Design isn’t decoration. It’s not “making it pretty.” It’s choosing what matters so the business moves and someone’s life gets easier. If you want posters, hit a print shop. If you want impact, let’s talk design.
1) Design is a business tool
If it doesn’t touch revenue, cost, retention, or risk, it’s expensive art. Design should fight for a metric and chase a clear outcome. “Wow factor” doesn’t pay salaries; working funnels do. Every screen that doesn’t push the goal is noise.
2) Start with problems, not features
A feature without a problem is a door in a hallway. First: what hurts? What’s stopping the user from doing X today? What decision are we improving, and how will we know? Features are hypotheses, not trophies. Prototype, measure, delete without regret.
3) Good design disappears
When it flows, nobody applauds you. That’s success. The user does their thing and forgets the interface even existed. Quiet microcopy, sane defaults, helpful empty states. If people rave about the UI, be suspicious—you might be competing with their task.
4) Deadlines help. Perfection doesn’t
A deadline forces choices: smaller scope, sharper clarity. “Perfect” lives in Figma; “good enough” ships, learns, and gets better. Slice value thin, ship often, log the debt, and only pay it down if it truly matters. Quality isn’t gloss; it’s reliability.
5) Figma is not where design starts
Design starts in messy conversations, support tickets, and dashboards. Only then—maybe—open Figma. If you jumped into a canvas before understanding the problem, you already married a solution. Talk to people. Walk the flow end to end. Then vectorize.
6) If users don’t care, neither should we
“Nice to have” is a trap. If it doesn’t ease pain, reduce friction, or earn attention, skip it. Team energy is finite—spend it where users would pay with time, money, or loyalty. Everything else is vanity.
Design is prioritization: real problems over shiny features, outcomes over applause, learning over perfection. If a decision doesn’t help the business and the user, it’s a distraction. That’s the bar. Saying no hurts—keeping dead weight hurts more.