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The idea for this article has been in my backlog for 3 years now. It started with a simple question: As a software designer, what’s different about working at a software development agency compared to working in-house? Since the best way to answer this question is to experience both scenarios, I did exactly that.

But why make a comparison in the first place? When I was looking for answers to better understand the differences, there was very little content out there that I could relate to. Most articles are either focused on graphic design, branding, or written by agencies that are actually upselling to executives deciding whether to hire in-house or outsource.

This is not that. But this is also not a definitive guide, because it’s based on my personal experience doing product design at agencies with US-based clients and small in-house teams at startups.

3 years ago, I switched from agency to in-house with a strong hypothesis that building products would look different. I just didn’t know exactly how. Consider it a multi-year experiment, and this is the result of both experiences.

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Doing a little bit of everything

I’ve shared in the past how my career started out as a graphic designer, which is a generalist path by design (not pun intended). During my bachelor’s degree, I studied a bit of everything, from history of design to composition, photography, multimedia, typography, and the list goes on. It allows students to get in touch with different applications of design, enough that it’ll slowly pull you in a certain direction of preference.

My freelance career in UI started during that time. Back then, I didn’t have any class adjacent to it, but I enjoyed it as a way of trying a different medium. I even thought it was going to be a temporary gig, but I enjoyed it because it allowed me to try different directions without a clear destination, and that’s a theme that kept following me in different ways throughout my career.

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Fast, and everywhere at once

When it comes to software development at agencies, there are a lot of myths about how the design practice works, but there’s one thing that can’t be denied: the pacing is fast. Like, really fast.

On any given week, I would be working with up to 5 clients in parallel. All from different industries, all with different team compositions and different scopes. One of them might be close to launch, another might be a legacy app requiring a full revamp, and maybe a new client only has an idea and wants to see the v1 in 2 weeks. Or, as Peter Quill would say, “12% of a plan.” It’s barely a concept.

It goes without saying that executing design would look vastly different from client to client. The picture I just painted is an example of how 3 key skills were needed to thrive in this environment:

• Prioritization, to manage every day and week efficiently.

• Context switching, to adapt at every turn and understand what’s needed to keep moving.

• Storytelling, because every client required a different narrative to collaborate and get buy-in from stakeholders.

Agency product design isn’t for the faint of heart, but if you’re willing to adapt, the reward is in the variety itself. Seeing a lot of 0 to 1, exploring many industries, and developing end-to-end skills that will come in handy anywhere else.

I spent those years debating how to specialize, because it seemed like I had to in order to have a successful career. I went through phases of focused learning in Design Systems, Business Design, and management. I could feel the pull from Design Systems, to the point that I pioneered this practice in El Salvador and it was already part of how people perceived me as a designer.

It could have seemed like a logical next chapter, but every time I seriously considered picking one path over the others, it felt like I was leaving another part of me behind.

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When product calls for end-to-end

When I made the change to work at a startup, I expected that small teams would require end-to-end work, and eventually, I would focus on one of these paths. I just didn’t know how broad the end-to-end spectrum would get.

Since I already had experience as a generalist, my skills allowed me to support the team with anything from product, research, growth, web design, and Design Systems. Picking a single lane without a larger team would be a narrow perspective. Probably even individualistic, if I say so myself. But since I like being a team player, I was happy to wear many hats.

This became even more crucial when I joined onBeacon as a founding designer for an AI-native design tool. I didn’t have a clear idea of how my role would evolve, but my days and weeks are the most varied I have ever had in my career. To make a fair assessment, I asked Granola about which skills I’ve been using the most in the last 90 days, and the results are wild:

• Context Engineering

• Product Strategy & Positioning

• Customer Research

• Product Design

• GTM & Pricing

• And the list goes on...

My role demands constant range instead of a fixed lane. I thought I would be going deep instead of broad, but the challenges of a lean AI startup aren’t fit for a designer looking to specialize, because your impact should go far beyond the traditional boundaries of what design used to look like.

Mine certainly does, because some of my best contributions to the product can be found in the logic behind our context engineering and not in the UI. Turns out, this was the perfect Venn diagram of lived experiences, including many of the things I originally thought I would choose to specialize in while leaving the others behind.

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It was never one or the other

People tend to box in generalism as a single mushy term. In the context of agency and in-house, I’ve come to view it as a matrix with two axes, and what changes is which axis you’re stretched across, not whether you’re stretched. Here’s what that looks like, with my own two chapters onto it.

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Agency demanded broad context, involving products and industries of all kinds. I used to tell juniors that every single client is different from the others for this very reason. It also means you can’t be certain of how long you’ll collaborate with a team, so you optimize for the highest impact in that specific stage of their product.

Product at a startup means owning one problem space long enough to live with the consequences of your decisions. But that depth doesn’t remove the range, it just moves it. Instead of stretching across five clients, I was stretching across five roles inside the one I had, as proven by the Granola list I shared, just aimed at a single target instead of many.

So, if you were to ask me 3 years ago how my role as a designer would look, I’m sure I would have said something completely different from what it is right now. But one thing’s for sure: the constant throughout this wild and unexpected journey has been a generalist mindset.

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Parting thoughts

This is the point in the story where you’d expect me to say I’ve picked a path, but the reality is I’ve decided to embrace a non-linear career path instead. The answer was never intended to be a guide, because just like I went through different chapters in my career, you’ll notice your own patterns in yours.

If you’ve faced a similar debate in the past, it might actually be a sign, not a flaw, that you’re a generalist by nature. Roles like founding designer and design engineer exist because the industry needs more of this, not less.

Personally, I’ve decided to become a designer who builds, putting that mindset into the personal projects I always dreamed about but couldn’t materialize before. None of it existed 4 months ago. That’s how quickly things are changing, and possibly a sign of how quickly your own next chapter might start looking different too.

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Shortcuts

• The reinassance of the Visual Designer, as described by Ridd and Tommy Geoco at Dive Radio.

• What companies look for when hiring Product Designers these days is a lot different than it used to, as observed by Tom Scott in his recruitment practice.

• What design engineering is, how it’s changed, and where it’s going. There’s not a one-size-fits-all, and Marcelo Chaman helps to visualize this spectrum.

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That’s where curiosity led me this month. Your path will look different, because context always matters.

If this sparked something, let’s continue the conversation on Twitter. And if someone you know is navigating their own creative uncertainty, share this their way.

Keep exploring,

Laura ✌️

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A lot of exciting product launches happened in June of 2026: Anthropic released Fable 5 and made a lot of headlines (in more ways than expected), Apple announced the revamp of Siri at WWDC that has me actually excited about updating my OS for the first time, and I launched my very first product, Flicker.

The idea didn’t happen overnight; it has been quietly building up for years. I’ve spent more time than I would like to admit hunting for the perfect loading spinner for each product I’ve worked on. Sometimes, I have an idea for the animation or pattern style, or imagine distinct spinners for certain events that could benefit from a bit of extra joy.

It’s always easier to just use the default option, but I like adding personality to the things I build. The thing is, finding good spinners isn’t an easy task, and it wasn’t easy to carve out the time to make something custom every time.

It wasn’t until I came across the Glyph Matrix on the Nothing Phone (2) in 2025 that I knew I wanted to do something as fun as that. It started with frame-by-frame in Figma, animated as an SVG with Make, and when the code landed in prod, I asked myself: “What if?”

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The first spark

The first commit happened with v0 back in February, when the excitement of turning the frame-by-frame into a tool was still fresh. The main goal was simple: Doing these manually takes time, and I couldn’t easily control all the details at scale, so I wanted to systematize this process into a tool I could use to share spinners with engineers afterward.

Within the first session of planning, I landed on the core metaphor of the mechanical snap to match the actual flip-dot displays, the frame-by-frame animation with dot-painting process, and even the naming. It felt like a brain dump of excitement that needed some scoping and decent planning, but I could see it all working in my head.

Having the vision was the easy part. Making it real? It came through hurdles. A lot of them. But I wanted to be a doer, not just a talker, so it was time to take action.

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What I hadn’t done before

Code and I aren’t complete strangers. I have dabbled in basic HTML and CSS in the past, learned a bit of Coffeescript to use in Framer Classic, and even animated in Flash using ActionScript. The one thing I hadn’t done was being the only one in the room when something broke unexpectedly. No team, no one to hand it over to, no “just wait for it to get fixed.” Just me, a bunch of LLM tools, and a deployment error I couldn’t figure out.

I thought I had momentum going, instructing v0 one prompt at a time what I wanted to build next, which led to a sudden database error. There’s an auto-fix option, so I handed my problem to the tool, which, after a few turns, managed to solve it. Minimal friction, but determined enough to continue.

A few days later, I encountered another error, and when v0 offered the “Fix with v0” option, I was happy to oblige. Only this time it turned into an unprompted full UI rollback, which happened twice in one sitting. I didn’t know whether the issue had been resolved or the build had simply been rolled back to a previous stable state, but I had hit a wall.

Were those unknown errors gone? What if another issue makes me go back to level 1? Do I have the patience to do it all over again?

Looking back at my logs, it was a mix of Next.js warnings and a routing bug that had me spinning my wheels. In hindsight, it was a trust problem in the tool and my ability to overcome unknown errors, not the bug itself, that made me step back.

There wasn’t a lack of ideas, but continuing meant risking the same loss again on terms I didn’t understand. Three months of quiet followed, and none of it was about motivation. I had to learn a different lesson to continue.

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The wall was lower than I thought

Months later, something almost unrelated reopened the door.

I came across Kris Puckett’s course Neuma, with a simple framework: “You describe what you want, AI builds it.” This got my attention, because what do you mean I can just build anything by simply describing it? Didn’t I need more building experience and technical proficiency to start using the terminal?

One weekend afternoon, after finishing the first module of the course, I built a humble local HTML file using Claude Code and the terminal. Suddenly, the wall I’d been picturing, the idea that I needed more reps before I could be ready, turned out to be much lower than I thought. I’d already cleared it.

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I was so excited I shared about it on Twitter, and the response was excitement in return. Even if the step felt small in that moment, I knew it was headed in the right direction.

Three days later, I came back to Flicker, but not the same way. I had reignited my confidence that I could bring ideas to life, and the work unfolded through planning before building and diagnosis before coding, with precise edits, one batch at a time.

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Building a rhythm

What changed wasn’t my skill set, but rather the belief that I could navigate uncertainty on my own without knowing all the answers yet. That’s different from learning new tools.

Flicker became my playground for a month, testing new ideas and tinkering with new tools. Having a GitHub repo created with v0 and connected to Claude gave me a lot of control to look under the hood and diagnose various situations. On the other hand, I discovered a new way to explore ideas using skills in Claude Code, HTML artifacts, and tools like Variant UI. I could go on with the tools, but that belongs in another essay.

Dark mode and the color picker were both removed early, and then came back in a more stable build, like placing a puzzle piece in a clear space and waiting for it. The right things return when the foundation is ready for them.

The guest mode almost didn’t happen, but when I shared an early build with my sister, she made a very valid and yet simple question: What if people want to experience building a spinner? So I did a session purely on scoping how guest mode would work without requiring authentication.

The biggest mindset change was realizing that whenever I felt frustrated, I had to pause to make a decision: Is there a new concept I should learn? Is it time to pivot and use a different approach? Or am I simply running low on battery and need to end the session to come back refreshed the next day?

Through plenty of lessons and frustrations, principles began to emerge and compound, making the next build better. And it did indeed, as you’ll see in a bit. It wasn’t a single prompt or a single tool. It was hundreds of small decisions that happened along the way.

Building Flicker felt like a sprint. It happened late at night and during weekends, which wasn’t easy, but the outcome made it worth it. I launched on June 8th, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive, with the most common adjective being “fun.” Is it useful? Check. Is it fun? Check again. The real test came two weeks later during Config, and the outcome was way better than I imagined.

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Parting thoughts

Earlier this year, I wrote how I wanted to share how I build, not just the way I think. The path looked nothing like I had planned, but the intention held. The best proof would be Zone Camera, which I rebuilt from the ground up in two weeks and launched it the same week of Config. The experiment I shared over a year ago is now fully created the way I originally intended. I was developing my ideas with Flicker, and I did it again with Zone, but faster, without the three-month gap.

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Through both projects, I realized that not knowing isn’t the same as lacking judgment. Just because I don’t know the answer yet doesn’t mean I can’t build it. So I used my curiosity, thinking through each problem to make my intent clear, and paying attention to the moments when a pause was the best move, rather than brute-forcing features with vibe-prompting alone. Lesson learned.

The quality of the conversations I had during Config has been the biggest reward of all. My conversations were no longer hypothetical or purely about discussing AI in the context of the day-to-day work. I was putting in the reps, so I could relate to the workflows, ways of working, and struggles that others were sharing. Furthermore, the first spinner created with Flicker is now in the wild, and Zone Camera was even mistaken for the (Not Boring) Camera for a brief moment, and this is probably the biggest compliment I could ever ask for.

For the first time in my career, I sensed a shift in how I viewed my list of ideas: I could now build them.

You can play with Flicker to create a flip-dot loading spinner, or capture dithered memories with Zone Camera. But more importantly: build your ideas. The confidence gap doesn’t close on its own or happen by reading about it. The only way to discover you can own something end-to-end is to finish it. The only way out is indeed through. It felt right before, and still is now that I’ve gone through it.

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That’s where curiosity led me this month. Your path will look different, because context always matters.

If this sparked something, let’s continue the conversation on Twitter. And if someone you know is navigating their own creative uncertainty, share this their way.

Keep exploring,

Laura ✌️

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If you’re a designer, let’s do some time traveling, especially if you have less than a decade in your career.

When you started your career in design, did you punish yourself because it didn’t happen in the 00’s when modern social media was just emerging? Would it make you less of a designer because you didn’t adopt mobile-first and use skeuomorphism right after the iPhone launched in 2007? Or do you regret not launching your first design system alongside industry pioneers like Carbon or Polaris?

If that doesn’t define your career, then this moment when AI is re-shaping how software operates shouldn’t either. But why does it feel like it should?

We’re in a nonstop breaking-news cycle in tech, where every week feels like a year of innovation, with new models launching, new tools with impressive features we only daydreamed about in the past, and it seems like everybody and their parrot has automated their lives with agentic workflows.

Let’s dive into this discomfort for a moment, shall we?

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You’re not the only one sitting with this

When ChatGPT launched, most of us were skeptical about how long the hype would last. It didn’t go away. When a few tools started diving into UI generation, it was easy to label everything as slop. Now we can’t. But if you’re reading this, I doubt you’re in the group that’s trying to ignore all of this.

What if you’re trying to take it all in? Reading model benchmarks, watching countless videos about automation setups, and spending nights and weekends on side projects to make it all fit together. It’s not that you don’t want to, it’s just not humanly possible to do it all. And yet, you feel like you could be doing a lot more.

If we’re being honest, most of us have felt that at different times, even those “ahead” of the curve, pioneering new ways of working. Recently, Peter Merholz shared how even in a room full of innovators, everyone he spoke with used some variation of “I feel behind.” So take a moment to read Peter’s short post, and allow yourself to breathe.

It’s not just you, but the good news is that no one has all the answers either.

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The feed isn’t a mirror

The current state of social media is optimized for louder voices, for those with spicy takes and the ones making breakthroughs that “earn” a top spot in other people’s feeds. But that’s not everyone’s reality.

Not everyone has the luxury of spending their free time reskilling and building stuff that goes viral on Twitter. Not every employee has the permission, let alone the bandwidth, to be the ones building internal tools that 10x productivity at their company. You could be eager to learn, but “too employed” to ride this wave.

We’re seeing the design world through a biased lens.

We’re in a bubble. And inside that bubble, the loudest voices are often the ones most invested in making this shift look bigger, faster, and more universal than it really is.

— Dan Winer, Designer at Kit

To truly grasp how different reality is outside this bubble, I like to ask people outside of tech about AI. How is it changing their work? What kind of tools have entered their toolkit? How are their skills evolving in their role? You’ll likely encounter answers that feel “dated” to us tech people, because what was novel 2 years ago is now table stakes for you and me.

This isn’t me being cynical; it’s important context for staying in touch with reality. You might feel behind if you’re still in the early stages of using chat-based tools to speed up research, generate graphics, or play with prototypes. But all things considered, you’re still early, and what feels like falling behind is almost always a comparison problem, not a learning problem.

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What gets lost when you stop pausing

While some people can’t keep up, some people can’t stop.

What if you have time at night or on weekends to explore the full potential of this new technology? It’s amazing how much you can optimize your processes and become a 10x designer, but in the process, your workload has grown exponentially, and the cost goes beyond the tokens billed.

Because when almost anything feels possible, it becomes harder to know when you’ve done enough. Or learned enough. Or explored enough. And I think that lingering feeling, that sense that you should probably be doing more because now you can, is part of what feels so exhausting right now.

