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In the quarter-century I’ve been a product designer, design has matured. We’ve developed tools and practices that allow us to work faster, better, and more in concert with engineers and product managers. Things are a lot less chaotic than they used to be.
But with that change comes the process. I’ve written elsewhere about the dangers of too much process; in the years I spent building the design practice at Heap, I tested and evolved my ideas around Pragmatic Design and its potential to reduce process. I encouraged lower-fidelity artifacts; design briefs instead of endless mockups; product-quality reviews instead of design reviews; and I pushed for early, ongoing collaboration between Design, Product, and Engineering. The results were encouraging: we got more done with a smaller, scrappier team.
In 2020 I left Heap to found Miter, a startup whose mission is deceptively simple: make meetings better. And if Heap was a testing ground for pragmatic design, Miter’s been a crucible for extreme pragmatism: nothing is scrappier than being the only designer, the only PM, and the only engineer. What process is worth keeping? What can be optimized and what can’t? And what needs to change again as we build a team?