Writing
Essays on interface design, user research, and product design from Series B to unicorn.
- When AI is the UI, design moves underneathDavid Sacks, on All-In after the Salesforce × Anthropic Claudeforce moment, put it plainly: Benioff is willing to let Claude own the front end — the primary user relationship — because customers want to create agents in the AI they already live in, that then run across SaaS.
- Prompts to Harness: The Agent Ladder Is a Design VocabularyThis week a post on X named something I'd been circling for a year.
- The job is unblockingIn late 2024, Marc Andreessen went on Chris Williamson's Modern Wisdom podcast and described how Elon Musk runs his companies.
- The Spreadsheet That Tells You What to Test NextUser testing is the most misunderstood topic between design and its stakeholders. Here is a spreadsheet-sized way to get everyone on the same page and know what to test next.
- What I'd Build Earlier: Design Lessons from Series B to UnicornEight years inside a venture-backed company taught me that the first release sets the foundation for years, and that the code base is part of your design.
- Papercuts, Tech Debt and Stalled Features: How Design Teams Ratchet Quality ForwardRoadmaps get crowded. The design teams that keep raising quality are the ones that watch for openings in the work already in motion.
- Make Your Idea Plan B: How Product Teams Find the Right Solution FasterGood ideas don't come from any of us. They come through us. The fastest route to the right design is getting out of the way, alone and as a team.
- What Changes When Your UI Has Depth: 7 VR Design ConsiderationsNotes from my first impressions of Google Cardboard, before Daydream: what changes about interface design when your UI has depth.
- Why Great UIs Run on Grey: Hierarchy, Whitespace and ContrastThe cleanest interfaces on your phone are quietly doing the same thing: they use grey to keep complexity out of the way.