— Joey Banks, Founder & CEO at Baseline

Friction and slowing down are no longer nice-to-haves, and they serve two main purposes: reducing cognitive load and preserving judgment.

First, multitasking is already taxing. When you’re dealing with agents and tools whose only limitations are compute and token restrictions, it’s like switching the game difficulty from hard to extreme. Productivity gains can be addictive, but working at high speed can have a taxing effect on your mental energy.

At the same time, it’s not wise to let this newly acquired mightiness become your safety net for every move you take, or worse, become dependent on it. If you do, the next time you’re facing a challenge without these tricks at hand, you would be like Peter Parker suddenly losing his powers.

Use these tools to augment your impact, but don’t let them tax your health or hinder your judgment.

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Keep your fingerprints on it

Having a clear intent to solve a problem, forming opinions before AI has done your homework, and keeping a grasp on what success should look like are still relevant and will always be. Let your fingerprints show on the final outcome.

When you slow down with a purpose in mind, using a new technology becomes a vehicle for your intent. It can be tempting to jump straight to a full working prototype every time you want to show something, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it is needed. You could also pay for 10+ tools to catch ’em all, but that doesn’t automatically translate into actual efficiency or quality.

Do not worry about always being unique. Be unique when it matters, in the little details and the micro-understandings that no context file can capture. Do not follow trends. Understand the value behind a trend, then do it slightly differently.

— Juan J. Ramirez, Ads AI at Netflix

It might seem easier to just copy someone else’s playbook right now, but what’s working for them might not work 100% for you, and likely won’t. Even within teams, toolkits and ways of working vary widely these days, so don’t feel pressured to follow a trend.

Instead of trying every tool under the sun and every new model on launch day, you can start by thinking about something you want to build, a process that’s worth optimizing, or a problem that needs solving. Then, pick a few tools or models to test side by side. Get a feel for their limits, where they shine, and which ones actually get you excited to continue tinkering.

This exercise has helped me form my own opinions about how I want my process to evolve, and about how certain tools limit or enhance this process. Through this, I’ve learned that planning mode helps me see the forest for the trees, that I need to be able to modify the code if I want to, and that having a way to capture rules or patterns reduces my frustration when I notice I’ve been repeating myself on something.

The win isn’t in the tokens spent, it’s in the confidence gained and the habit built along the way.

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Parting thoughts

While doing some time traveling of my own, I can admit that I didn’t start at any of the points mentioned at the beginning. I didn’t launch my first design system at the same time as Carbon, nor did I redefine the way design is done. But I was able to learn from those who came before me.

This is why Joey Banks’ open and honest admissions in his recent LinkedIn posts have been encouraging to keep learning, and why those same words inspired me to write about this in the first place.

I’ve used quotes throughout this writing to make a point: They were said out loud, publicly, by people who could have pretended certainty. They didn’t, and neither should you have to.

Pausing isn’t the same as stopping. And learning alongside others isn’t the same as falling behind.

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Shortcuts

• You’re Not Behind, by Joey Banks. The piece that sparked this article. An honest admission that none of us has it figured out, and that’s the point.

• It’s Vibes All the Way Down, by Kate Moran. Research-backed and quietly reassuring: most people are learning AI tools through trial, error, and peer sharing.

• Becoming an AI-native designer, Kris Puckett on Dive Club. A grounded look at what leaning into this moment actually looks like in practice.

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That’s where curiosity led me this month. Your path will look different, because context always matters.

If this sparked something, let’s continue the conversation on Twitter. And if someone you know is navigating their own creative uncertainty, share this their way.

Keep exploring,

Laura ✌️

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If you’ve been collaborating with teams to build products for a while, you have probably shared thousands of feedback messages by now. Sometimes ad-hoc, sometimes urgent, sometimes right before a deadline, but certainly always needed.

When I joined onBeacon as a Founding Designer two years ago, I didn’t expect feedback to become the foundation for what I was about to build.

The problem is, we’ve confused feedback with a personal opinion when, in reality, it should help make a decision. So, what does useful feedback actually look like? Turns out, it’s harder to answer than it sounds.

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When feedback turns into commentary

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been overwhelmed by feedback. I know I have. Especially early in my career, I thought every piece of feedback was a task to take on. I would come back from a meeting with what felt like a to-do list. Pretty straightforward, right?

What happens when two people with strong opinions have contradictory thoughts? Or when you receive feedback that felt completely wrong, even if you couldn’t put it into words? How do you figure out what actually matters?

That’s the moment when feedback stops feeling valuable and turns into competing voices, with the louder one winning most of the time. If it came from your boss’s boss, it seems like you can’t say no to it. Maybe you’re facing a dilemma with an engineer claiming it’s not doable right after you shared your idea. Or a client who says something isn’t working. They don’t know why. They’ll know it when they see it.

When feedback doesn’t lead to a decision, it’s not doing its job. It’s just adding noise.

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What “useful” actually forced me to figure out

When I started building the feedback plugin, the core idea seemed obvious: give it a screen, get feedback on copy, accessibility, and UI decisions. What I didn’t anticipate was how hard it would be to define what “good feedback” actually meant. The real challenge was shaping the feedback itself.

When designers and PMs can just drop their screens inside ChatGPT and ask for feedback, what makes this plugin different? More importantly, what does “useful” look like in product feedback?

That question opened up more exploration than I expected. Some feedback felt too directive. Some too conversational. Some simply unconvincing. The process took a while. User interviews, experiments, and countless iterations, each one shifting how I understood what I was actually trying to build.

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Each small improvement made the next one clearer. That’s a pattern I’ve come to recognize as the most critical kind of progress. None of my biggest breakthroughs here could be displayed in a visual design portfolio. It happens at the level of natural language, figuring out how to guide a model toward outputs that actually help someone take a step forward.

There’s no written playbook for this. That makes it the most unexpected part of my job, and the one with the longest-lasting impact. The most rewarding kind.

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What good feedback is actually made of

The structure of the feedback turned out to be the first key learning, and the hardest to get right. What started as a simple format of feedback plus rationale evolved into something more layered. Not by design, but by paying attention to how feedback actually gets used.

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Good feedback doesn’t bury the lead. It starts with the relevant point in a concise, specific, and accurate manner. The next layer is a suggestion: what to change and how. This segment is all about action.

Below that, supporting evidence. A behavioral principle, a user quote, or a relevant data point that makes the case with tangible proof. Then the rationale for why this matters at all. And if you need to go further, the source material to dig deeper is there.

Not every piece of feedback needs all five layers. A rule-based accessibility issue is different from new ideas for an onboarding flow. The goal of this sequence is progressive disclosure: you spend only as much time on it as the decision requires.

I came across the Minto Pyramid recently, which is a framework for structuring persuasive arguments, and recognized the shape immediately. Lead with the conclusion, then support it. That’s what I’d been building toward without knowing it had a name. The best structures usually come from watching how people actually behave, not from looking for frameworks first.

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The part that can’t be automated

When you’re about to ask for feedback from someone who’s not involved in the process, do you just ask them, “What can be better?” I bet not. Structure is the vehicle for feedback. Context is what makes it land.

In the early days, every time I showed someone a generated feedback example, I’d hear the same thing: “This is good, but it’s too generic.” But you know what’s not generic? Their specific context.

A designer reviewing an onboarding flow, a PM reviewing a product spec, or an executive evaluating a high-stakes project share the same underlying questions: Who’s this for? What problem does it solve? What does success look like here? Without those answers, you’re evaluating execution without understanding the goal.

Those are the lenses that make feedback useful, not just correct. Each specific note is now connected to the bigger picture. That’s what’s hard to automate, because it requires judgment about the whole product, not just the piece in front of you. And when humans do it well, it’s irreplaceable.

Getting the product context into the output remains the hardest part. Without it, quality drops. Without quality, there’s no confidence. Without confidence, trust is gone.

This is why quality improvements take priority on our team: even as models become more powerful, cheaper, and capable, the quality of the results will be the real differentiator. That’s the thing about human feedback worth studying: it moves people forward. That’s the bar.

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Parting thoughts

I didn’t expect AI to teach me how to assess the quality of feedback. Trying to articulate what I knew forced me to deconstruct things I’d only ever done intuitively. Skills that had become autopilot after years of practice suddenly needed words. Going through thousands of results and trying to put a number on quality will do that to you.

It sharpened my instincts. More than that, it gave me the language to explain what good feedback actually is, something I’d been doing before I could describe it clearly.

The ideal outcome of feedback is simple: the person receiving it should feel confident about what to do next. That sounds obvious. Getting feedback that’s specific, grounded, and trustworthy is not. When someone says, “I’ve got this,” you know you made it.

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Shortcuts

• How to Build a Truly Useful AI Product, an insightful essay by Chris Pedregal that ignited my bet on quality.

• The art of influence, a Lenny’s Podcast episode with Jessica Fain discussing fundamentals to get buy-in for your ideas.

• Strategy, not self-expression, a simple framework for giving feedback that drives behavior change.

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That’s where curiosity led me this month. Your path will look different, because context always matters.

If this sparked something, let’s continue the conversation on Twitter. And if someone you know is navigating their own creative uncertainty, share this their way.

Keep exploring,

Laura ✌️

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Have you ever met a promising talent who almost was? I’ve certainly met a few. Young excitement, ready to take the world by storm. A mid-career professional with a clear passion for their craft, eager to prove they can take it to the next level. Maybe even a senior IC or manager who had an ambitious plan to grow beyond their imagination.

But something happened along the way... and they just stopped. Quiet, almost unnoticeable. They stopped accepting feedback, stopped being hungry for real challenges, and stopped experiencing the friction of being a beginner at something new. A promising career, stagnated because they stopped asking “what should I learn?” and switched to “what should I do?” mode, optimizing for competence.

Careers can plateau for many reasons, many of which are valid. However, in most cases, the only blocker to their growth is none other than themselves. Years ago, I wrote about the decision to take a leap despite uncertainty. This time, I’m looking at what happens when we quietly stop making that decision altogether, without even realizing it.

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The easiest thing to say

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon an essay by Paul Graham, titled “How to Do What You Love.“ If it was still being shared 20 years later, it had to be good. What I didn’t expect was to find a key insight about learning I hadn’t encountered before.

“… if you took a random person off the street and somehow got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the next twenty years, they’d get surprisingly far. But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say “I can’t.”“

— Paul Graham

I can’t.

It’s so easy to say, just turning the page and letting it go. As if being capable of something was a binary option.

I connected with Paul Graham’s analogy because I used to sell prints of my artwork at my local Comic-Con’s artist alley. During hundreds of interactions, I noticed how common it was to hear people say, “I could never do something like that.” They probably meant it as a compliment, but my natural response was always that “anyone can do it... as long as you make a real effort.” That’s the part that people don’t like to hear.

Getting decent or even good at something doesn’t happen overnight; you can’t buy it, and no one starts as a prodigy. We all start somewhere. We all struggle and become our own worst critics when we look at the results and know they’re not up to our standards. Looking at my old work isn’t exactly fun, but I know the only way to grow was to go through those phases.

Being a beginner isn’t just uncomfortable; it can be a real threat to identity. We reach a point in our lives and careers when we feel experienced and accomplished. This same feeling can be a barrier when dealing with the strange feeling of being dumb at doing something new. The weight is heavier than it used to be at a younger age.

So we say ‘I can’t’ and let that be enough. Not because it’s true, but because it’s easier than finding out.

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The green light

As a kid, I once submerged a digital watch in water to check if it was water-resistant… turns out it wasn’t. I lost a cool-looking Coca-Cola watch, but learned a lesson: Check the instructions manual.

To improve my public speaking skills, I started teaching a Gen-Z class about design. Tough crowd. I overcame the initial awkwardness of using humor, prepared for every single class, and found my storytelling style along the way.

When I decided I wanted to become a leader, I took a job opportunity to build a design team from scratch, even though I had never had a design manager before to learn from. Eventually, I became one.

Each of these personal examples might seem like taking risks with different stakes, but deep down, they were always learning opportunities for me. Sometimes the outcome wasn’t positive, sometimes there were unpredictable struggles or humbling moments that made me realize how unprepared I was, but it always led to real lessons that stuck with me forever.

Molly Graham has a name for this feeling: a flashing green light. It can be something as simple as posting online for the first time, and you feel like “I’m not ready to share this yet,” but it’s an excuse that has no expiration date. Maybe you’ve been asked to mentor someone junior or run a workshop on your team, and you’re afraid of being challenged because you don’t know everything yet (we never really do). You’re likely exploring the idea of switching to an adjacent discipline in this very moment, but you’re scared of looking like the least experienced person in the room.

Anything that makes you feel genuinely incapable is worth paying attention to. There’ll be plenty of obstacles; your ego can get bruised in the process, but if you approach it with an open mind, you’ll learn something about yourself either way.

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The quiet trap

Fear doesn’t always look like direct avoidance. Sometimes it looks like an endless collection of courses and an ever-growing podcast queue.

Saving articles every day, bookmarking all the courses you want to take, or listening to podcasts every drive. It can feel productive because there’s visible output, a number or frequency that you’re proud to say out loud. Sure, it might feel validating when you read hundreds of articles and listen to familiar topics over and over. You might even be tempted to believe that you’ve become an expert at it because of the sheer amount of content you’ve consumed.

But consuming is not learning. It’s rehearsing the idea of learning while keeping it safe, far away from the part where you have to do something with it and discover you don’t fully understand it yet. Or that you haven’t even scratched the surface. Pretending to learn is like preparing to face challenges, but without ever stepping in front of one.

This is a quiet trap that we can all fall into. I know I have. There’s nothing wrong with revisiting content you enjoy and keeping ideas fresh. The problem is when it replaces the discomfort of something you haven’t figured out yet.

If you’re willing to combat this, I would look no further than Andy Masley’s essay “Strategies for learning.” It’s a long read, and it might challenge you in more ways than expected, but it’s full of practical tactics you can try right away. Totally worth the read.

“Avoiding playing pretend during your valuable learning time is important and psychologically difficult. A lot of people’s learning is limited by their insecurities and need for their social status to be reinforced. It often feels amazing to pretend to learn things, and unpleasant to actually learn.”

— Andy Masley

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Parting thoughts

Treating new challenges as experiments has always been my default, as my clearly non-water-resistant watch story confirms. Not everyone arrives there naturally, and that’s totally fair.

What I do know for sure is that “I can’t” is rarely about actual capability. It’s fear of the unknown, of uncertainty, and of the very real likelihood of embarrassment. A self-protection mechanism that works a little too well.

Whatever you’re facing, keep moving even when feeling slow, because those who keep growing are the ones who keep choosing to be beginners on purpose. Not because it’s comfortable, but because they’ve learned to read the discomfort correctly.

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Shortcuts

• How to Do What You Love. Paul Graham on the quiet self-deception behind “I can’t” and what it really costs you over time.

• “I like being scared”: Molly Graham’s frameworks for rapid career growth. Why the feeling of not being capable is often the most tangible signal that you’re in the right place.

• Pablo Stanley: Curiosity will spark your design inspiration. A great reminder that staying curious isn’t a personality trait, it’s a practice worth protecting.

• The Ceiling Is Far Higher Than You Think. Shreyas Doshi on the question that ambitious people forget to ask once they get good at what they do.

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That’s where curiosity led me this month. Your path will look different, because context always matters.

If this sparked something, let’s continue the conversation on Twitter. And if someone you know is navigating their own creative uncertainty, share this their way.

Keep exploring,

Laura ✌️

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Believe it or not, this topic has been on my writing backlog since September of 2024. Had this been written back then, the output would’ve looked wildly different. Initially, I wanted to share my new process compared to the one I used at software development agencies. Now, it’s a whole different story. I was already skeptical back then about the idea of a perfect process, but the tooling and the ways of working have changed much more in the time that has passed.

On the tooling side, articles and hot takes claiming that the canvas is dead have been piling up nonstop. Shortsighted, if you ask me. But lines are blurring faster than ever, and if I look at my own tasks from last week, I’m doing work I wouldn’t have imagined before AI happened. The how, where, and why it changes a designer’s workflow is still, as usual, something that depends.

Today, I want to share 3 examples of designers who aren’t afraid to experiment for better outcomes, rather than blindly following processes.

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Don’t trust the process

Remember when design was all about the process? This mindset pushed an entire generation of designers into thinking that following cookie-cutter steps was necessary to arrive at the perfect solution, instead of understanding the problem with critical thinking.

Jenny Wen’s essay and her talk at the Hatch Conference make the case that many of us were afraid to realize: at some point, “trusting the process” became about output artifacts rather than about the people living these experiences.

Portfolios filled with journey maps, personas, and user flows. Proof of process rather than proof of craft. We spent so much energy decoding users through artifacts that we stopped making things people actually loved to use.

Memorize every step.

