A 60-second crash course on quick thinking for designers
A 60-second crash course on quick thinking for designers:
Over the last 14 years, I’ve spent my design career working on product teams with aggressive shipping cycles.
This forced me to get competent in making snap-decision trade-offs every day.f
I tried a few lofty frameworks to improve my speed. But it was a simpler 3-question operation that made me fast on my feet.
When faced with a decision, I ask myself these questions, in this order:
1. What bet is the company making?
2. What design bets can support the company bet?
3. What is the weight of available information?
It breaks down like this:
1. What bet is the company making?
On the macro level, how are we planning to win in the market? There are four categories of macro-level bets:
- Velocity: We win by getting our offering to market faster
- Efficiency: We win by managing our waste better
- Accuracy: We win by being right more often
- Innovation: We win by discovering untapped market potential
Which category best describes your company's current position?
2. What design bets can support the company bet?
- For Velocity: Reduce time-to-delivery, reuse existing components, find metaphors in other markets.
- For Efficiency: Creating design systems, reusing existing patterns, reducing work-in-progress.
- For Accuracy: Stronger research, measuring product performance with instrumentation, discovery sprints.
- For Innovation: Uncovering “fog of war” with better discovery, finding parallels for good patterns in other markets.
3. What is the weight of available information?
I use a linear process for weighing information in time-sensitive scenarios. It goes like this: User research > Customer familiarity > Institutional knowledge.
In the absence of user research, rely on what our customers are familiar with. If we don't know they're familiar with, rely on best practices (or strong opinions, loosely held).
