Notes on building
28 of 28 published. Numbered in reading order, which is roughly the order they were written.
- Luck is biased
Fortune isn't random. It's weighted toward people already moving — a smaller claim than it sounds.
- Intentional incompetence
Competence is comfortable and comfort is where plasticity dies. Keep choosing things you're bad at.
- Everything starts as a fragment
Projects don't begin whole and they don't end. The friction is information, not punishment.
- Products are relationships
Adoption, habit, personalisation, plateau, abandonment. Every product is somewhere on that curve.
- Authority without permission
Distributed roles work when the process is real. Otherwise you've replaced a bottleneck with a vocabulary.
- Designing for foragers
People hunt information the way they hunt anything else: follow the scent, abandon the trail when it weakens.
- Value before polish
Heckel's law: when perceived value is high, people forgive the interface. It's a licence with limits.
- The invisible tool
A good tool disappears into the intention. Getting there costs more than adding features.
- Users invent the product
The uses you didn't plan for are where the market actually is — and most teams treat them as bugs.
- Designing for mood
The same screen lands differently depending on what happened before it. Most of that isn't yours to control.
- Usability is an ethical position
A confusing interface spends someone else's time and attention. That's a transfer, and it has a direction.
- Systems are not their parts
Optimising every component individually is a reliable way to make the whole thing worse.
- Rigour and resonance
Research gives you the map. Craft gives you the reason anyone follows it. Neither substitutes.
- Process is a tool
Frameworks are scaffolding. The failure isn't picking the wrong one — it's forgetting it was scaffolding.
- Design as philosophy
Design decides what people can do and, eventually, what they think of as possible. That's a bigger claim than it looks.
- Decisions are experiments
The choices that matter get made without the data. Optimise for what you can undo.
- Stewardship in AI
Safety constraints cost you something now and buy the only thing that makes the category viable later.
- Metrics that change behaviour
Most dashboards report on decisions already made. A useful metric changes what you do this week.
- Empathy is discovery, not projection
Ask what they were trying to do, not what they want you to build. The difference is most of research.
- Attention is the budget
Every feature spends something finite. Most roadmaps account for engineering time and not for the user's.
- Hire for judgment
Early hires either multiply the number of good decisions being made, or they add throughput. Only one scales.
- Failure is data
Cheap failures are worth having. The point is the recovery system, not the slogan.
- Small, honest experiments
State the hypothesis, the metric and the smallest test that could move it. Most teams write only the third.
- Features need stories
A feature list tells people what exists. A story tells them what changes. Only one of those gets acted on.
- Scale the right parts
Scaling isn't more of the same. It's finding out which constraint breaks first and rebuilding only that.
- Craft compounds
Small details add up to trust. So does their absence, on the same schedule and in the same direction.
- The founder is the thermostat
Your state sets the ambient temperature of the company, which makes recovery an operational concern.
- Compounding goes both ways
Trust, culture and technical debt all accrue quietly. Only one of them is usually being tracked.