The Constraint Was the Brief
How treating severe constraints as the brief can clarify the real problem, expose the limits of familiar patterns, and produce a product for the user's actual state.
-
-
Intention Deficit Disorder
How AI products accumulate intent debt when they misread users, assume missing context, and make correction difficult, plus ways design teams can identify and prevent it.
-
Company of One
How a working agent harness uses bounded delegation, explicit checks, visible failure states, and honest cost accounting to make uncertain behavior easier to inspect.
-
Cut, Defer or Build
A practical framework for deciding what an early product should cut, defer, or build when ambition outruns time and budget, and research must separate evidence from enthusiasm.
-
Product Design Principles
How research-grounded design principles resolve real product trade-offs, survive delivery pressure, and endure when encoded in workflows, interfaces, and structure.
-
Embedded Product Design Lessons
Lessons in research, workflow structure, delivery, and coherence from embedding with product teams across complex commercial projects and organizational change.
-
What Makes a Real MVP?
Why a real MVP is not the smallest demo, but the smallest complete journey a user can finish confidently, especially when trust, context, and user state shape viability.
-
You Always Let Yourself Win
Why designers need evals to define product quality, expose weak and inconsistent outputs, and keep AI experiences useful, clear, trustworthy, and accountable over time.
-
Two-Dollar Bill
What a two-dollar agent mistake revealed about cost visibility, failure states, operational trust, and why autonomous systems must demonstrate control before earning more freedom.
-
A Free Surf Lesson
Why design judgment needs systems understanding and hands-on execution, with a constrained-interface example showing how user state, constraints, and implementation shape the work.