Fill in every box of the template.

All portfolios looked the same.

Designers and the tech industry in general were due for a reality check, because AI has inevitably disrupted everything we thought we knew about design practice before. Roles are blurring faster than ever. Doing more with smaller teams. The tooling landscape is changing almost every month.

The one-size-fits-all kind of process is outdated now, because when everyone can generate options effortlessly, what truly matters is selection. Not generating more, but choosing better. Curating and using your judgment with confidence. This is why Jenny’s examples of how great work is made can be applied in the new reality we live in, favoring end experiences over artifacts:

Starting from the solution instead of the problem statement. Caring ruthlessly about details. Operating on intuition built through deep user understanding. Skipping steps, backtracking, changing things after handoff. Making something just for the sake of making people smile. It’s messy, and as Jenny puts it, she wouldn’t have it any other way.

I keep coming back to these approaches because they align with the messy, unpredictable context in which I’ve been working for the last 2 years as a founding designer at an AI-native startup. Now more than ever, we need to adapt and build our internal model to make decisions faster. That’s exactly where I’m at right now, trying to move from “what’s the right process?” to “what feels right for this moment?”

“Your value as a designer is in honing that process to get to the best results, not following one”

— Jenny Wen

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The bad build is the point

For the longest time, I thought ideation required structure and planning upfront. Turns out, I just lacked the right tools. I can gather unstructured thoughts and context materials, diving deeper to truly understand the problem. That’s one of the ways in which Tom Johnson’s work has changed, sometimes even dumping transcripts into Claude with little to no structure.

Then comes the part that’s all about building a structure that works, but looks terrible. For designers who keep a high bar of quality, this can feel counterintuitive. Almost like a waste of time. That is, until you realize what the actual intent is. What Tom calls the “bad build” is focused on function first, creative direction second. Defining interactions, information architecture, and systems thinking, all without worrying about the styling. And when that is ready, you can act as a curator, without having to paint on a blank canvas.

Voice, rough-edged builds, the canvas, and even hand-made wireframes are all different mediums that will shine if used in the right moment. Sometimes it comes in a conversation, your own scattered thoughts, or your mental repository of the visual language you’re trying to create.

These days, I know I can come up with wild ideas mid-conversation and actually keep them. I never expected to be throwing a Loki reference while pitching a feature in its early stages, but that’s exactly what happened this week. I painted the picture, and Granola had it neatly structured in my notes in a matter of seconds. With MCP support now live, those notes are worth even more.

Embracing dynamic workflows means you understand where AI can give you a head start, and when your own judgment is most valuable. Leverage the right tool to capture intent as easily as possible, with the least amount of friction possible. As Tom likes to put it: it’s about exploring solutions, making things up, and finding flow.

I’m not sure how long this workflow will continue. The tools may change, the process may change, the amount of complexity may change. But when I look at it detailed out, it’s still design.

It’s still a process of exploring different solutions.

Of making things up and finding flow.

The difference is what tools, and the order they are used.

— Tom Johnson

Explore first, seeking signal from noise, until the path forward is clear.

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Two questions, every tool decision

What I find most interesting about Ridd’s approach to choosing AI coding tools is the premise underneath it: each tool serves a different purpose depending on your intent, rather than trying to fit a single workflow for every situation. When he mentioned during our conversation on craft that every piece of work can be mapped to a 2x2 matrix, I knew he wasn't joking, because his latest matrix clicked for me immediately.

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While many people are debating about whether or not designers should stay in a canvas or fully embrace code, his approach is very pragmatic:

Blank slate

Bottom left and right quadrants

• Starting from scratch? Pick your favorite prototype tool, like Lovable, v0, or Figma Make. These tools leverage out-of-the-box libraries that are well-crafted already, like Tailwind and Shadcn. The trap that Ridd reminds all of us is to avoid rebuilding too much, and I’ve been guilty of that as well. Focus on interaction, with just enough quality to convey your idea.

• Do you have materials in Figma? Copy/paste it to Figma Make, it’ll do wonders to leverage your existing library, layout, and content, so all you have to do is use natural language to prompt interactions and new functionality. You can even go back to Figma, tweak small details, and bring it back to Make again, which is how Ridd did this prototype.

Exists in prod

Top left and right quadrants

• Small scope? Grab your CLI tool of choice, like Cursor or Claude Code. The main goal is to go from UI fix to PR and merge as easy as possible. This is a workflow I haven’t personally explored yet, but when I do, I’ll be taking Conductor out for a spin.

• Big ideas? Once again, grab a CLI and leverage plan mode. Since planning and executing are two distinct mental models, doing it all at the same time can be frustrating, time-consuming, and spend way more tokens than your average AI tool bill.

My entry point into this was Ryan Rumsey’s process, where he literally prompts Claude to act as his CTO to drive the development plan and flag fixes along the way. That framing clicked for me, and it lines up with how Ridd thinks about it too. From there, treating the AI as a collaborator with a role rather than a clipboard changed how I approached building. And since the AI tooling space moves at the speed of light, Vercel shipped planning mode and better GitHub integration for v0 basically while I was still writing this. Way to go Vercel team!

If you’re wondering about prototyping and building workflows, take a look at his walkthrough, where he shares many examples and his thinking behind each use case. Worth a watch!

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Parting thoughts

Tom, Ridd, and Jenny arrived at very different workflows. None of them got there by following a template.

They got there by staying curious, noticing what wasn’t working, and being willing to try something else. That’s not a process. It’s a practice. And the difference matters: a process is something you follow, a practice is something you build.

Three years ago, I wouldn’t have guessed I’d be writing system prompts, running evals, or making judgment calls on model outputs as a core part of my design practice. None of that was in a job description. It just became what the work required, and I followed it. Discomfort has a funny way of becoming your competitive advantage when you stop fighting it.

Nobody’s workflow is going to look like yours, because nobody else has your context, your constraints, or your way of making sense of a problem. The tooling will keep changing. What won’t is the value of knowing when to adapt.

The most dangerous thing you can do right now is treat someone else’s process as the answer. The most useful thing is to stay curious about your own.

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Shortcuts

• Three Modes of Working with AI: Create, Understand, Act, written by Stefan Klocek, to differentiate the intent behind each mode and how to support it.

• Case Study Factory, by Fabricio Texeira and Caio Braga, with a message that's still relevant almost 7 years after being first published.

• Taste is selection, as Soleio illustrates, with our environment selecting as much as we do.​

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That’s where curiosity led me this month. Your path will look different, because context always matters.

If this sparked something, let’s continue the conversation on Twitter. And if someone you know is navigating their own creative uncertainty, share this their way.

Keep exploring, Laura ✌️

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What started as a New Year’s intention writing turned into words I’ve long meant to write.

Last year was unique in many ways. I’ve been writing consistently for over two years now, I’ve been enjoying the humbling challenge of learning French, and practicing Pilates regularly has improved my health more than I initially imagined.

Now that I’ve adopted these habits for good, it’s time to reflect on what comes next, based on the current stage of my life and career.

This is the intentional focus of my year. It’s about being thoughtful about where I’m putting my energy, but just as importantly, about guiding my decisions to shape the next best version of myself.

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Sharpening my craft

Most of my career, my focus has been on the early and middle stages of product development. In the last few years, I’ve come to understand the early stages more deeply. Still crafting the pieces directly, but also developing the product thinking to decide what needs to exist and why in the first place.

Shaping the strategy and vision has been a rewarding challenge to expand my skills, influence, and ultimately my impact. This time, I’m choosing to balance it by diving deeper into my own craft. More specifically, interactive animations with code.

I’ve been collecting inspiration for years. My own end-of-year compilation always includes one or more categories related to inspiration. My next frontier is making something heavy.

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The people who can turn intent into output—who can think and make in the same motion—are the ones defining the future of craft… Strategy-to-pixels favors the doers, not the talkers.

— David Hoang

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Writing and publishing my thoughts has become a healthy habit, but it’s time to be more of a doer and not just a talker. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still write, I love it, and I’m proud of the latest wordsmith work I’ve been putting out. It’s a body of work that represents how I think. Now I want to create a body of work to capture how I build.

Focusing solely on AI is tempting, but I want to sharpen my interaction skills first, then leverage AI more thoughtfully. I’m intentionally choosing difficulty as a moat. In an era when people are obsessed with one-shotting prod-ready apps, I’m choosing craft as the differentiator.

The outputs will speak for themselves, and I’m accepting the friction that’ll come as an investment, not as a cost.

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Learning to shape the material

There’s a gap: it’s called crafting interactions that can be shipped. From a taste perspective, I can tell the difference between good and great. What I’m lacking is the skillset to make these myself.

My usual approach when I identify a skill gap is to understand the language, put in the reps, and ultimately build the confidence to consistently deliver great results. This is how I approached Design Systems, business acumen, leadership, and more. It’s time to look under the hood of interaction design.

I know which are the tools of the trade, and while I could achieve a similar output with my current toolkit, what I really want is to shape the material directly. It’s no longer about distinguishing good vs great; it’s about having the language to explain why something is working or not and the skills to execute on this vision.

I’ve got a list of dozens of pet projects ready to experiment with, so I’m not short on ideas. To bring them to life, I’ll be working with newer tools like Paper to play with shaders, picking up Rive for interactions, or building with native components in Play. It’s a mix of tools that serve distinct purposes. The big boss will be a CLI like Cursor, but I’ll be taking it one step at a time, because I don’t want to spread myself too thin.

This is about building mastery.

Signs of progress:

• Experimenting with new tools

• Taking interaction courses and putting them into practice

• Building something new on a monthly basis.

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Thinking fast, not only slow

While crafting interactions requires a slower pace to pay attention to details, I intend to pair this with regular AI prototyping.

As I mentioned in the previous article, I’ve now adopted a simple principle for visualizing ideas: if it’ll take me longer to explain, the more it needs a prototype, because nuanced ideas require clear visuals.

I like pairing this with a different type of fast thinking, which is all about leveraging ideas as a thinking partner. It has helped me with strategy, data analysis, and even pricing modeling, but I’m sure there’s still a lot of potential waiting for me to uncover, and it all starts with “what if”?

Both of these habits will feed back into a learning loop of sharing my experiments in public. I did a test last year, and I liked the results. Not because it went viral (it didn’t), but because it showed clear intent and a practical lesson I could share with the world. A doer, not just a talker.

This is about exploring what’s possible.

Signs of progress:

• AI prototyping as a daily practice

• Find new ways of leveraging AI as a thinking partner

• Sharing my learnings and findings throughout my journey

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Keeping the inspiration flowing

And last but not least, thinking fast and slow also requires much-needed breaks, but I like to be intentional about them too.

Whenever I’m doing activities related to art or games, that’s when I’m the most recharged with creativity. It might be my graphic design roots, or the fact that my origin story involved illustration, music, and video games.

Truth be told, illustration and music, in particular, took a back seat for years in my life because I was mostly focused on my career. Still, I’ve come to appreciate how liberating and inspiring it is to play without boundaries in those spaces. Slow, personal, and imperfect results of brush strokes in a digital canvas, grainy film photos, and song improvisations that are made with my own hands. This human imperfection infuses the results with a unique personality, and I love that.

To double down on my craft, I’ll be fueling it with scheduled creative breaks. Just like with AI pet projects, there’s a list of artworks I’ve been intending on painting, and video game challenges waiting to be conquered.

This is about feeding everything else.

Signs of progress:

• Creative breaks on weekends with illustration, playing music, and video games

• Level up my storytelling by reading at least 10 books, with a mix of fiction and non-fiction

• Sharing my creative breaks as a way of working in public

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Parting thoughts

For the longest time, I’ve been on a journey of self-discovery, trying to answer: What do I want as my differentiator? I’ve embraced a non-linear career path, but I’m also accepting an organic process of understanding based on where I am now, not some grandiose five-year plan.

The dust is finally settling.

My bio today reads: storyteller and product builder. It’s short, but it carries weight. Over the last two years, I’ve learned the many facets of being a product builder in the age of AI. But I’m first and foremost a storyteller. And storytellers work in many mediums.

This year’s challenge is learning to tell stories through motion. Not just describe interactions but build them. Not just write about ideas but prototype them. Not just consume inspiration but create it.

This essay is my way of working in public, of turning private intention into shared accountability. The journey will have plenty of friction. I’m counting on it. I’m ready to become someone who can make heavy things.

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Shortcuts

• Make Something Heavy. The challenge that ignited my focus this year, written by Anu.

• Strategy-to-pixels, by David Hoang sharing how to turn intent into output.

• Difficulty as a Moat, by Dan Mall. Because sometimes, doing what others won’t is exactly the way to win.

• The Ceiling Is Far Higher Than You Think. Shreyas’ short but insightful essay motivated me to reframe “what should I do?” into “what should I learn?.”

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That’s where curiosity led me this month. Your path will look different, because context always matters.

If this sparked something, let’s continue the conversation on Twitter. And if someone you know is navigating their own creative uncertainty, share this their way.

Keep exploring, Laura ✌️

It’s December, which means it’s time for career shortcuts, following the tradition from 2023 and 2024. I handpicked all kinds of tools, practical resources, and inspiring material throughout the year, and I’m excited to share my favorites with you.

10 categories, 3 picks per topic, 30 shortcuts in total. Let’s dive in!

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Favorite new tools

• Comet by Perplexity

  The star of the show it’s the personal assistant, which can be delegated a wide variety of tasks, giving us a glimpse of what the future of the browser looks like.

• !Camera by Not Boring Software

  If there’s one thing this camera does well, it’s bringing joy to photography, with thoughtfully built controls that make it fun to capture your favorite moments.

• Raycast

  While technically not new, it wasn’t until this year that I started using it and became essential to my daily workflow.

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Designers building and having fun

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Ryan Stephen is turning ubiquitous interactions into playful ideas.

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Sam Peitz is always adding joy to every day moments.

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This canvas that Tobias Renström is building looks like pure delight.

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Talks that kept me thinking

• Design and (Blank)

  Career paths aren’t linear, and shared how the skills you build along the way can be the key differentiator to impact other functions as designers.

• A conversation with Jony Ive

  One of the most candid conversations on building with intention, nurturing ideas, and making thoughtful products.

• Design at the speed of startups

  When you’re the first designer, creating clarity and momentum is your main goal. Gabriel Valdivia shared practical lessons for rapid iterations at early-stage startups.

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Must-follow shows

• This is Taste

  Tommy Geoco and his team are doing something different these days by telling stories full of soul and engaging narrative.

• First of Kind

  Design pioneers in the software space, sharing their journeys in candid conversations with Soleio.

• How I AI

  Claire Vo is having fun, practical chats with operators who share AI workflows you can try right away.

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Brands to feed your imagination

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Raycast

The latest Raycast Wrapped designed by Jordan Amblin is a perfect example of the high bar kept by this team.

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Framer

I don’t know what I’m more eager about, their new features or the stunning visuals by Benjamin.

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Perplexity

Their announcements are anything but ordinary. All you have to do is look at one of the latest vids by Cam Sackett, to know that the team at Perplexity is clearly having fun with their brand.

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Favorite portfolio inspiration

• Gabriel Valdivia, Fractional Design Partner

  Clean and clear, letting the work speak for itself.

• WoraWork, 3D artist from Thailand

  Showing us there are creative ways to let others enjoy your work.

• Bruno Simon, creative developer

  Bruno’s original website was already fun to explore. This new version looks like Kakariko village with a built-in racing track.

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Courses for detail-oriented builders

• Devouring Details

  Rauno’s attention to detail is well known in the industry, and his course is jam-packed with interactive lessons to learn by doing.

• Animations on the Web

  Emil’s course is all about applying animation principles to level up your UI animations from good to great.

• Interactive SVG Animations

  Nanda Syahrasyad breaks down the core concepts of SVGs to use them as a wonderful material for animations.

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Practical tips for product builders

• Building product at Stripe: Craft, metrics, and customer obsession

  Jeff Weinstein reminds us that building products is all about keeping the customer at the center of the process.

• Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact

  The more we advance in our careers, the more communication becomes essential for making an impact. Wes Kao shares practical frameworks to excel in this vital skill.

• From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products

  Well-rounded conversation with Peter Deng on everything about Product teams, with incredible insights on hiring for autonomy and growth mindset.

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Deep reads

• High Agency In 30 Minutes

  George Mack does a fantastic job at explaining what high agency looks like, common pitfalls, and how to practice this on a daily basis.

• Making Software

  I never expected I would be smiling while reading about screens, but Dan Hollick has a way with words that turns complex subjects into engaging stories.

• How to ship like a startup

  We all know the importance of shipping, early and often. But how do we do it at the pace of a startup? Mihika Kapoor shares her lessons and practical tips to shipping, and using the story of Figma Slides as an example.

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It’s not what it seems

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​Apple TV

The new intro could’ve been easily created with CGI. Instead, they went old school and made everyone talk.

