Sponsorship is a thing you sell

Not a logo slot on an event page. Making it an object in the product — packages, benefits, slots, price — is the difference between a feature and a reason to use the thing.

“The empty state is the product on day one.”

Something I learned late on my first product, and design first on every one since.

Design the failure, not the happy path

Six states for a barcode scan, and the one that matters is manual entry. Cameras fail, labels smudge, warehouses are dark. Typing the ID has to be one tap away rather than a dead end.

Say the number

Five interviews is directional, not conclusive. Naming the sample size costs nothing and buys the reader’s trust for everything after it.

Same job, different output

Fiction and product design are both about deciding what to cut, holding attention through a sequence, and accepting that the sentence in the empty state does more work than the illustration above it.

Arguing in public

Open source review is slower and better. The objection you get in week one is the objection you would otherwise get after launch, from a stranger, permanently, on GitHub.