingly and protect themselves against the corporate bullshit. The team is then doing faux-agile. It's agile names and rituals, but without the values. It's waterfall with standups. Industries are making money with agile certifications and agile frameworks that do waterfall with new names.

Writing does not come particularly naturally to me, and my process reflects that.

There are, broadly, two types of posts I write (with significant overlap). The first are explanation-driven posts, where I try to explain some given topic. More often than not, the impetus is to explain something to myself: I feel like I don’t understand a topic, and use writing as a way to work through an understanding of it.

...The second type of post I write is exploratory, rather than explanatory. I find some dataset or collection of information that I think will be interesting to explore, and I write up what I find while exploring it.

...These categories will often overlap: I’ll be interested in understanding something, and do so by exploring some dataset (or multiple datasets).

I've had clients ask "What do I buy to make this accessible?" or "What can I buy to improve usability?"

In all these cases there are unscrupulous people who will sell you a magic cure-all - but the real answer is that these things are a process; not a product.

Yes, you can buy tools which will help improve your security / accessibility / usability etc. But unless you put processes in place to get people to use them effectively, the tools are useless.

Security is a verb - it is a doing word.
Accessibility is a verb - it is a doing word.
Usability is a verb - it is a doing word.

Buy nouns which support your verbs.

That Caro’s work is still done on paper, with no digital backup to speak of, marks him as one of the last of his kind. (He had never seen a Google doc until I offered to show him one. He was mildly startled to discover that, in a shared document, the person on the other end can be seen typing in real time: “That’s amazing. What’s it called? A doc?”) The Society has his old Smith-Corona Electra 210 on display, but he’s hung on to a bunch of duplicate models and a large quantity of black cotton typewriter ribbons so he can continue to work the way he always has. He handwrites first, then types it up, triple-spacing in the old newspaper fashion, then pencil-edits and retypes, pencil-edits and retypes.

Whether you’re a product engineer, a product manager, or an engineering executive, you’ve probably been pushed to consider using Large Language Models (LLM) to extend your product or enhance your processes. 2023-2024 is an interesting era for LLM adoption, where these capabilities have transitioned into the mainstream, with many companies worrying that they’re falling behind despite the fact that most integrations appear superficial.

That context makes LLM adoption a great topic for a strategy case study. This document is an engineering strategy document determining how a hypothetical company, Theoretical Ride Sharing, could adopt LLMs.

Deleuze and Guattari discovered a way of working that was “like two streams coming together to make a third stream.” Sciamma’s process achieves something similar, I think, through this clever use of dueling lists.

Pushing your organization to improve is essential leadership work, but organizations can only absorb so much improvement at a given time before they reject the person providing the feedback. Being rejected while trying so hard to help is painful, and it’s also a predictable outcome.

It’s also a bad outcome for your team. When I focused on how the environment could change to make my team more successful, I was usually technically correct, but usually didn’t help my team very much. Because work environments change slowly, it benefits your team more to give them feedback about how they can succeed in their current environment than to agree with them about how the current environment does a poor job of supporting them.

Working on a project of any kind is a journey. And like any type of journey, what matters the most is not the destination, but the journey itself. It’s easy for me to forget that crucial aspect while I’m working through any type of project. I jump from one project to the next, with my eyes set on the finish line but I forget to pay attention to the process. And in doing that I often find myself to be quite miserable. Because there’s no joy to be found at the finish line. The enjoyable part is the process. Trying new things, failing, making mistakes, experimenting, getting hurt. It’s all part of the process and it’s what makes the journey enjoyable.

The most important project for a design studio is the design of the practice itself.

Direct Management does not include or permit the concept of profit to occur. The management is fee-based, or based as a fixed salary, and all construction costs are fixed ahead of time, and the building design is modified during construction, to make up any over-runs. The manager is not able to move money around at will, or put it in their pocket. At the same time, the design is approximately fixed, but with the understanding that it may be changed, during the evolution of the building, so that subtle adaptations can be included in the emerging building. In the Direct Management method it is the architect themselves and the direct manager who together manage the building works and all on-site construction for the owner.

Fight the Waterfall

Start all of the pieces of work a little bit earlier. The key to starting work early is not succumbing to the pressure of having to finish the work. Don’t worry about finishing. If you’re a developer, you can start doing things while your design or information architect are working because a lot of your work actually isn’t dependent on their work. Some of it is, so you probably won’t be able to finish, but that shouldn’t stop you from starting.

Share Work-in-Progress Early and Often

When you share work-in-progress, share it with the caveat that no feedback is needed at this point. You’re simply sharing it to let people know where you are. For example, if you have to make 12 wireframes, share it when you finish 2 or 3. Rather than spending a whole week to drop 12 wireframes, share 2 – 3 wireframes every 2 days. The more often you do this, you start to build rhythm, and rhythm builds momentum.

We do say “no” very quickly, not just to designs, but to everything. That led me into thinking about the psychology of software engineers and what makes us the way we are.

In your head, you'll probably find two models for writing.
One is the familiar model taught in high school and college—a matter of outlines and drafts and transitions and topic sentences and argument.

The other model is its antithesis—the way poets and novelists are often thought to write.
Words used to describe this second model include "genius", "inspiration", "flow", and "natural", sometimes even "organic".

Both models are useless.
I should qualify that sentence.
Both models are completely useless.

Many have become so focused on the process and methodologies that they’ve forgotten the fundamentals of why we started focusing on the user and what we hope to achieve with that focus.

Get embedded in the team. Designers should use sprint planning, grooming, standup, and retro as opportunities to provide design to — and receive feedback from — the rest of the team. Designs can take the form of written or verbal descriptions, not just wireframes and high-fidelity mockups.

Only design what’s needed. Use constant communication between engineering and product partners to understand what your collaborators will need next. Then, plan on delivering only what is needed, and nothing more. Use the agile process — grooming, planning, and retro — to find any shortfalls or excesses.

Avoid creating a backlog of designs. Designs don’t age well. In the time between finishing design and shipping code, it’s likely that you’ll learn something new that changes your understanding. If you’re producing more design than can be implemented, focus more on the quality of each design.

The meat of Stalker, it replicates to me the middle, the feeling of the middle part of any creative project, where you're slowly putting one foot in front of the other, hoping that things work, trying to find your way, but you're not fully convinced that you're actually fucking doing it, and you feel like you're going in circles.

And so the meat of Stalker is these three characters, writer, the professor and the stalker, lost in these woods called the Zone. They have to break in there, which to me is like, it's replicative of the creative process of finding a way to break into an industry, or finding a way to break through writer's block, or it's this, you know, pure allegory, right?

It actually doesn't matter whether you actually have a formal retrospective. It doesn't matter whether you have four or five labels of things on your retro board, or exactly how you do the retro. What does matter is the notion of thinking about what we're doing and how we can do better, and it is the team that's doing the work that does this, that is the central thing.

People get confused, companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success, and a lot of them think that somehow there’s some magic in the process that they’ve created. And so they start to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long people get very confused that the process is the content.

In my career I’ve found that the best people are the ones who really understand the content. And they’re a pain in the butt to manage. But you put up with it because they’re so great at the content. And that’s what makes great products. It’s not process, it’s content.