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Framer Spring launch

Their event visuals were so mesmerizing that people thought it was AI. It was all beautifully executed 3D by Ben Fryc.

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Ditherface

The clean lines and sharp edges of Tom Johnson’s Ditherface project aren’t made with a filter or AI, they’re all made by hand, one line at a time in Figma.

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Thanks for reading, sharing, and learning with me this year!

If this sparked something, let’s continue the conversation on Twitter. And if someone you know is navigating their own creative uncertainty, share this their way.

Keep exploring, Laura ✌️

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There was a time when younger Laura wanted nothing to do with software. It seemed to always be in a perpetual state of change. Unstable. Unpredictable. Photography and concept art seemed like capturing a moment in time that wouldn’t have to “suffer” as much as UI would. I didn’t know a thing about building software back then, so I’ll go easy on my 20-YO-self because I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

These days, I thrive in uncertainty, exploring new ideas, and learning fast. The best school for this has been the role of Founding Designer at Beacon. Those who truly understand this role have lived through it. Like Tom Johnson.

This is why, when he recently announced he was leaving Basedash after 5 years of building a massive product as a solo designer, I knew I had to chat with him to reminisce about his early-stage startup experience and exchange learnings.

Why would any designer choose chaos? Not because they’re fearless. Because they wanted to know if they were actually good at this, outside the safety net.

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When you don’t know what you’re building, experiments are your map

I left the safety of having a team, processes, and supporting roles that allowed me to focus on my own tasks, but I couldn’t fully own a product. Tom left a billion-dollar company where his work was “successful,” but he was never sure whether it was because of the company or his abilities. We both chose uncertainty over safety.

Early-stage is exciting because there’s an entire ocean to explore. Terrifying for the same reason. But how do you choose where to go when your compass isn’t even working yet? Time’s running out. Funding runway doesn’t last forever. And if you don’t pivot at the right time, someone else will beat you to the finish line.

It feels like having Jack Sparrow’s compass guiding you. It’s not broken. It “points to the thing you want the most in this world.” But... how do you know what that thing is?

Like Jack Sparrow, you have to be a bit crazy to accept this compass and be willing to follow it. Much like a founding designer role.

One of my favorite parts of Tom’s long Twitter thread sharing 5 years’ worth of work was admitting that early on, you’re trying ANYTHING to get to PMF. We’re taking wild bets looking for signals, looking for the right user who needs your product. You can’t convince people to use it unless they truly need it.

So, how do you find the north on your compass? Ship. Ship like your life depends on it. Because, for the life of the business, it depends on it. And to ship the right bets, you have to step away from just looking at pixels to understand what needs to get built and why.

“In order for someone to be effective at design, they have to understand why a feature or product exists in the first place.”

— Tom Johnson

You achieve this understanding by wearing more hats than just design. Getting your hands dirty with 1000s of manual evals. Jumping on a sales call and realizing the person who’ll pay for your product isn’t the daily user. Making product decisions even if your role description doesn’t say you’re a PM.

This doesn’t happen in isolation, which is why influence is the best design tool. Your job isn’t designing features. Your job at a startup is about staying alive. Treading water until a boat floats by, and then figuring out how to build a boat that matches the boat that floats by.

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You can’t plan your way to clarity; you prototype your way there

During our chat, Tom shared an interesting metaphor: “If you woke up from a coma and I showed you a picture of an automatic door and said, ‘Tell me how to open this,’ you’d be lost. No handle visible. But the trick is you just walk up to it. It just works. You never know until you use it.”

Most design looks intuitive in screenshots, but real intuition only emerges through use. Seems simple on paper, but getting to that intuition takes a lot of reps. How? Staying close to your users and building alongside them, by constantly testing out what’s intuitive to them. This ongoing access to your users is the fuel to keep iterating until “it just works.”

The traditional design approach would have you going through a lengthy process of planning and testing to develop intuition. When you’re on your own as a solo designer, the playbook shifts entirely. Instead of waiting for the perfect version of the feature to be launched and celebrated, you experiment. Internally, informally, saying “let’s ship it” and learning with the feature in production.

Building early is also about constantly generating prototype ideas beyond just clickable ones. You can run nimble experiments of things like tier packaging models. System prompts to reverse-engineer predictable outputs. Or setting up a table at a mall and getting feedback from people passing by in exchange for a $5 gift card. You’ll have to ask Tom about that story; it’s a good one.

You have to be comfortable letting go of prototypes and ideas. One-offs that serve the purpose of making the right decision and moving on.

Soleio calls this the hardest skill to develop:

Having the courage to show these prototypes to others to get honest feedback about how bad your app is over and over and over again is what builds your sensibility, your intuition. Every user struggle becomes a product improvement. Until you create a surprising effect on users. It just works.

Every experiment changes you. After enough of them, you’re operating at a completely different level. And it’s still you. A better version of you.

Trust the compound interest of learning + shipping. Most experiments teach you something, but don’t directly drive growth. You’re building before the payoff is visible.

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What makes it hard is exactly what makes it worth it

Still nodding along? You’re in for an adventure.

Basedash was only 6 people. Beacon is 10. Both products look like they should require teams of 30+, yet they don’t. Heck, Tally built a profitable $3M ARR business with 4 full-time employees. How?

Lending Tom’s words:

“It takes incredible people with incredible talent to build a product like Basedash. Staying lean is what allowed us to stay focused and kept us all close to the work and our users.”

The first reaction of those who haven’t experienced the startup life before might include racing thoughts of whether or not you can pull it off. Wearing many more hats than you signed up for. Having more ideas than sprint points available. A lack of structure and processes to the point of feeling chaotic. I can keep going.

At the same time, the chaos that makes it uncertain is exactly what turns small teams into something else entirely. Wearing many hats develops product thinking better than any book. The constant influx of ideas becomes fuel for bold bets. The lack of formal structure gives you speed to pivot in days, not months.

Everyone is close to the work, close to users, close to decisions. The shared context is unmatched. Everything is your problem.

You’re not blocked by another team’s capacity or priorities in the org chart. You develop “full-stack product builder” skills. You build strong intuition through direct user contact, not research summaries.

Being a founding designer is learning in real-time, with real stakes.

This type of adventure is for those who see problems as opportunities, with an openness to learning while navigating uncertainty. The comfort with not knowing. And then, everything becomes your impact.

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Parting thoughts

Not everyone should be a founding designer. But if you’re still reading, you might be one of them. The ones who left success to test if they were actually good. Who’d rather ship and learn than plan and hope. Those who see uncertainty as a creative constraint, not a paralyzing risk.

You’re not designing products. You’re discovering what the product wants to become. You’re not following a roadmap. You’re creating the map by walking.

Thanks for the inspiring chat and collaboration, Tom. Here’s to building in public and figuring it out as we go.

PS. How to spot a founding designer

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Shortcuts

• Tom's 5-year journey at Basedash, a walk down memory lane full of candid lessons

• How To Win Friends & Influence Decisions, by Julie Zhuo, sharing practical examples on how to drive influence as a product builder

• Don’t trust the (design) process, by Jenny Wen, encouraging us to embrace the messy process

• From 2 to $3M ARR: How We Bootstrapped Tally With a Tiny Team, by Marie Martens, co-founder of the mighty team at Tally

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That’s where curiosity led me this month. Your path will look different, because context always matters.

If this sparked something, let’s continue the conversation on Twitter. And if someone you know is navigating their own creative uncertainty, share this their way.

Keep exploring, Laura ✌️

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Writing often starts like this: Having a topic you want to explore, many directions you could take, but also with a blank page staring back at you. Just like any other creative exercise, you have to face the dreaded “blank page syndrome.”

And yet, here we are, two years later, turning blank pages into fully fledged ideas every month. But why do I write? None of the concepts I’m sharing is a breakthrough in how design or technology works; there are people diving much deeper into these topics, and in most cases, ideas are still evolving as I’m writing them.

I don’t consider myself a “content creator,” nor am I chasing vanity metrics. To me, this is an ongoing experiment of thinking in public, making a commitment to explore one topic every month, diving deeper into why “it depends,” and articulating my learnings. This is one of the most underrated moves for product builders still figuring things out, so if you’re curious about getting started, here’s how I did it.

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False starts and finding my voice

I tried writing articles back when I was still at the university. I can’t remember what the topics were, but I do remember I didn’t enjoy the process at all. It was homework, so I didn’t have inner motivation, nor did I feel like I had anything significant to say at that point in time. Since I lacked inspiration on the topics I picked, I ended up writing what I thought I should write, not something I wanted to explore. It was forced, so it didn’t feel natural.

A few years ago, I was invited to write for the blog at a previous job. Since it was a low-stakes situation, I said yes and picked a tactical topic I had explained dozens of times to other designers: Keeping your files organized in Figma. By that point, I had read enough articles to start noticing the type of writing I enjoyed, leveraging a conversational style. I had the stage, and it felt like I had permission to be authentic.

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The content resonated with others, so I wrote a few times after that, but without a clear rhythm. Every now and then, an idea sparked inspiration, and if I found the time, I would sit down to write. It still felt like a rare occurrence.

It wasn’t until two years ago that I made a personal commitment, a challenge to myself, to write and publish monthly for half a year. It was an experiment to see if I could think in public and enjoy the process. To keep the inspiration flowing, I started a list of topics I had strong opinions on. Every month, I picked one off the list depending on what occupied my mind.

Prior to this self-imposed challenge, I thought I had to write about things I had mastered already, like technical skills, so it seemed like I didn’t have much to say. But what ended up fueling my creativity were those unfinished questions I had in mind on topics adjacent to creativity and personal growth of non-linear careers. Setting up the challenge was just the beginning of a learning journey.

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The practice of imperfect publishing

One of the most unexpected learnings? Finding my rhythm.

I write like I illustrate, in batches. Flesh out an outline, then walk away. Write one or two sections next time. Walk away again. Come back with fresh eyes to adjust tone, find better punchlines, tighten the narrative arc. It’s less about tackling one daunting task and more about finding the shape of it over time.

Every time I come back, the shape looks clearer than yesterday. I leave the full-on editing until last. I prioritize shaping the narrative first and refining details later. I’ve tried editing while drafting. It kills momentum. It makes me more self-aware of fixing issues instead of letting the ideas flow.

The truth is, things aren’t always this clean. There have been months when I procrastinate until the last few days, scrambling to make the deadline I set for myself. It’s made me more disciplined, sure, but it’s also humbling. Some months, I sit with a draft thinking, “Who am I to write about this?” Especially when tackling topics everyone seems to have an opinion on, like taste or craft. Perfectionism never fully goes away. It just gets quieter. I’ve learned to recognize when I’m polishing to improve versus polishing to delay.

After editing and hitting publish, the article is ready, but that doesn’t mean the ideas and concepts are perfect. The article itself represents where I arrived at that point in time in relation to the topic I had been trying to clarify, but some questions are still unsolved, and I fully expect concepts to evolve. And that’s the whole point: a constant curiosity to learn and grow.

How can I be at peace with this? Because I’m writing for myself, not for others. The writing exercise helps me to practice my storytelling skills and communicate ideas, but at the end of the day, I’m publishing something I would happily just share with my younger self. It’s not perfect, but if it makes me pause, reflect, and brings a smile to my face, then it’s ready.

The biggest challenge by far is showing up every month. Life can get in the way, and sometimes, topics might not feel article-worthy in a sea of voices competing for attention. But keeping up the commitment has made me notice more details than ever, reflect on conversations, and grab inspiration from unusual sources like attending a conference or binge-watching a TV show. I trust the process and let the topics shape new ideas I hadn’t thought about writing before. And it’s working, not just for me, but for others too.

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What it became

One of the most gratifying outcomes of writing is when someone mentions an article months (or years) later, saying it helped them in one way or another. That’s why I like to always close with an invitation to share or reply to continue the conversation. Just a few months ago, I had someone comment on my very first article from over five years ago. How crazy is that?

That’s when I know it has been worth the effort to deal with questions that don’t have clear answers because it helps me in that moment and helps others long after being published. I’m not pressured to chase numbers or meet someone else’s expectations. As long as it allows me to let my curiosity wander and the story has a clear message, I know it can become an artifact that can be shared with those who are also dealing with these questions.

After six months, I paused to ask myself: Should I keep going?

The answer surprised me. It had become more than a habit. I genuinely enjoyed it. The monthly rhythm gave me permission to stay curious without the pressure of creating content constantly. One topic per month meant ideas could shape themselves during random moments: a conversation over coffee, something said during a conference talk, rewatching a favorite show and noticing a pattern I hadn’t seen before. The ideas found me instead of me hunting them down.

So I kept going. Two years in, this has become one of my favorite creative practices for developing clarity and sharpening how I communicate. I even have almost two years’ worth of could-be ideas waiting to be explored.

Some articles are shared regularly, like Shifting from Graphic to Software Design, The Anti-Networking Guide to Meaningful Connections, and, most recently, On Making Things Happen. In some cases, they might quietly help one person. One or many, the outcome still matters.

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I didn’t know it at first, but over time, I understood that it wasn’t about having all the answers. It’s about documenting questions that have been on my mind for long enough, creating a body of work that reflects how I think, and inviting others to figure it out with me. That’s why “it depends” worked from the very beginning, because all of these topics have nuanced answers and are constantly evolving.

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Parting thoughts

After two years of thinking in public, I have embraced the imperfect nature of writing. Showing up is more important than creating a perfect piece that’ll become a timeless essay. Consistency beats having the title “writer” next to your name. Enjoying curiosity is more important than being “ready.”

If you have been wrestling with ideas or questions on your mind, waiting for the perfect time, this is your sign. Start monthly. Pick topics that fire you up, the ones you’ve been wrestling with or can’t stop thinking about. Block some time during your week and put on some lo-fi beats. You don’t even have to publish yet. Write for yourself, to capture ideas on paper (digital or not), and to practice how you articulate those ideas.

Over time, you’ll hear yourself more clearly. You’ll understand why certain topics matter to you, and in the process, you’ll find your voice as well. You’ll create artifacts that can help you and help others, especially those who are dealing with those questions for the first time. And you might also discover, just like me, that writing is less about having an opinion that’s worth sharing and more about letting your curiosity take you on a learning journey.

The articles I read that have inspired me the most are the ones that show authenticity and a genuine desire to understand. So if you’re reading this, you’re probably one of my first 100 subscribers. Thank you for being part of this journey. I hope these ideas can spark your inspiration too.

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That’s where curiosity led me this month. Your path will look different, because context always matters.

If this sparked something, let’s continue the conversation on Twitter. And if someone you know is navigating their own creative uncertainty, share this their way.

Keep exploring, Laura ✌️

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As with most of my writing, I pick nuanced and tricky topics based on personal experiences, things I want to understand, or things that also bother me for some reason. Sometimes all three at once, like this month’s topic.

Having worked with dozens of designers throughout my career and mentored many of them, I couldn’t comprehend why, in many situations, someone would simply stop trying. Trying to understand a problem, trying to find an elegant solution to said problem, and even trying to challenge themselves to become better designers by navigating these problems.

I assumed it was a lack of proactiveness, until I started to learn more about this word that’s becoming more and more of a buzzword these days. And no, I’m not talking about craft or taste, although you can read my thoughts on crafting software and nurturing taste intentionally. I’m talking about having high agency and how it shows up in the day-to-day.

I have learned to value this skill more now that I’ve been partnering with early-stage startups, wearing many hats while working with fully remote and lean teams. Add to that working in the space of AI tooling. Things are moving fast, and having high agency is not an option if you want to survive.

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High agency ≠ Proactiveness

To help me illustrate what having agency looks like, I want to start by sharing my favorite story on making things happen: An indie game developer.

If your favorite video game ever doesn’t have a PC version and the quality of the latest releases isn’t promising, the average person would just hope after a while, mourn what could have been, and then move on. But not Eric.

Working for 70 hours per week for four years to launch his first game, Eric started his journey by creating a humble clone of his favorite game to practice his skills, while also working as a part-time theater usher to pay the bills. He learned to code in C#, composed the music and sound effects, wrote all the dialogs, and created the pixel art, redoing everything multiple times because his skills got better and he wanted the game to have the best possible quality. He poured his heart and soul into creating the perfect homage to the game he wished had existed.

What no one expected was that it would become Steam’s highest-rated game of all time, not even him. As some of you might have already guessed, the game is Stardew Valley. It has now surpassed 41 million copies sold since its launch in 2016 across platforms, has a board game, a cookbook, and even an orchestra traveling around the world. And it all started because Eric Barone, most commonly known as ConcernedApe, single-handedly developed a farming simulator.

I read about his journey during launch, and it instantly became my favorite story on high agency. He treated it as an experiment, iterated consistently, and achieved goals that others thought would be impossible.

