Thinking
Notes from the work.
Short essays on defining, designing, and building digital and AI products. Opinions earned on real engagements, written to be useful rather than complete.
Essays
A slow, deliberate archive. New writing when there is something worth saying, not on a schedule.
A working prototype beats a written spec
A written spec loses a little fidelity in every handoff. On Companion, we skipped the document and shipped the answer instead: a working prototype the engineers built against directly.
Design systems: speed or fit?
Consistency and coherence get sold as rivals. They are not. How to choose between speed and fit, drawn from systems shipped for the VA and CEMEX.
Why we design in code
Once a design system lives in code, building the screen is faster than drawing it. What that changes for the teams who receive the work.
Conversation is the new responsive
Conversation changes the flow of a product, not just its layout. How to design it like a call center, and why an agent is cheaper on the APIs you already have.