Practical Design Isn't Flashy… But It Works
Unblocking teams to ship product beats chasing ivory-tower ideals any day.
I call myself a no-nonsense, practical design leader. My bias is to keep the work focused on helping the business move forward. But if you don’t live and breath the design world, and most founders don’t, it can be hard to grasp what that really means in practice.
A Small, Easy-To-Grasp Example of What I Mean
To make this concrete, let’s look at a classically contentious topic: research.
Research is often cited as “the thing that slows teams down,” but that’s only true when it’s treated as an ideal instead of a tool.
The Problem Isn’t Research. It’s How Teams Use It.
When teams complain that research is slow, they’re usually talking about user research. Interviews. Scheduling. Recruiting. Synthesis. Decks. Timelines. All of that can be slow. Sometimes painfully so.
But talking to users isn’t the only legitimate way to do research. There are many others. That’s why I’m deliberate about calling it UX research, or simply research, rather than treating “user research” as the default.
Research Is a Tool, Not a Virtue
Research isn’t something you “do because good teams do research.” It’s a tool you use to answer a specific question, or close a specific knowledge gap.
Instead of asking, “Should we do research?” I ask:
What decision are we currently blocked on?
What do we not know that prevents us from moving forward?
What is the fastest way to get just enough confidence to proceed?
Sometimes the answer is user research. Often, it isn’t.
Why Did I Pick This Example?
This isn’t really about research. Research just makes the pattern easy to see.
The same thing happens whenever teams default to “best practices” without considering context. The work that actually helps teams ship rarely looks impressive from afar. It’s constrained, targeted, and often invisible once it’s done.**
That’s the bias I bring to my work: fewer ideals, more progress.
** Invisible in the moment doesn’t mean undocumented. This is why every engagement includes a Design Intelligence Hand-off Package: a practical record of decisions, rationale, and artifacts so future team members can understand why choices were made instead of reverse-engineering them.