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I used to think that high agency was a synonym of proactiveness, but I’ve come to the conclusion that this would oversimplify it. Sure, you can have the intention and act on something, but if someone like Eric had kept things vague or quit easily after facing unknown problems, he would have never achieved this immense success.

Out of many definitions of high agency, my favorite comes from George Mack in his 30-minute High Agency essay:

“High agency can be a confusing idea to understand because it’s not just one idea. It’s a combination of three distinct skills rarely found together:

1. Clear thinking

2. Bias to action

3. Disagreeability”

Take one out, and things fall flat, because you need all three to make things happen. It’s easier to call something impossible than to sharpen your thinking and take action in unconventional ways, which is why low agency is the default in almost any context, and why high agency isn’t easy to find.

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This is a rare finding

I’d ask during 1:1s and get blank stares. ‘Why aren’t you following amazing designers?’ Empty silence. ‘That skill you’ve been talking about for months?’ Nothing. The pattern was noticeable: overwhelm, overthinking, vagueness. After watching this repeat across teams, I realized that somewhere along the way, we mistakenly learned that being a “team player” means just nodding along and that professionalism means not rocking the boat.

But the designers who grow fastest are the ones comfortable with constructive friction. They ask the questions everyone’s thinking but won’t say out loud. High agency isn’t about being difficult; it’s about being honest when it matters.

Coming back briefly to George Mack’s essay, he did a fantastic job at explaining the low agency traps, and most importantly, what you can do to combat these common traps. My favorite piece of advice in the entire essay is a simple and yet challenging question: “What would I do if I had 10x the agency?”

Make a pause right now, think about a challenge you’re facing, and ask yourself that question. Let it simmer. I’m sure this question will get your mind running and thinking on wilder ideas than usual, even if you consider yourself a high-agency person... especially if you’re one, because you know there’s always more that you could be doing.

Let’s take the questions at the beginning of this section to make his exercise. What would I do if I had 10x the agency to...

• Look for amazing designers to follow?

  • DM someone whose work you admire and ask for their top 3 follows. Check the designers behind the products you love using. Or start with the Design Community Starter Pack I made a few months ago. Pick one approach and spend 10 minutes on it.

• Put in the reps to develop that skill you’ve been talking about for months?

  • Block one hour this week on your calendar. Ask someone excelling at that skill what the first step looks like. Then open the tool and play around. Momentum beats perfection.

• Share your work and thinking process with the world?

  • Post one thing that feels slightly uncomfortable. A work-in-progress moment. A delightful detail from something you’re building. Or write for yourself like I’ve been doing monthly for almost two years now. Start small.

• Challenge ideas during the meeting?

  • Ask one clarifying question: What’s the main problem and why? What does success look like? What’s the worst-case scenario? Then connect those answers back to the ideas being discussed. That’s it.

None of these are complex. None take more than an hour. But most people will read this list and do nothing. Don’t be most people.

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No agency, no growth

Although I didn’t know the term earlier in my career journey, I’m completely convinced I wouldn’t have achieved half of the things I have if I didn’t have high agency. I say this not by trying to step into a pedestal, but with satisfaction of the pages I’ve turned to write each chapter, and conscious that there’s still a lot more to write in the story of my career.

Nearly a year ago, I started a draft of an article by writing the shared traits of junior designers with incredible potential, asking others this random question, and making a summary list that looked like this:

• Self-motivated learners

• Critical thinkers

• Curious and unafraid to ask for help

• Adaptable and resilient

Looking back, this is all about having high agency. I didn’t include any technical skills because they can be learned, and if the designer really wants to grow, they’ll get there, no question. This is why whenever someone tells me that “they could never be capable of doing what I do,” I tell them that it’s 100% possible.

I shared in the past how my self-taught journey started, knowing that my skills didn’t yet match the vision I had of what great could look like. It happened with design, just like with music, photography, and illustration. So I just pushed through, despite the discomfort, putting in the reps, and found creative ways to keep improving. Underneath everything, high agency is the fuel that keeps the wheels turning.

To me, one of the best analogies of what high agency looks like in practice is Wes Kao’s idea of turning a yellow spot into the sun.

Turning a yellow spot into the sun means:

1. Turning a little into a lot. Most people do the opposite: they have near-infinite resources at their fingertips, but come back with mediocre work.

2. Creating work that surprises and delights. The output is better than what folks described or originally imagined. Shows flashes of brilliance.

If high agency is the input, turning the yellow spot into the sun is the undeniable output. It’ll look different in every context and for every person, but it’s unmistakable because it’s way above average, it’s creative, and displays a high degree of intentionality to move from idea to something real, and in turn, there’s growth.

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Parting thoughts

Being agentic means going from spectator to thinker to doer, treating every iteration as a learning opportunity. These are the characters who stand out because they grow, because they act when most people are too comfortable or afraid to try. That’s main character energy.

After years of watching the pattern, I realized the biggest blocker isn’t context or skills. It’s ourselves. I accepted I can’t make that change for others because it needs to come from within. This is why high agency is now the number one trait I’ll be hiring for and leading by example on.

So here’s the move: Take whatever challenge you’re facing and ask yourself, “What would I do if I had 10x the agency?” Let it simmer. Then take the smallest first step.

Take action. Use it as an experiment. Do it for the plot.

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Shortcuts

• Interview: What’s next for Stardew Valley, the post-launch conversation with Eric Barone that made me connect with his story even more

• To learn more about how Stardew Valley came to life, you can check this article and this podcast diving into Eric’s indie developer journey

• High Agency In 30 Minutes, a must read by George Mack

• On agency, by Henrik and Johanna Karlsson, sharing even more examples of inspiring people with high agency

• Turning a yellow spot into the sun, a timeless read by Wes Kao

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That’s where curiosity led me this month. Your path will look different, because context always matters.

If this sparked something, let’s continue the conversation on Twitter. And if someone you know is navigating their own creative uncertainty, share this their way.

Keep exploring, Laura ✌️

​

One of the main lessons I got from Graphic Design was that inspiration can come from anywhere, especially outside of your own field, and even seemingly unlikely places, such as a cranky fictional character. Today, I want to share the lessons I got reminded of as a product builder while watching a TV show happening inside kitchens, but it’s not about food, and also not about restaurants. I’m talking about The Bear.

I just finished watching the show, and I’m fascinated by its storytelling. Watching four seasons in two weeks can tell you a lot about how much I enjoyed it. I noticed patterns of what makes a story click for me—the secret ingredient that gets me hooked is rooting for a character I can relate to, someone who makes me care.

This article practically wrote itself based on how inspired I felt after watching this show, Richie’s character development, and especially the episode “Forks.” It has nothing to do with the perfectly timed Taylor Swift song during a peak moment of one episode, although I have to say it captured the emotion of that scene in an unexpected way. And because I like to write based on what I’m learning or actively trying to figure out, these ideas are fresh out of the oven. Pun intended. Enjoy!

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Listen. Watch. Execute.

For those who haven’t had the pleasure of watching this episode, I’ll give a brief summary: The fictional establishment "The Beef" is in the process of transforming into "The Bear," a Michelin-worthy restaurant. Richie, the only person on the team without a clear sense of purpose, has been sent to work for a week at the best restaurant in the world to learn from them. He thinks it’s a punishment. There’s a lot more, but this is enough for the purpose of this article.

Richie shows up at Ever convinced he's being punished. He's that team member who sees problems before possibilities, who complains first and asks questions later. We've all worked with someone like this. Maybe we've been someone like this.

Interestingly, one of the first things that sparked a change in him during this episode was the opposite of chaotic. While shadowing the staff at Ever, he noticed how much attention they paid to their customers, even learned about them before they arrived, and the effect this had to elevate their experience beyond their expectations. Even in the little things. Especially in the little things.

Someone seems to be a bit cold? Let’s adjust the temperature in that area of the room.

A table likes to eat faster? Let’s speed up their tickets.

A customer wanted to try deep dish before leaving Chicago? Let’s buy them one from a local place and plate it beautifully.

It’s all about paying attention to the details, and user research is no different from that. Listening to your users and catching on to subtle cues to serve them better, even when they aren’t directly asking for a feature, but you make it happen because you want to improve their experience. Just like Ford, don’t give them faster horses.

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As mentioned in the episode, some of the most important moments in a person’s life happen in a restaurant, which is why making that moment special is crucial to provide an unforgettable service. In a similar way, people interact with technology every single day. Ensuring your product delivers a great experience can easily make their day, convince them to come back the next time, and improve their lives because you paid attention to the little details.

Just like gathering all your ingredients before you start cooking prevents mid-recipe scrambling, the right user research preparation sets up breakthrough product insights.

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Every second counts.

Under the clock of Chicago’s best kitchen in the show, there’s a sign with 3 simple words: Every second counts. And boy, you can tell that it does inside that restaurant. A smudge on a plate? Those painfully extra 47 seconds during a service didn’t go unnoticed. They owned it and learned from it.

Richie's confusion wasn't just about the time. It was about caring. Why obsess over 47 seconds when you could focus on bigger problems? But that's exactly the point. Those 47 seconds weren't about efficiency. They were about ownership.

The issue lies in taking responsibility for one’s actions inside the kitchen to maintain high standards—in other words, accountability. It’s everyone’s job to keep the business running smoothly and meet the expectations of their clients, which is something we can learn from in the business of making software.

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As product builders, we don’t usually work in a high-pressure environment such as a world-renowned restaurant, so it’s easy to forget the importance of time in our day-to-day. The reality is that shipping fast makes a big difference in who wins the market, especially now with the tectonic shifts of AI present everywhere. Roles are evolving, lines are getting blurred, and the teams shrinking their iteration time are shipping at the speed of light.

But shipping doesn’t equal getting things out the door for the sake of it. It means developing rapid learning and adaptation, which is crucial in the ever-evolving landscape of technology and design. The startup waiting to build the perfect solution will get its lunch eaten by those doubling down on iterating based on real feedback. They might not have certainty of the solution from the very beginning, but they’ll for sure learn faster and improve by getting their product into the hands of their users.

Shipping should come first because execution trumps perfection. It’s true in restaurants, and it’s an ever-present truth in building software. But here's where Richie (and maybe the rest of us) miss the point about speed.

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Time well spent

The episode started with Richie having to clean forks for an entire day, which made him frustrated pretty easily because “what’s the point of having forks without streaks?” Conversely, the episode ends with a similarly tedious activity, only this time our character has already grown and willingly puts himself through the task of peeling mushrooms by hand.

The same guy who questioned streak-free forks is now choosing tedious work because he understands something different about standards. Not rules from management, but care made visible. When chef Terry, interpreted by the amazing Olivia Colman, gets asked why she’s doing this instead of having someone else do it for her, she replies:

“It's just a nice little fun detail. So when the diners see it, they know that someone spent a lot of time on their dish… I think time spent doing this is time well spent.”

This seemingly pointless task of peeling mushrooms one by one becomes something deeper. A focus on craft. It's the difference between shipping features and shipping meaning. Details matter. Speed might be everyone's responsibility, but so are those small touches that add up to something memorable. The kind of details that make you pause and think, someone actually cared about this.

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The attention to detail in these examples is obvious. What's less obvious is how rare it actually is. Instead of yelling at the clouds because I can’t find this in every app I have installed, I aspire to infuse my own work with it, enough to make my users pause and appreciate the thoughtfulness to make their experience meaningful.

As for the food, I prefer to leave it in the talented hands of chefs; I can only marvel at their craft and come back because I know it'll make my day.

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Parting thoughts

The Bear isn't about restaurants, just like product building isn't really about features. It's about that shift when someone stops going through the motions and starts caring about craft. When they realize every second counts not because of deadlines, but because someone's experience depends on getting it right.

Here's the thing about Richie. I couldn't stand him at first. He was loud, pessimistic, and seemed determined to drag everyone down with his complaints. But he was open to changing. That episode where he works at Ever? It flipped everything. Now he's my favorite character on the show.

That transformation happened because I watched him care. Really care. Not just hit benchmarks or follow orders, but invest himself in doing something well. Your users will have that same shift when they see you've changed too. When every detail shows someone took time to make their experience matter.

So make them care. Start with yourself.

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Shortcuts

Building what customers need, not just what they ask for; a great example by the Linear team on listening to your customers

How I ship projects at big tech companies, by Sean Goedecke, and why shipping is a lot more than just launching

Musings on shipping fast, by Lee Robinson.

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It's always more fun to learn with others than doing it alone, so don't hesitate to reach out on Twitter if you want to continue the conversation. If this article has been helpful, share it with a friend!

Over and out,

Laura ✌️​​

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Anyone who has worked with me can validate that I advocate for good frameworks and systems to make processes smoother. There's a reason I thrived leading Design System initiatives, spent countless hours decoding design processes, and find it easy to reuse frameworks for everything. Even my first article was about process systematization for designers.

I'm a systems thinker by nature. Having control over expected results has allowed me to refine my craft over the years. But as the saying goes, "what got you here won't get you to the next level."

So how did a creature of habit like me switch from predictive environments to the uncertainty of early-stage startups? To make it even more challenging, a startup working on AI-native products? This is how.

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The type A designer

I like planning. My activities go into my calendar, I use various systems to access my digital content easily, and my travel plans are all documented in Notion. It's an investment of time, but it is incredibly worth it when I need to remember, access, or do something that could get lost in a sea of context. It's like paying it forward to my future self.

This, however, has sparked debates in the past with my type B friends, who are more free spirits who go where the wind blows. Let's take traveling, for example. They schedule their trips in a blink of an eye and do activities spontaneously without much structure. So, whenever I explain my approach to traveling, they're usually horrified by how much time I spend on it.

But what happens when life gets in the way and I'm forced to go with the flow? I've let myself wander more freely, discover local gems just based on how good the food smells when I pass them, or ask the tour guide for recommendations on which coffee shop I should visit next.

For someone used to having everything structured, it might seem like a wild idea to do "vibe traveling," but as with anything in life, having a bit of both creates a good balance. Just enough structure to have the key elements in a safe spot, while embracing the act of exploring that will undoubtedly make some of the best anecdotes you'll share with your friends afterwards.

Coming back to design, when I worked at software development agencies, I was used to having structure: a PM to take care of the logistics, a PO that owned the roadmap, a highly detailed PRD after a few days of product discovery, etc. You get the gist. The problem space and the solution of the MVP might be unknown, but the operating systems in place were more or less predictable, and I liked that.

Until I dared myself to step into the unknown of startup life.

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Exploring vs Exploiting

Over dozens and dozens of projects, I found myself gravitating more towards 0 to 1 products. I thrived in dealing with ambiguity and discovering the opportunities amidst the unknowns. It was exhilarating. Challenging. And when it worked? Incredibly rewarding. Still, I had a safety net of operating processes to rely on and a certain level of predictability of how things would unfold at a high level.

I couldn't explain why the MVPs felt different from most other projects where I had to scale and optimize until recently, when I read about explore vs. exploit modes in an interview with Granola's co-founder and CEO, Chris Pedregal.

• Exploit is like your type A friend during a trip. Structured, systematic, and optimizing to make the most out of every day before the returning flight.

• Explore is, on the other hand, like your type B friend. Adventurous, willing to make mistakes, and enjoying one day at a time.

Based on these descriptions, you might think I had to become an explorer to fit into my new reality. But as with most things, it depends.

Depending on the context, one approach might generate better outcomes than the other. Exploring is about venturing into unknown territory and generating new possibilities, a synonym of pre-PMF products, and figuring out how to make them stick. Exploitation is about optimizing, scaling, and operationalizing what already works; hence, it becomes the driving force after PMF.

Two very different mindsets for two different scenarios.

So now I'm technically both. I'm more open to wearing many hats, experimenting outside of my traditional toolkit, and skipping a process diagram in favor of shipping fast.

At the same time, I'm certain that there will come a time when some things will require a framework or a system to scale. At some point, another designer will have to rely on solid foundations to maintain cohesion while still shipping fast. Quoting Dan Mall on a recent Auto Layout walkthrough, "You systematize afterwards, once you know the things that need to be a system."

To enjoy the best of both worlds, I had to adopt a new strategy and make trade-offs as I learned the nuances of exploring.

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The principles of an explorer

Although I was already enjoying the discovery of new ideas, I hadn't fully experienced startup life until last year, let alone the craziness of building AI products. What comes next are the hard lessons I came to understand through a lot of iteration, keeping a growth mindset, and being curious about how things can evolve. The overarching principle is explore → iterate → exploit.

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1. Adaptive systems over rigid frameworks

I'll be the first to admit that it's tempting to create structure right after joining if you're used to it. However, reusing old patterns before even knowing if you'll have to pivot your entire business in 6 months is a dangerous trap. Instead, I'm focusing on building minimal viable structures that evolve as the product grows, adapting to pre-PMF startups that need flexibility over predictability.

