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.

There’s no doubt the future of design systems is tool-agnostic...

In my experience there is really only one dependency to keep in mind when it comes to the work you do and how you do it...

The answer is often: to an entirely different role. This is an unfortunate reality playing out in product companies today.

As creators, our role is to not only look at the top, face level of what it is we build (or what inspires us) but also the many different layers of complexity contained within the thing.

For all we know the designs we encounter out in the world are incomplete, unintentional, or even placeholder. Not at all the high-polished, intentional works we imagine them to be.

Every creation is a product of opinion. If you want to produce high quality design you need develop a strong opinion, but one shaped by that of many others.

Edge cases can be difficult—even impossible—to define. Thankfully there are strategies to spotlight where edge cases are likely to hide, and you can use these strategies without changing much of your existing design process.