The reading list
Essays, tech notes, and the in-between.
- Product·3 min read
Design Storyboards: The Fourteen Days Between a New Hire and Their First Leave Request
Leave Balance had an onboarding flow, an import tool, and a welcome email — three teams' worth of work, and no one who could describe what a new employee actually experiences. Design Storyboards put the whole fortnight on one wall.
- Product·3 min read
Improv Prototyping Both Sides: The Nudge and the Person Who Receives It
Recap CRM was about to ship a feature that told founders which relationships were going cold. We acted out the nudge — and then, because someone insisted, we acted out the awkward coffee it produced three weeks later.
- Product·3 min read
Improv Prototyping with a Paper Phone: Designing Grading for the Back of a Taxi
Course Guru's instructors kept saying they'd grade assignments on their phone if they could. Instead of designing screens, we cut a phone out of card, made someone stand on a chair pretending to be a taxi, and acted it out.
- Product·3 min read
Improv Prototyping: Acting Out the Worst Hour of a Theme Update
A theme update broke seven live storefronts on a Friday, and the postmortem produced a support runbook nobody believed in. So we put four people on their feet and made them play the merchant, the agent, and the update itself.
- Product·3 min read
Min Specs in Reverse: Writing the Must-Not-Dos for a Test-Writing Agent
Shortest's agent could generate a passing test suite for any repo it was pointed at. The hard question wasn't what it should do — it was which four rules it could never break without destroying the trust the whole product runs on.
- Product·3 min read
Min Specs for a Rollout: The Four Rules a Holiday Calendar Launch Couldn't Break
Leave Balance was shipping multi-country public-holiday calendars to 400 companies at once, and the rollout checklist had grown to thirty-one items. Min Specs found the four that would actually have caused a failure — and one nobody had written down.
- Product·3 min read
Min Specs: Cutting a Meeting-Prep Digest Down to Its Two Real Rules
The spec for Recap CRM's pre-meeting Prep Card had seventeen requirements and a six-week estimate. Min Specs asks one brutal question of each line — can we still hit the purpose if we break this rule? — and left us with three.
- Product·3 min read
Wise Crowds: A Manager Panel on the Leave-Approval Redesign
The managers approving leave requests every week have opinions they'll never put in a survey. Wise Crowds gets one of them into the client chair, turns their back to the room, and lets the honest version of the complaint come out.
- Product·3 min read
Wise Crowds: The Merchant Advisory Panel That Actually Advises
Every theme storefront eventually gets a merchant advisory panel that turns into a status update nobody wanted. Wise Crowds — structured peer consultation, chair-turn and all — is the fix, and it works even better once real merchants sit in the consultant seats.
- Product·3 min read
Agreement-Certainty Matrix: Should Course Guru Build Certificates?
Certificates look like a checkbox feature — every LMS has one, so why debate it? Because for a Shopify-embedded app, the checkbox hides three real disagreements. Here's how the Agreement-Certainty Matrix stopped a team from copying a feature that didn't fit.