Daily practices:

• Systematize only when it's needed. Just enough documentation until patterns emerge organically.

• Document, reflect, and learn. Lightweight personal decision logs to capture learnings and inform yearly retrospectives.

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2. Entrepreneurial product intuition

Designing an MVP is one thing. Becoming a founding designer in the age of AI? That's a whole different story. To design at an early stage, you have to shift from a traditional design mindset to entrepreneurial product thinking, which is an ongoing practice of immersing yourself in product and customer data to confidently prioritize your bets.

Daily practices:

• Find signal through the noise. Actively monitor user feedback, market pulse, and competitor news to spot trends and outliers.

• Build strong product sense. Dive into identifying emerging opportunities that others haven't pointed out to make decisions despite the ambiguity.

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3. Exploration beyond traditional boundaries

Shaping a product during its early phases requires full-stack problem-solving. This is demonstrated by technical curiosity, business insight, and a willingness to collaborate across various fields, regardless of job title. This is the stage to do some ad-hoc data analysis, influence GTM, or leverage prompt engineering to shape new solutions. The lines are blurring fast, making expanding our impact as product builders easier than ever.

Daily practices:

• Curiosity to do unsolicited exploration. Proactively run experiments and get involved in conversations across disciplines, acquiring new perspectives to inform better design decisions.

• Thrive in autonomy with high agency. Discover problems independently, proposing solutions and taking ownership of their outcomes to drive the vision forward.

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Parting thoughts

In the last couple of years, I have travelled a few times without having an actual plan other than where I'm staying and my return ticket. It has created unique experiences in ways I didn't expect, so I'm striving for just enough planning these days. Like my traveling habits, I've embraced a dynamic role and processes that are hard to put into words, but have expanded my impact and accelerated my growth exponentially.

My past self would probably be in disbelief at seeing my current way of working, and that's okay. It was a different chapter of my career that required a different mindset than the one I've come to develop over the last two years. Truth be told, startup life isn't for everyone, but if you're willing to jump on this kind of exploration, you're in for quite the adventure.

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Shortcuts

• Some leaders are not a good fit for 0 to 1 products, explained by Shreyas Doshi

• Don't trust the (design) process, by Jenny Wen to remind us all what truly matters

• How to Build a Truly Useful AI Product, an insightful essay by Chris Pedregal

• Designing the future of Cursor, a Dive Club interview with Ryo Lu

• The ultimate guide to the founding designer role, by Tom Scott and Ivy Mukherjee.

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It's always more fun to learn with others than doing it alone, so don't hesitate to reach out on Twitter if you want to continue the conversation. If this article has been helpful, share it with a friend!

Over and out,

Laura ✌️​​

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There’s so much content out there these days that it feels hard to imagine a world where we didn’t have access to information so easily, especially now with AI tools like Perplexity ready to answer your questions in a blink. For us curious types, it’s a dream come true!

At the same time, there’s so much content out there these days that it can be daunting. You can follow thought leaders, content creators, and newsletters; before you know it, you’re drowning in a sea of information.

Although I’m a curious and lifelong learner, I know that if I didn’t approach my information diet intentionally, I could easily become overwhelmed by the amount of information at my disposal. It would no longer be fun learning.

How are we supposed to purposely learn and develop taste when drowning in everyone else’s opinions and hot takes?

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The evolution of content consumption

The early days of my career were an organic discovery journey of constant learning. Since everything was new to me, my initial criteria for consuming content was fairly simple: Is it related to web or mobile design? If yes, I would read it, watch it, or listen to it.

This technique worked for a while, taking me down a few rabbit holes and expanding my horizons, but after a few hundred bookmarks, it became unsustainable to grab everything with a UX tag on it. My bookmarks looked like an encyclopedia, but lacked a clear direction, almost like going to a supermarket without a budget or a menu. I was collecting everything, but only extracting specific bits of information when I wanted a technical or theory refresh, instead of having a constant value stream.

Over time, I naturally developed a more focused consumption based on broad domains I wanted to master. I went through various phases like Design Systems, DesignOps, leadership, and business acumen. I learned immensely during those phases, both with theory and practice, but something else was still lacking.

Each phase taught me different things, but when trying to develop better taste, you must be selective beyond just themes or skills. I thought I was developing taste by consuming more, but I was becoming a repository of other people's opinions. That’s when I realized I needed better criteria to select my learning sources in a way that would directly inform my opinion.

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A forward-looking taste development

Taste has become a buzzword these days: Fuzzy, flashy, and yet hard to put into words. In a practical sense, it’s a skill that can be learned, but you need to nurture it, and it doesn’t happen with mere execution. How do you develop good taste? I could try hundreds of wine varieties, but that exercise on its own doesn’t mean I’ll become a wine connoisseur.

Veteran PM and startup advisor, Shreyas Doshi, explained how you decide the content you consume and, most importantly, the value you attribute to the source of this content. In other words, it’s up to you to decide how much influence each source of knowledge will have in shaping your judgment. It makes you question: Which voices in your feed shape your thinking versus just filling time?

With this in mind, I reverse-engineered my judgment criteria when I’m encountering a new source, and found myself asking the following questions:

1. Does it demonstrate critical thinking? Or is it just an echo chamber?

   Anyone can put a hot take out there and get attention, but if self-reflection and a learning mindset aren’t present, I won’t trust their perspective.

2. Did it make me reflect, learn, or get inspired?

   Whenever I encounter an idea that re-shapes and expands my perspective, it creates a natural excitement to evolve. Bonus points if it makes me eager to build or write about it.

3. Is this pushing my character arc forward? Furthermore, do I want to pursue this story?

   Having a North Star of what type of professional I want to become makes it easier to identify which types of learning and niche topics help me advance. I am also open to having side quests as part of my non-linear career path.

While none of these questions are a simple yes or no, I can look at each piece of content through these lenses to decide whether to save it, follow this source, or even build on top of it. I’m looking for insights I can easily revisit during my next project, career pivot, or even years in advance when touching on an adjacent subject, like nurturing a garden of ideas for my future self. High-value sources aren't just informative, they transform how you think.

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The intentional curation system

One of my favorite questions to ask designers during interviews is where they find inspiration and learning. Sometimes, they share specific accounts or publications, and on rare occasions, they include a podcast or a YouTube channel. This question isn’t intended to collect sources, although it’s a nice way to find new sources I might check out later. I’m interested in the intentionality behind their source selection, to know if they seek them or passively consume whatever happens to appear on their social media feed that day.

I like to see this practice as filtering the signal through the noise. It’s an ongoing practice that will make it easier for me to “stumble upon” high-value content, instead of giving in to FOMO and chasing every top article out there, but feeling empty. Here’s how:

Step 1: Define your taste profile

• What kind of creative work makes you stop scrolling and say "whoa”?

  Think in general terms, with openness to explore other creative fields outside of yours.

• What problems are you genuinely curious about solving?

  Be honest about which industries or problem spaces you naturally gravitate to, which can be as niche or broad as you want, as long as you put it into words.

• Whose work do you admire, not just for outcomes but for approach?

  I did this exercise a while ago, of decoding the people whose perspectives I valued the most. I came up with a few adjectives that resonated the most, which makes it easier to compare against the next time I might enter a rabbit hole of someone else’s body of work.

Step 2: Curate your influences

• Insightful sources.

  Based on the problems you enjoy, look for individuals, publications, or shows that have built a reputation in that space, the ones that spark ideas whenever you check their content.

• Active practicioners.

  Theory is fantastic, but combining that with practice is a much more powerful combo. Look for those experimenting and having fun while doing it, especially those sharing their roadblocks and how they overcame them.

• Adjacent explorers.

  I can’t stress enough the value of allowing inspiration and learning to come from other fields that are closely related or even outside of yours. It’ll enrich your perspective more than you might expect.

Step 3: Active taste development

• Always-on radar.

  Once you trust a source, be open to taking side quests when they recommend other content or individuals, which can lead to unexpected but delightful learnings along your journey.

• Quarterly purge.

  Unfollow/unsubscribe based on value delivered, consciously refining your inbox or daily feeds.

• Annual Reflection.

  How has your taste evolved? What patterns emerge that weren’t there a year ago? This can also lead to a pivot based on evolving goals.

To put this in context, I want to share two sources that have yielded high value for me over the years: the Today in Design newsletter and the Dive Club podcast. Both are curated by designers in the loop of the most relevant industry topics and the most impressive work getting shipped out there. Following both creates new avenues for high-quality content worth your time.

If you make it this far in the article, here’s a treat for you. I’ve received occasional requests to share my “must follow” recommendations, so I’ve finally assembled a starter pack for designers with over 100 individuals worth following. I guarantee you won’t be short on learning and inspiration with the quality of their work. Check it out here.

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Parting thoughts

With how limited and valuable time is, don’t you think we can invest in curating the information we’re exposed to? “Taste” doesn’t happen overnight, nor does it happen without intention and investment, and selectively filtering the signal through the noise of your daily feed is an investment with compounding effects. Just like an outcome-driven diet will make you feel healthier, this practice will directly shape your future self because you choose who influences your creative instincts.

There’s more content and channels to consume now than it used to back when I started. The difference is that now that I’m putting the FOMO aside and focusing on quality over quantity, I feel more energized, inspired, and challenged than ever. The goal isn't to know everything, it's to know what matters for the creative you're becoming.

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Shortcuts

• How to Remember What You Read, by Farnam Street

• Do I actually have good taste?, one of four questions Shreyas wishes he’d asked himself sooner

• Most People Don't Have Good Taste — And What You Can Do About It, also by Shreyas

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It's always more fun to learn with others than doing it alone, so don't hesitate to reach out on Twitter or Bluesky if you want to continue the conversation. If this article has been helpful, share it with a friend!

Over and out,

Laura ✌️​

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Raise your hand if you prefer small gatherings of like-minded people over crowded networking events full of strangers, where exchanging contact information feels like trading cards. If you’re anything like me, especially as an introvert, the mere thought of it makes you uncomfortable, like a homework assignment that isn’t fun, but you know you have to do it anyway. I dreaded the advice of “you need to increase your network,” not because I didn’t see the value, but because the process seemed too transactional for my taste. That is, until I met Mindaugas.

I met him back in 2021. He was leading On Deck Design, and I was applying to join. He asked me what I could offer to the design community, but I barely knew anyone in the industry, so I froze. This realization encouraged me to make a change, despite the geographical distance to tech hubs. It marked the beginning of my journey of learning how connections could be built in a way that felt authentic to who I am.

This is why, when I finally decided to write this article, I knew Mindaugas was the perfect person to partner with. With a long track record of connecting designers, either as a recruiter or by building communities, he understands the impact of meaningful connections. Traditional networking doesn’t cut it in today’s job market, so this is how we’re doing it, how you can get started, and we’ve also included a few personal anecdotes we’ve experienced over the years.

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The Anti-Networking

When the word “networking” comes up, common wisdom suggests that you should:

• Grow your LinkedIn connections exponentially to become a top voice

• Ask strangers for referrals, since those will surely get you an interview

• Cold-message influencers, asking for a portfolio review, because they have to help the community

• Attending as many in-person events as possible, to talk to as many people as humanly possible

Just looking at the list feels misaligned with how authentic relationships actually form. No wonder people have a strong aversion to the concept of networking as a whole. If you take this approach, it can feel like crossing an item from a long list of tasks to have a stronger network… supposedly.

With the current job market, posting on LinkedIn or Twitter that you're hiring is like asking to be flooded with hundreds of “I’ve applied,” “I’m interested,” or AI-generated DMs in a matter of hours. Playing a numbers game is not helpful for anyone involved because you look exactly like that, just a number.

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Over the years, I’ve lost count of how many times strangers have landed in my DMs with the same blunt request: “Hey, I see you have a big network. Can you introduce me to people?”

That’s it with no context and zero effort - straight to the ask. It’s wild when you really stop to think about it. We’ve all become more accessible thanks to social media, and that’s mostly a good thing. But somewhere along the way, some people started to confuse accessibility with obligation. Just because someone’s inbox is open doesn’t mean you’re entitled to their time, or their network.

The ask itself is fascinating: We don’t know each other. There’s no background, no specificity, no relationship. It’s like walking up to a stranger at a party and asking them to vouch for you with all their friends, sight unseen. Even if I wanted to help, all the work lands on me: figure out what you want, scan my mental rolodex, make connections on your behalf without so much as a proper hello. It’s not just a big ask. It’s a miss on what makes connections meaningful in the first place.

— Mindaugas

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We’ve all experienced this at some point, either by taking the advice of growing our network fast or receiving such requests, but the good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way.

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Connecting Without an Agenda

Let’s start by stating what this new way of connecting is not:

• It's not a transaction → It’s about building relationships

• It's not a numbers game → It’s about getting to know others individually

• It is not an overnight solution → It takes time to nurture each relationship

If we take away the traditional approach, it can feel as if we don’t have anything to get started with, because the common misconception of first-time conversations is that you need to offer something in order to receive something else in return. But what if there are other ways to kick off a conversation? In our experience, the best connections start without an agenda, and here’s how we do it:

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Everything changed when I started sharing the things I was building, especially prototypes I hacked together out loud. Suddenly, the conversations that landed in my inbox looked and felt completely different.

Take just last night: an ex-colleague I hadn’t spoken to in years messaged me out of nowhere. He’d built his first idea with Lovable and wanted to share it, just because he saw I’d been experimenting publicly. It wasn’t about a favour or an introduction. It was curiosity, excitement, and a little bit of “Hey, look what I made too.”

I get these messages pretty often now from people I’ve never met who say, “I saw you build that thing, and it nudged me to finally try it myself.” It’s not transactional. It’s the start of a real conversation, and usually, I want to talk to them. When someone reaches out because they paid attention, because they cared enough to create something, it’s night and day from a cold ask for access. It’s an actual connection, not a shortcut.

The difference couldn’t be clearer: One approach is all take, the other is an invitation to build something together even if it’s just a five-minute exchange. I’ll take the second kind every time.

— Mindaugas

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Want to stand out from the crowd of mass messages? Don’t just ask, share with curiosity and a personal touch. Building meaningful connections is like gardening: planting seeds, taking consistent care, and harvesting relationships that grow naturally over time.

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Remember how I mentioned initially that I didn’t have a strong network a few years ago? I took matters into my own hands to find creative ways of connecting remotely. Having a background in music and illustration, I knew how powerful it is to build relationships through shared interests, so I played to my strengths and leveraged exactly that.

I started doing small interactions with people in the industry whose work or perspective I admired, one message at a time, sharing my thoughts or saying thanks without expecting a reply.

It looked like Twitter replies, DMs, cold outreach, a newsletter reply, or a question during a webinar. Sometimes, I even started out by catching on a reference or replying with a GIF because I wanted to make sure it felt genuine both ways, and it worked like a charm.

Nowadays, when I attend Config in SF, my favorite part is meeting and talking with those friends in real life, built upon years of small but meaningful interactions with a strong compounding effect. If you do it intentionally, you could start those conversations during the event itself.

— Laura

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Have you noticed the common patterns happening in these scenarios? We didn’t start by asking for anything, not a follow-back or LinkedIn connection. We didn’t mass-message high-profile individuals to expand our network. All we did was find a topic we were already passionate about, share our thoughts publicly or privately with the author, and keep the conversation going. By leveraging a topic we enjoy, conversations are easier to get started, much like you would at a Comic-Con, and there are many ways to get started with it.

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Small Actions That Compound

Now, how can we turn this into action? Similarly to how you could increase your professional visibility, there are broadly three angles you can take to spark conversations:

1. Creating a serendipity surface area by sharing authentic exploration, increasing the chances for the right people to find you, just like it happened with the Lovable prototypes

2. Demonstrating how you think, which is what people actually hire for, and we both have seen that happen through our writing

3. Building relationships based on shared interests rather than networking obligations, and leads to “I’m so happy to finally meet you” when you chat in person for the first time

We’re social by nature, so exploring with curiosity, sharing your thought process, and leveraging your interests is a much better game plan than hoping for people to know you exist. If you want to try this, you can start small with these ideas:

1. Build something small and share the process

   Create small throwaway prototypes to explore new tools, then document how you built them. This is the easiest way to stand out right now, and you can experiment without technical ability.

2. Engage authentically with others' work

   Respond to work that genuinely resonates with you, but get specific about what connected with your own experience, engaging with people whose thinking aligns with yours.

3. Share your contrarian takes, thoughtfully

   Articulate where you disagree with common wisdom, but explain your reasoning clearly. Wes Kao calls it “Spiky point of view,” which is taking a stand on a topic you care a lot about, but most people are afraid to do so.

4. Find your people through adjacent interests

   Engage in conversations that blend your professional work with your personal interests. These intersections reveal more dimensions of who you are and what moves you.

