Designs are meant to be thrown away

Linear has shared its design process and it bucks the trends of modern design approaches. (See link to article below)

Considering they have built one of the most copied webpages on the internet they must be on to something.

They are avoiding the trend of complex design systems starting all design work with a screenshot of the existing app and designing on top of it. They do have a design system but it is intentionally very lightweight. Once the features are built the design files can be thrown away because, as Karri Saarinen, CEO of Linear, says, the real design is the app. They can screenshot that when they need to make any changes.

This gives a lot of flexibility to the designers and limits the amount of overhead work required to maintain design systems. I think this is a great way of working, particularly when you have around 50 employees like Linear, but I feel that cracks will begin to show in terms of quality and consistency as you try to scale this across much larger teams. It is a great example of how best practices aren't always best - and there are definitely some ways that larger companies can learn from this and streamline their processes.

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

Q: Do you think that teams should track Ethical assumptions?

Tracking ethics as an assumption category was the clear winner (even if most people say they will do it as a protest). There were some fantastic comments shared as well. Here are two quotes I particularly liked: “If ethics are a part of the culture it’s not a separate category but part of every decision” and “Ethics help us to decide whether we’re likely to create value over the longer period, which is king for retention”. Now lets move on to the trolley problem…🙂

This Weeks Updates

Enabling the Team

5 Levels Of Problem Solving by Pim de Morree
Pim shares the five different levels of knowledge when a person encounters a problem and how a manager can help people move up the levels towards a solution.

The Product Model At Spotify by Marty Cagan and Joakim Sundén
We've all heard about the Spotify model, but Marty goes through a case study of the Discover Weekly feature to see it in action.

Product Direction

10 Product Strategy Mistakes To Avoid by Roman Pichler
Roman shares with us the most common pitfalls when creating a product strategy and highlights the dangers of a disconnected strategy.

Is Product-Led Growth Doomed? by Emerson Taymor
Is the future really product-led? Emerson shares a write-up from his recent debate at UXDX EMEA 23 (hint: he's bullish on sales-led)

Continuous Discovery

Facilitation Skills: Avoid Groupthink and One-Sided Discussions by Jim Morris
Jim shares the best facilitation techniques to encourage group discussions and counteract. He also offers practical methods such as blind voting and more.

Clarify Your Thinking By Drawing Concept Maps by Jorge Arango
Drawings are not just for conveying meaning; the very act of drawing helps understanding. Discover practical guidelines for easy concept mapping.

Continuous Design

Primer On How We Design At Linear by Karri Saarinen
Karri shares the 6 steps of the Linear design process emphasising speed and flexibility over high-quality design systems.

Why You Should Add Friction To Your Onboarding by Ben McRedmond
Contrary to popular belief, Ben argues that adding friction to onboarding can improve user retention and demonstrates this with an example.

Continuous Delivery

Death By A Thousand Microservices by Andrei Taranchenko How Amazon use Chaos Engineering to validate the efficacy of their high-scale distributed services that power Search on Amazon.com.

Software Platform Engineering Will Elevate Workflows by Adrian Bridgwater
What are the benefits of standardised tools, continuous integration and infrastructure as code? Discover why platform engineering is more than a buzzword.

The Bulletin Board

Take a look back at the highlights from EMEA 2023 in Dublin. 📷

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