Consequential

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Fifty-four moves

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Each one is about four minutes. You can start anywhere.

Act I · Decide

What to build, and what not to.

Know who you are building for

  1. 01Ask who hurts
  2. 02Name one person, not a segment
  3. 03Watch, don’t ask
  4. 04Find the workaround
  5. 05Sit in the support queue for an hour

Question the ticket

  1. 06Find the problem behind the request
  2. 07Ask what breaks if we ship nothing
  3. 08Ask why three times, not five
  4. 09Separate the need from the shape
  5. 10Say no with a question

Shrink the work

  1. 11Set an appetite, not an estimate
  2. 12Slice down the middle, not into layers
  3. 13Build the ugly version first
  4. 14Find the walking skeleton
  5. 15Cut scope, not quality

Act II · Make

Making it good, and knowing whether it was.

Design it yourself

  1. 16Climb the grey ladder
  2. 17De-emphasize, don’t emphasize
  3. 18Kill the borders
  4. 19Double the whitespace, then take some back
  5. 20Two weights, two sizes
  6. 21Snap to the scale
  7. 22Fix the leading
  8. 23Design the empty state first
  9. 24Blur, don’t punish
  10. 25Make focus beautiful
  11. 26Two-part shadows, five levels

Show it before you build it

  1. 27Prototype in the medium you will ship in
  2. 28Learn auto-layout, ignore the rest of Figma
  3. 29Generate three, pick one
  4. 30Put a clickable thing in front of a human within a day

Know if it worked

  1. 31Decide what would change your mind
  2. 32Count people, not events
  3. 33Instrument before you launch
  4. 34Watch the drop-off, not the total
  5. 35Kill your own feature

Act III · Multiply

Making the whole team effective. The part only you can do.

Build the rails

  1. 36Run the two-lane merge policy
  2. 37Contain the blast radius before you improve the output
  3. 38Turn review comments into build failures
  4. 39Make the diff prove itself
  5. 40Close the supply chain and the secrets tap
  6. 41Make the preview URL the review interface
  7. 42Budget the context, then ship the rails as a package

Fence the model

  1. 43Assume your chatbot is a public API
  2. 44Move authorization out of the prompt and into the query
  3. 45Put a hard per-user cost ceiling in front of the model
  4. 46Break the lethal trifecta
  5. 47Give the model a menu, not a keyring
  6. 48Never trust a system prompt to keep a secret
  7. 49Treat model output as untrusted input
  8. 50Watch it, and attack it yourself

Be believed

  1. 51Write the one-pager
  2. 52Demo the outcome, not the code
  3. 53Disagree with a number, not an opinion
  4. 54Take the smallest bet you can be trusted with