5. Create low-stakes opportunities for connection

   Suggest small, specific ways to continue conversations without big commitments. Instead of “Can I pick your brain?” try “I'd love your thoughts on this prototype.” And if you have a bigger ask, do your work to make it easier to get a yes.

These are just a few ways you can use to get started, and over time, build your own tactics that feel less like a transaction and more like we used to feel when making new friends as kids. Not sure if it'll work? Try us, our DMs are open ;)

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Parting thoughts

This anti-networking approach is uncommon, requires patience to see results, and might put you in a vulnerable position. Still, if you’re willing to put in the effort to build genuine connections and remain consistent, you’ll develop deeper relationships that will last longer than a transactional message most will probably never even read.

This approach won't get you hired next week or boost your follower count overnight. What it will do is help you build relationships with people who genuinely care about your success. You don't need profound insights to start, just curiosity about other people's work. Your next meaningful connection is probably one thoughtful message away.

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Resources

• Config Confidence: An Introvert’s Journey to Conference Success, by yours truly and her experience during Config 2024, even as an introvert in a sea of conference attendees

• The career game you didn’t know you were playing, by Mindaugas on how to open up unexpected opportunities over time, as the "right people" start to notice your thinking

• What’s In It For Me?, by Dan Mall where he shares in detail how to craft a compelling ask through making the effort of figuring out what they want

• How to get an enthusiastic yes, by Wes Kao to learn how to frame your message in a way that makes it easier to get a yes when you ask

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  Thanks for reading it depends! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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It's always more fun to learn with others than doing it alone, so don't hesitate to reach out on Twitter if you want to continue the conversation, you can find Mindaugas on LinkedIn sharing his latest experiments, and make sure to check out his publication Lines Open. If this article has been helpful, share it with a friend!

Over and out,

Laura ✌️​

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Last month, I shared my musings on how creative habits differentiate good designers from great ones. I want to share another indicator I’ve identified over the years: asking questions. Not just asking them for the sake of it, but being completely intentional about their purpose.

I’ve seen firsthand how a room full of curious minds can elevate a fireside chat to a memorable moment that leaves you full of insights and motivation afterward. On the other hand, a project kick-off with poor questions or no questions at all can easily leave the wrong impression of a disengaged designer despite their good intentions.

To me, this is an underrated skill for not just any designer but anyone involved in building products. Let’s explore how we can level up our game of asking better questions exactly when needed.

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Questions as Turning Points

Have you ever played “Guess Who”? I loved that game as a kid. For those unfamiliar with it, you and another player each have a board with 48 face cards, and a randomly selected face card in front of you. Each player will try to guess the other player’s face by asking questions about their appearance, eliminating suspects until one of you makes a correct guess. The key to the entire game is to get the most essential information and make an educated guess with the least amount of questions. That sounds oddly familiar to work-related meetings.

It’s easy to just go through the motions and forget how easily a question can impact a conversation, so I decided to make a list. It could be even longer, but you get the gist. These are some situations in which great questions can be incredibly valuable:

• Interviews, both as an applicant and as a hiring manager

• Design critiques with your team

• Design reviews with stakeholders

• User interviews with users of your product

• 1:1s, both as a manager and as a direct report

• Negotiations with potential customers

• Discovery calls with a client

• and the list goes on...

If questions are so important, why do we take the backseat and avoid stepping up to make thoughtful and nuanced questions? It can be a matter of shyness, lack of experience, or just not knowing how to ask things in the first place. Regardless of the reason, the best approach I’ve seen in practice is simple: Plan ahead of time and listen carefully.

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Curiosity as Method, Not Just Mindset

Why is the sky blue? Can we travel to the sun? What’s in the depths of the sea?

These are all kinds of questions any curious kid would ask. I still have them, and look for answers almost instantly because I want to understand genuinely. Asking questions professionally is not too far from that, at least not for me. You want to understand something, pose a big question, and pay close attention to the answer.

It looks something like this:

Learning goal → Key questions → Use active listening

1. Learning goal
   I like to start, first and foremost, with what I want to learn; everything else should follow suit. This can be the main problem: what the other person cares about the most, or how that team defines success. Clarifying the end will prevent you from asking unnecessary questions or going down the wrong path.

2. Key questions
   This is the part where you share the big questions that hopefully get you the answers to learn. Make no mistake, I’m not talking about big existential questions that will prevent people from sleeping later that day. Sometimes, asking “Why is this important?” or “How could this go wrong?” will get you further. The nuance behind the answers will yield the most results, not the ones that give you predictable answers, so aim for open questions, not leading ones.

3. Active listening
   This, to me, is the hardest part, and I’m sure many can relate. The point of asking better questions is to get the best insights, but it’s always tempting to keep thinking of the following question on the script and fall into the trap of listening without paying attention. Instead, focus on genuinely understanding what the other person is sharing, which can get you to unexpected insights, unscripted questions, and diving deeper.

If these steps sound familiar, it's because I’m borrowing from user research’s playbook. During a Dive Club episode, Noam Segal, Head of UX Research at Zapier, explained how, during an interview, the person conducting the interview tends to follow a script blindly instead of paying attention and allowing the conversation to flow naturally to find unscripted follow-up questions that would uncover much more valuable insights.

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Crafting High-Value Questions

Before diving into this topic, my first instinct was to say it depends. It truly does; it depends on the context, airtime, audience, and so much more. Regardless of the highly nuanced nature of when and where this is happening, I’m also systematic. When I found this talk from Chris Do on this topic, I knew it would provide me with answers.

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In the talk, Chris shared a practical framework that he uses to create better questions. It's called the “Pro-ACT” framework and comes from Jason Barron's book The Visual MBA.

• What is the problem? Understand the real challenge

• Have a clear objective: Define clear goals

• What are the alternatives? Consider multiple options

• Consequences of each alternative: Evaluate the impact

• What are the tradeoffs? What does saying yes/no mean

What I like most about this framework is its flexibility, without necessarily making binary rules about the structure. Each point of this list can be a series of questions and be phrased slightly differently depending on the conversation, but once again, the idea is not to treat them as a script to follow or a checklist to go through. The ultimate goal remains: Learn, understand, and gain clarity to move forward.

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Your Question Toolkit

About 8 years ago, my game plan was straightforward before I had conversations with stakeholders. Before the first meeting with a client, I would ask the PM for a background overview. This would give me ideas of key pieces of context I wanted to understand, which would materialize as a loose question list for the meeting. Only years later, reflecting on my process, I understood why I did this: I needed to leave that meeting with a clear path for actions. I needed clarity.

Over time, I developed a different approach, going for quality over quantity to ask the least amount of questions while also getting the highest amount of insights. In some cases, you could even make just one question, but if it’s a question that leads to deeper understanding and clarity, I can assure you it’s a win-win all around. You'll leave the conversation feeling confident about what happens next, a natural eagerness to see what happens next that reminds me of a child’s questions and the rabbit hole they usually open up. Better questions will get you the confidence to take the right next step.

During this time, I found tricks to prepare better questions. Banks of questions like this one are easy to start, but now I prefer to “steal” great questions from experts in their field, taking note and keeping them in my pocket for the next time I’m in a similar conversation where it fits the purpose. Here are a few sources I’ve saved over the years:

• Discovery questions with a prospective client, by Dan Mall — Perfect to encourage prospective clients to talk about the future

• Business questions during a design project, by Alen Faljic — Strategic prompts that connect design decisions to business outcomes

• Questions to develop rigorous thinking, by Wes Kao — Thought-provoking questions to challenge assumptions and push past surface-level analysis

• Career reflection questions, by Julie Zhuo — To guide introspection about your career path when you're feeling stuck or considering your next move

• High-signal-to-noise interview questions, by guests on Lenny’s Newsletter — Battle-tested questions from industry leaders, whether you're interviewing users or potential team members

Look at them and grab the ones that fit your most immediate conversation. None of them is a one-size-fits-all, but they can become powerful tools in your arsenal if used properly. It takes time to come up with your questions, especially when you’re just starting, but I’ve found that analyzing and trying out the questions others have shared has helped me develop critical thinking about making the right questions at the right time.

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Parting thoughts

You can tell a lot about a person based on their questions. Are they asking obvious binary questions, or do they make you pause and reflect? Are they going for the safe questions, or does it help to uncover valuable insights? Are they going on tangent, or does it move the conversation forward? It seems obvious when someone is good at that, yet it’s hard to describe most of the time.

Each section of this article could become an article of its own. What started as an introspective moment of trying to understand why questions matter in the first place was a deeper discussion on any avenue I wanted to go, but I wasn’t going for that here. Instead, I tried to treat it as a pause on a topic we rarely discuss, reflect, and remix some of these ideas to make them your own.

Regardless of where you are in your career, improving your questions will be an invaluable skill wherever you go. It has certainly helped me a lot and allowed me to be in conversations where it wasn’t common to see a designer. Everyone knew it would help others as well, even if I wasn’t the one talking the majority of the time. I hope these learnings are helpful for you or someone you know, so you can start improving your question game as soon as today.

Before your next meeting, write down three questions that focus on learning rather than confirming what you already believe. Notice how responses to these questions shape your understanding differently. So tell me, what are your favorite questions?

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Learning shortcuts

• Tools and tactics for modern user research, Dive Club interview with Noam Segal

• The Art of Asking the Right Question, by Caroline Reidy

• Rick Rubin’s approach with artists, on the Lex Fridman Podcast

• The introvert’s guide of how to sell without being to selsy, a Twitter space by Chris Do

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It's always more fun to learn with others than doing it alone, so don't hesitate to reach out on Twitter or Bluesky if you want to continue the conversation. If this article has been helpful, share it with a friend!

Over and out,

Laura ✌️​

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I've been thinking a lot lately about early career designers, particularly about spotting the difference between good and great potential. After reflecting on designers who've made exceptional career leaps, I've noticed something consistent: it's rarely about raw talent alone. The differentiator often lies in their systems of daily habits and practices.

Coincidentally, I just finished James Clear's 'Atomic Habits,' which articulates this perfectly: 'Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.' This insight crystallized something I've observed throughout my career—successful designers aren't simply waiting for inspiration or opportunity; they're building systematic habits that compound over time, creating a foundation for excellence that appears almost magical to outside observers.

With this hypothesis in mind, I’ve gathered a few examples of the creative habits of 3 top-level designers that you can start practicing today. Let’s dive in!

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Build a secret repertoire that fuels unexpected connections

While the average designer might wait until they’re about to start a project to look for inspiration, founder and creative director Tobias van Schneider takes a much more intentional approach. He has invested a lifelong effort in collecting inspirational references daily in his secret repertoire.

The topic of inspiration is one of my favorites, and I’ve explored it in the past. At its simplest form, it’s all about exploring outside of your field, paying attention to all kinds of inspiration, and capturing those that make you feel something. It doesn’t have to fit anything you’re working on right now; you’re cultivating an ever-growing vault of meaningful references, what Tobias likes to call his “garden of ideas.”

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By casting your net wide and maintaining a passive habit of finding meaning in your everyday life, you’ll build a private collection of references that will help you to come up with original ideas by connecting the dots between seemingly unlike sources. You can read his approach in depth in his article “How to build your secret repertoire.”

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How you can turn it into a habit:

• Daily Single Capture – Save one inspiring thing daily, regardless of current relevance. The constraint makes it stick.

• Monthly Field-Hopping – Dedicate each month to collecting inspiration from one non-design discipline. Architecture this month, fashion the next.

• Physical Space Gallery – Photograph real-world solutions to design problems in unexpected places like restaurants, airports, or retail.

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Embrace the mundane to discover extraordinary possibilities

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“The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.”

— James Clear

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Following Tobias’ practice of a secret repertoire, let’s look at how Dan Mall connects the dots with his habit of creating an influence page at the beginning of a project, even after +25 years of a truly impressive career.

In an article for Figma’s publication Shortcut, Dan explained how important it is to “warm up” before you start designing, just like any athlete would warm up before competing. One of those warm-ups is creating a page full of inspiration, such as websites, campaigns, editorial design, and any other type of visual material that can shape his creative direction.

Dan Mall’s exploration of his new website is a perfect example. Based on the idea of “helping designers get their flowers,” he gathered samples of flowers from books and remixed editorial layouts. Then, he handpicked seasonal flowers to reimagine them, inspired by Rachel Ruysch's beautiful work. The final art direction is one of a kind, driven by beauty.

The beginning of any project can feel dull and stagnant if you’re not particularly passionate about the topic. That’s why assembling a curated collection of references can help you explore possible futures like Doctor Strange in Infinity War and turn a trivial task into a meaningful and enjoyable practice.

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How you can turn it into a habit:

• Pre-Constraints Exploration – Create a visual direction in the first hour of any project before practical limitations enter the picture.

• Medium Transformation – Reimagine boring deliverables (forms, legal pages) as if they were entirely different media formats.

• Analog Warmup – Begin each new project with manual sketching before touching digital tools, like scales, before a concert.

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Turn learning into a game where failing is half the fun

Many designers are overwhelmed by all the new and disruptive design tools, especially the ones driven by AI. But not Tommy Geoco, author of UX Tools and the yearly Design Tools Survey.

Although it seems like everyone, their pet, and their neighbor is talking about AI tools, his approach, born out of curiosity and a genuine desire to inspire other designers to explore, brings a fresh perspective to playing with these new tools. He’s constantly sharing sick design inspiration, spotlighting designers who ship, and sharing his own experiments, like when he turned Sesame’s AI voice demo into a D&D dungeon master. You can’t watch this type of exploration and not smile.

In one of his recent experiments, the Bild Wars design battle, he took this passion for learning to another level. Both participants were tasked with creating a landing page for an AI robotics company called Pulse, and 40,000 people watched it happen live. The most interesting part of it all was seeing in practice how tools can empower anyone to solve problems better than ever. Entertainment was just the cherry on top.

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Just like it happened with Flash, Photoshop, Sketch, and Figma, the tools help to shape the design practice, and there’s no better way to understand how it fits into your workflow than trying them yourself. Tommy said it best himself, “the designers doing the most interesting production work are not afraid of new tools, they’re using them to do thing that weren’t previously possible.”

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How you can turn it into a habit:

• Tool-Specific Side Projects – Assign each personal project a different tool you want to learn. Low stakes, high learning.

• Weekly AI Experiments – Spend 30 minutes weekly asking "what if?" questions with new AI tools and documenting discoveries.

• New Tool Weekend Sprints – When a significant tool launches, give yourself a weekend to build something.

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Transitioning to Better Habits

Starting new habits is like switching design tools mid-career—your muscle memory fights you at every turn. Most designers abandon new practices when deadlines hit, falling into the "I'll get back to my inspiration collection next week" trap.

Here's what actually works:

• Start impossibly small: Save just one inspirational image today. That's it.

• Connect it to existing routines: Add one step to your morning social scroll—hit save on something interesting.

• Reduce friction: Keep inspiration tools on your home screen and desktop. When it's easier to do than avoid, you've won.

• Expect the dip: Around days 10-14, motivation fades before the habit becomes automatic. This isn't failure—it's part of the process.

These habit transitions don't have to be dramatic reinventions of your workflow. They're more like minor adjustments to your existing patterns—tweaking the kerning of your daily routine rather than switching typefaces entirely.

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Parting thoughts

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"The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this."

— James Clear

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One of the most powerful ideas I found in Atomic Habits was how your identity is shaped by your habits (and vice versa), either consciously or unconsciously. Instead of adopting habits to achieve goals, you have to choose habits that are aligned with the identity you want to attain.

It takes a quick Google search to know that these three designers have careers that any designer could dream of. Tobias has designed logos that went to space multiple times, Dan Mall ran a 7-figure Design System agency for over a decade, and Tommy Geoco publishes the well-known Annual Design Tools Survey. I’m sure all of them have received countless requests for advice over the years, but if you ask me, the first thing I would do as a junior designer is to take note of their creative habits and try them out myself.

Results might not be noticeable in a day, a week, or a month, but every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become, and actions speak louder than words. So ask yourself: What type of designer do I want to be? Your habits should reflect that.

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It's always more fun to learn with others than doing it alone, so don't hesitate to reach out on Bluesky if you want to continue the conversation. If this article has been helpful, share it with a friend!

Over and out,

Laura ✌️​

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It’s been only two years since the launch of GPT-3.5 in 2022, but it somehow feels like we’ve been through 10 years of technology evolution. Personally, I was skeptical at first. Anything using superlatives to claim that it’ll forever change your workflow usually seems too good to be true. Because of that, I took an observation approach and only used ChatGPT for small tasks, waiting for something that would spark my curiosity.

It wasn’t until the end of 2023 that I tried Perplexity. Their branding focused on curiosity got my attention and made me wonder, “what if I could easily answer -almost- any question that comes to mind?”. So I did that. I started asking any question that came to my mind, and I got my answers in seconds. It felt magical.

