Ryan McCuaig

2025 Jan 23

First, watch these videos:

  1. Design in Practice
  2. Design in Practice in Practice
  3. Design in Practice

What I find refreshing about them is that they’re about thoughtful, rigorous technique, using commodity software. All you need is a spreadsheet and something that can draw boxes and arrows.

This resonates with me. I’ve had the experience many times over the last 20 years of having thoughtful, well-designed software that I’ve grown to appreciate suddenly taken away from me: maybe via acquihire-and-kill, maybe maintainer burnout, maybe app store hostility, maybe business model inadequacy, maybe some product manager’s bonus being tied to change for change’s sake.

Technique is something I can own and take with me when thoughtful technology gets taken away.

(I found re-watching the first talk again after watching the second, which works through concrete examples, to be very helpful).

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