Series
Liberating Structures: Design & Prototyping
A nine-part series applying the Liberating Structures built for shaping a solution fast and cheaply — Min Specs, Improv Prototyping, and Design Storyboards — to feature-development workshops across a CRM, an AI-native QA tool, an HR leave tool, a Shopify storefront theme, and a Shopify-embedded LMS.
9 parts · first published
- 01
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.
·5 min read - 02
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.
·5 min read - 03
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.
·5 min read - 04
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.
·5 min read - 05
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.
·5 min read - 06
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.
·5 min read - 07
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.
·5 min read - 08
Design Storyboards: Drawing the Path from `npx shortest` to a Merged Pull Request
Shortest's install command took eleven seconds and our activation numbers were dismal. Storyboarding the whole path — install, first run, first review, first merge — showed that the product ended two days before the moment that mattered.
·5 min read - 09
Design Storyboards for a Migration: What a Merchant Does with a Major Version Nobody Wants
Polo Themes had a major version ready and merchants who had every reason to stay put. Storyboarding the upgrade — including the five weeks of not upgrading — turned a release plan into a migration the shop could actually survive.
·5 min read