That’s when it hit me: If I want to expand my toolkit in the AI era, I have to start with curiosity instead of following prescribed workflows. Today I want to share three experiments with AI tools that have changed my workflow while allowing me to have fun in the process.

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AI as a Thought Partner

I’ve been writing it depends consistently since October of 2023; before that, I had only written a few articles here and there. Up to this point, my writing process has been very organic:

Using my voice and style to share my thoughts feels natural, but I’ve always wanted to improve it somehow. What if Claude could help me with the writing process? I was curious enough to try, with one caveat: I would do the actual writing.

I started with brainstorming possible angles for an article. I briefly explained the content, the audience, goals, and a few questions I recently learned from Wes Kao on rigorous thinking. I really liked the results, which included examples and questions that could be answered depending on each possible angle, so I kept going.

It helped me build an outline that was initially too long, so I asked to shorten it and explain the narrative. I was gaining momentum, so I felt confident about starting my first draft. From then on, I started an iterative process, switching from brainstorming to editing, even asking for a score to get a good sense of how close I was to finishing, not to aim for perfection, but to understand how each review improved compared to the last.

By the end, I retook a brainstorming approach and asked for ideas to write a blurb and an outro, after which I could do a grammar review and hit publish. Mission accomplished!

Thanks to Claude, this is how my workflow looks now:

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Transforming Passive Learning with Granola

As a life-long learner, watching a talk or listening to a podcast isn't an isolated action for me. I want to save ideas to reference back and keep learning from them in the future, which is why I love using tools like mymind and Notion to capture my findings in different ways, either as practical learnings, inspiration, quotes, or resources that are mentioned.

Last year, I started using Granola. It’s a game-changer like no other for note-taking during meetings, trusting that the main ideas, questions, and action items will be captured for me, allowing in turn to be truly present during conversations. It’s so good that I wondered: Can I use it to take notes in other scenarios? Let’s see what happens.

I selected a Dive Club episode I was already familiar with, an interview with Soleio for which I had already taken notes and saved quotes when I first listened to it. All I had to do was start a new note in Granola, play the podcast episode, paste my notes, and avoid talking (Otherwise, it would go into the transcript). To make the experiment even more interesting, I set the speed to 1.5x to test the accuracy of the transcript.

Granola didn’t let me down in the slightest. It did a pretty fantastic job at enhancing my notes to capture so much more than I had previously jotted down. Still, I wanted to make these notes more personalized, so I used their hidden templates feature and looked for a suitable one. However, I didn’t find anything that suited my needs, so I took matters into my own hands.

I created a template of my own that I could reuse any time I wanted to take notes during a talk or podcast with the purpose of learning. As you can see, the descriptions are brief, but each section serves a purpose of how I approach learning from podcasts or talks: Practical, inspiring, and resourceful. Et voilà!

To take this even further, Granola has a Notion integration, so I’ve created a database dedicated to this use case. I can easily refer back to these notes any time in the future and include a source link like YouTube or Spotify. I’m eager to keep adding more in the future to enhance my learning experience.

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Nostalgic Prototype with v0

The 3rd and last experiment has been the most exploratory of all, and I knew going in that it wouldn’t be straightforward. There’s been a lot of discussion about tools like Replit, v0, Cursor, and many others, so I decided to try one at a time for a few weeks to get a good sense of its capabilities and limitations, without expecting a magic button that would instantly turn my ideas to life. I wanted to get my hands dirty.

It all started with a list of ideas I wanted to try, like a retro calculator, an easing curve tester with a grid of cards, an outfit checker, among many others. Each prototype has taught me something different. I now know that v0 can't do a pixel-perfect replica if you have effects and textures, or that just “asking” for 30 easing function cards is too broad, so I’ve put some ideas in the backlog.

A week ago, I decided to try to make a pixel art camera. It has been a roller coaster. Initially, my instructions weren’t creating the exact results I had in mind. If I asked for an accent color to be used, it was applied to all the buttons; if I asked for the Flip Camera button to be disabled, it was completely inaccessible, and don’t get me started on the filters. It felt like playing whack-a-mole with all the bug fixing.

One of the things that early iterations taught me was that working in chunks delivers the best results. I did the pixelated effect first, then added the controls, the visual language, and the capture view. Getting the filters right has been a very iterative process, the UI has broken down several times, and I even edited some of the code myself to fix minor bugs or improve the contrast of the filters.

Despite all of that, I was ecstatic every time a new piece fell into place. I was building something tangible with minimal code adjustments. After many iterations, I’m proud to present the v1 of the Retro Selfie camera. This is the first of what I hope will be many prototypes in the future, with a list of ideas that keeps growing because I’ve had so much fun.

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The Common Thread

I went into this process knowing that it would require patience and constant learning while leveraging playfulness to avoid falling into a strictly utilitarian approach. If it didn’t spark joy, it wouldn’t work for me. Throughout this AI-human collaboration, I’ve naturally developed some initial principles for future experiments:

1. Approach it with curiosity.
   All you need are simple questions to get started: Can it improve the quality of my writing? What about taking notes for me and letting me enjoy a podcast episode?

2. Define a clear intent.
   Instead of boiling down the ocean, use each tool with a clear purpose. Claude helped me to brainstorm and edit, Granola expanded my learning, and v0 allowed me to fast-track my prototyping game.

3. Make it your own.
   Treat each experiment as a “creative conversation” to fit your own needs, not a script. If you’re having fun while playing, you’ll be more likely to keep practicing.

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Parting thoughts

You must be thinking: “Laura, are you still skeptical?” I still am, to a certain degree, but I’m way more eager to keep tinkering and experimenting than I used to be over a year ago. At this point, it feels natural to reach out to Perplexity when I have a question, use Claude when I’m writing, have Granola in the background for enhanced note-taking, and I’m more eager than ever to keep testing other prototyping tools like v0.

You don’t need bells and whistles to get started. Aside from these experiments, I’ve done countless tests on a trial and error process, just like any other creative adventure of trying new materials and figuring out which ones you prefer because you enjoy the iterative process. Before you close this tab, jot down three repetitive tasks in your current workflow that spark zero joy. Those are your prime candidates for curious AI experimentation.

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It's always more fun to learn with others than doing it alone, so don't hesitate to reach out on Bluesky if you want to continue the conversation. If this article has been helpful, share it with a friend!

Over and out,

Laura ✌️​

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Several years ago, I was finally assigned to lead the MVP of my first big client. I was so eager to prove myself that, despite the project being an internal tool, I came up with a few novel ideas based on features I had seen in consumer products. This approach would surely improve the day-to-day work for this small user base, right?

During the stakeholder meeting, I excitedly presented bold feature ideas with seamless transitions, deep care for usability, and an aim for delight. Unsurprisingly, most of those ideas were rejected since timelines and budgets are almost always constraints in software development agencies. Although it seems obvious in hindsight, I was surprised at how easily the ideas were shut down.

This is how I learned that great design is about more than just aesthetics, which kick-started a journey to improve my communication skills and better understand how to make successful products, also known as product sense. Let’s explore how adjacent skills like these can make a powerful combination to go from tactical designer to strategic thinker.

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Reframing Design Problems

Although the word “product” is already explicit in the role of Product Designer, early in our careers, we tend to dismiss the needs of the product and the business. As we gain experience and perspective, we learn to see problems through different lenses.

Things started to make sense when I first saw this famous (and sometimes controversial) Venn diagram. The most important shouldn’t be which word goes at the center but rather how the overlap of lenses like desirability, feasibility, and viability create better products than apart. Essentially, moving from merely “how it looks” to understanding “why it matters” to everyone involved, not only the user.

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This seemingly simple diagram helped me shift my mindset, especially in the discovery phase. I invited engineers early on to ideate before opening Figma, and I asked the PMs to get involved in product conversations where design wasn’t even discussed. Still, it helped me make design trade-offs throughout the entire system.

The next time I led a multi-year project for an enterprise client, I was better equipped to approach the problem from different perspectives. The engineers were excited to collaborate more closely, the business stakeholders trusted the vision for the product, and I felt more capable of making decisions that would increase the likelihood of a successful product.

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Speaking Their Language

Over time, I learned that empathy wasn’t enough to make an impact on engineers and PMs. I needed to learn other languages to be a translator in conversations where the other person might not even know what Figma is. And I’m not talking about coding languages or my French class.

In a Dive Club episode from last year, Helen Tran shared her fascinating career journey, including her role as a founder. She explained that the main goal of design should be to create clarity. We can achieve that by being curious and asking more nuanced questions, which often leads to conversations that might seem outside of our traditional craft.

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“As soon as you start collecting more information, it becomes very clear what you do next”

— Helen Tran

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Have you ever visited a country where the language is so different from the one you speak? The first time this happened to me was in Iceland, and it was daunting. The language could have slowed me down or created unexpected challenges along the way. Thankful, I was able to instantly translate things on my phone, and Icelandic people spoke pretty good English, allowing me to fully enjoy the trip.

The same is true when designers work across domains, understanding why business priorities are in place, the technical constraints of a new feature, or fleshing out the GTM motion for the new product launch. The intention is not to forget about your tools and core skills as a designer but to acknowledge that we don’t have all the information and never will.

As we become fluent in languages such as business or product, we are better equipped to analyze various contexts and deeply understand problems. This newfound empathy for different domains will function as a natural translation to uncover nuanced insights, develop solid hypotheses that other functions can relate to, and ultimately influence the bottom line. It’s a win-win situation for everyone!

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The balancing act

Given the major shift in the tech industry, deep generalists with product sense, craft, and promptotyping1 are on the rise. The best part is that hybrid roles can be applied at all levels, from IC to executives, showing how multi-faceted professionals bring a broader perspective to their teams.

Another great example of leveraging adjacent skillsets in design practices comes from David Hoang. In his Hatch Conference talk, “Design and (Blank),” David shared how his career odyssey involved “irrelevant skills.” These skills created a compounding effect, making him the perfect fit to lead multiple functions, such as Design + Marketing at Replit and Design + AI at Atlassian. It all makes sense in retrospect, but you need a growth mindset to expand outside of your scope.

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Stories like these can feel like a risk of spreading too thin if you haven’t colored outside the lines before, but it’s not an evolution that needs to happen overnight. Start by leveraging your natural curiosity and talk with people outside your team to spot those relationship valleys that could benefit from a bridge. You might be surprised by how eager they are to share their knowledge and have a more fluent conversation that doesn’t have anyone feeling like a fish out of water. Here are some ideas to start your field research:

• Get a coffee chat with peers in other disciplines to act as a translator on behalf of your team. Maybe they’ve been waiting for an ally, and no one has shown interest… until you came around!

• During longer projects, offer to assist in conversations led by other functions that could benefit from your understanding of the product’s design. You’ll learn about their challenges while spreading empathy for the customer.

• Identify core skills of adjacent fields, try them out, and see what sticks. I get very excited when an engineer asks me about learning UI because they don’t need to become designers to leverage this skill and improve their craft.

As you go about this discovery process, do it like a designer and embrace the possibilities of evoking more empathy for the customer, even if it doesn’t require a fun whiteboarding session or a shiny new prototype. There’s no such thing as “too much empathy” regarding your customer.

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Parting thoughts

With the fast pace of technology, hybrid careers will undoubtedly become even more impactful due to their ability to bridge the gap across disciplines. Doing more with less is the new competitive advantage, and those capable of adapting and evolving are making their careers future-ready. My past self would undoubtedly be surprised to see my character development, including discussions about AI quality, market positioning, and impact on metrics that used to sound like Icelandic to me, but it has also been the most exciting chapter of my career.

The future of design goes far beyond pixels and prototypes. As our industry evolves, bridging disciplines becomes as essential as craftsmanship. Your journey from specialist to connector will not only increase your value—it will also enable you to create better products and stronger teams. Next time you encounter a challenge that appears to fall outside 'traditional design,' remember: that's precisely where the most meaningful work occurs. Take the initial step beyond your comfort zone, and keep in mind that confidence emerges after you take action, not before. The view from the bridge is worth it.

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Shortcuts

• The rise of the generalist by Carly Ayres, Editor at Figma

  Explores how versatility becomes a superpower in modern tech

• Can you become business-savvy without compromising design values? by Alen Faljic, CEO at d.MBA

  A practical guide to business acumen for designers

• The future of Design by Maven

  Curated courses on craft, strategy, and influence to become a full-stack designer.

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It's always more fun to learn with others than doing it alone, so don't hesitate to reach out on Bluesky if you want to continue the conversation. If this article has been helpful, share it with a friend!

Over and out,

Laura ✌️​

Last year, I shared my first compilation of career shortcuts, and I’d like to make this an annual tradition. Throughout the year, I hand-picked various tools, learning resources, and sources of inspiration that I discovered. This year, I am excited to share my favorite finds with you.

10 categories, 3 picks per topic, 30 shortcuts in total. Let's dive in!

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Favorite new tools

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• mymind

  I've been gathering and organizing thousands of reference materials for over a decade without finding a definite material, until I found mymind and haven't looked back.

• Perplexity

  As a relentlessly curious person, being able to easily find an answer to almost any question has been a dream come true.

• Granola

  Presenting and taking notes during a call isn't an easy task at all, but now I can focus on the conversation while Granola is taking notes.

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Tools I'm eager to try

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• Cursor

  I'll get my hands dirty and try to build a few personal projects next year.

• Play

  I'll be trying a new material next year by prototyping on iOS with native elements.

• Rive

  I'll be tinkering with interactive graphics to create delightful moments.

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Clever use of AI

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• Lennybot

  Trained on all Lenny's podcast episodes and newsletter posts (Including paid posts), this tool is like a massive wiki for all your product-related questions and so much more.

• How to build your designs with Claude and Cursor AI

  An inspiring story of how Meng To built DreamCut in 3 months with Claude and Cursor.

• How to leverage AI tools as a strategic designer

  This d.MBA webinar with Femke and Alen Faljic is a practical example of how we can leverage AI to increase our Business and Strategic Thinking.

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Inspiration

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• Shape of AI

  Emily Campbell created a fantastic collection of emerging design patterns to interact with AI products.

• Design Spells

  A design repository full of magical interactions to get inspired by.

• Invisible Details of Interaction Design

  This essay by Rauno is a wonderful exercise of observation, collecting everyday interactions and their physical counterpart.

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Design Systems resources

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• Design System University

  If I were to get started with Design Systems in 2025, I would go with Dan Mall's DSU before anything else.

• The Design System Guide

  A collection of curated resources for all things Design Systems.

• Design Systems Database

  Whenever you're looking to reference components from well-established Design Systems, this is the place to go.

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New courses

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• Executive Communication & Influence for Senior ICs and Managers

  I took this course by Wes Kao this year during the very first cohort, and it has been a tremendous investment to improve my day-to-day communication.

• How to measure UX and design impact

  If you're looking to get started with design metrics and KPIs, this new course by Vitaly Friedman is for you.

• Making UX Decisions

  This course by Tommy Geoco is aimed at improving a core skill for designers: High-impact and pragmatic decision-making, even under pressure.

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Talks

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• How to give and receive feedback

  This talk by Julie Zhuo is a practical and relatable approach to giving feedback, a sometimes tough but necessary skill.

• What makes a truly great software designer

  This Dive Club episode featuring Soleio is jam packed with lessons for software designers to stand out in today's context.

• 4 questions Shreyas wishes he’d asked himself sooner

  This candid conversation from the Lenny and Friends Summit dives on tricky questions for product builders: Time management, taste, enjoying your work, and listening.

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Articulating the impact of design

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• How to sharpen your analytical thinking—even if you’re "not a numbers person"

  Sharpening our analysis will help us to know what to look for and how to make sense out of it.

• Mini Design MBA

  Get started with Business Thinking by learning 5 key concepts every designer should know.

• Show design impact, without metrics

  There's a lot more than metrics to demonstrate the impact of design decisions.

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Job hunting tools

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• How to Write a UX Case Study to Showcase Your Skills, Experience, & Process

  This article by Sarah Doody provides a simple 5-step process for writing effective UX case studies.

• Teal

  Easily create and remix your resume to tailor it for every job you apply.

• Framer

  My go-to answer whenever someone asks me where to build their portfolio for the first time.

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Interview prep

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• The Product Designer's Interview Playbook

  A quick and practical guide to stand out in the interview process, filled with tips, strategies, and expert insights.

• Interviewing in today's UX design job market – prepare for 2025

  A full rundown of the UX design application process, from job market analysis all the way to negotiation.

• How to pass any first-round interview

  Single-handedly the most useful article I read to prepare for interviews during the time I was job hunting.

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If you scrolled all the way through, here's a bonus for all Arc users out there:

Easily add these links as a folder on your browser 📁

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It's always more fun to learn with others than doing it alone, so don't hesitate to reach out on Threads and Bluesky if you want to continue the conversation. If this article has been helpful, share it with a friend!

Over and out,

Laura ✌️