Blog
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Where do we go from here? User centricity helped us build software, but what comes next? The past: the genius designer design through ideology Vignelli, Da Vinci, Le Corbusier etc. master designer will intuit problems and find solutions, a moment of genius designing with atoms The present: the user-centric designer designer has a toolkit to…
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Startups are a sequence of nested bets. Like poker, you’ve got a limited bankroll and imperfect information. The Market Bet Your foundational bet isn’t just picking a market, it’s betting that you understand how that market will evolve. This bet shapes everything downstream: If this foundational bet is wrong, you face an existential choice: pivot…
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The void between users and builders of software is seldom considered. A software builder sits in San Francisco and hopefully talks to and observes user needs and behaviors in order to build a product that has some utility. This sounds trivial, but anyone who has conducted user research knows how lossy this process is. YC…
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one of the benefits of LLMs is the ability to summarize things one of the dangers of LLMs is the ability to summarize things read any AI product’s value prop and it will say a variation of “it frees you up to do higher order/ value tasks” nobody knows what these higher order things are…
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After spending a few weeks in China, the most notable behavioural difference is the usage of mini-programs. Every restaurant has a menu mini-program sitting on top of WeChat or Meituan. Hello Ride the bike-sharing startup is a mini program on top of Alipay. Here is a diagram showing the architectural differences between the two. OS…
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As designers, we focus on the core interaction and forget the bits and pieces around it. The stuff that some people refer to as ‘polish’. Here is a brain dump of my top easy to forget but important design stuff. defining which events should be tracked did we consider loading states, especially for users on…
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A short guide on how we tested team plans at Jenni and closed $10k in revenue. Hypothesis statements Team plans are a way to increase retention Team plans move upmarket toward users with more purchasing power Team plans are targeted at full-time researchers who have an ongoing product need Team plans afford the potential to…
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I’ve casually been learning some JS via Mimo and Udemy for the past couple of months. It is fun and I get some dopamine seeing a nice animation when completing a lesson on Mimo, however, it is pretty abstracted from a real environment. I learn things best under two conditions: the learning is synchronous with…
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Michel de Montaigne, in his ‘Essays,’ recounts the story of a friend who fell sick. Despite consulting doctors and trying different treatments, nothing worked. Resigned to his fate, the friend finally gave up all treatments and stopped eating. Surprisingly, this led to an improvement in his health. This incident illustrates the concept of ‘improvement through…
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After speaking to PM’s and designers over the holidays I was surprised to learn how scarcely prototyping is used in product development. Of my small sample size (+/- 10 people) only 1 designer regularly prototyped before sending a design ‘over the wall’ to engineers. Note: For scoping this post, ‘prototype’ will simply refer to an…