A look back at 15 years of my design portfolio homepage.

The augmented future is going to be exhilarating and empowering—for both consumers and designers.

Keeping a work journal is one of the best things you can do for personal development. A diary of work is also an excellent way for designers to build a case study for their portfolio.

I used to believe that what made great designers so great was their craft; their ability to add polish and style to whatever they touched. Now I see that what makes exceptional designers so incredible is not only their attention to detail, but their ability to think holistically about their work.

What does a modern interview process look like for digital designers? Design leaders building their design team, and individual designers looking to join one, can get incredible value from knowing what a typical interview process looks like today.

Designers need to invest just as much time in getting to know their teammates and cross-functional peers as they do getting to know their customers.

Designers can avoid wasting time and deliver their work more effectively by: Focusing on the audience's needs, speaking to specific details of the work, and spending more time listening than presenting.

Most problems have many possible solutions. Our job as digital creators is to identify the trade-offs and constraints that will enable us to select the best possible solution for any given problem.

How do you know what design's impact is on the product you're building? Even if you could measure design, how do you identify what parts of the product experience are worth measuring in the first place?

Nobody warned me how challenging being the Head of Design at an early-stage startup would be. Then again, nobody warned me how much I would love the challenge.

To make your one-on-one's more effective: Define and agree upon their purpose together, be clear about the schedule, use the time to sync on anything you can't anywhere else, and work to keep things casual.

To design effective experiences it’s not enough to think of our work in terms of features, patterns, or libraries, but rather experiences that play out in a narrative arc, wherein the user is the star. This narrative is always one that encompasses much more than what we can control and yet is the space within which we must play, experiment, and create.

As product designers grow in their careers we are tasked with taking on more complexity and ambiguous problems. We find ourselves in situations where our job is to help others envision and explore a complex and often poorly defined landscape.

It feels good to be right, and seeking right ideas is more comfortable than seeking wrong ones. But regularly trying to be right (to validate our ideas) only shuts us off from what's actually right and best.

What follows is the content of that document (only slightly edited to omit proprietary information) which I hope helps address the question any startup might face: what exactly does the product design team do here?

Slow down.