Rippling achieves incredible speed by prioritizing commitments over process. Every initiative has a deadline. This commitment is what matters, not the methodology used to get there. Dates can be renegotiated with rigorous justification, but the absence of a commitment is unacceptable.
Design success isn't just about creating a functional and appealing product. The ultimate measure, often forgotten, is market adoption and usage. A designer's responsibility extends to ensuring the product sells and is used by customers, making it a business-critical function.
Design and engineering teams should stop treating Figma as the ultimate source of truth. It is a simulacrum. The real source of truth is what customers experience in production. Orienting the entire team around the live product ensures everyone is solving for the actual user experience.
When technical performance hits a ceiling, design can solve the user's experience of speed. Perceived performance is a design problem addressed through interactions, optimistic UI, and loading states, making the product feel faster even when the underlying systems are not.
The best products are built when engineering, product, and design have overlapping responsibilities. This intentional blurring of roles and 'stepping on each other's toes in a good way' fosters holistic product thinking and avoids the fragmented execution common in siloed organizations.
The core job of a software designer is to make products that look good and work well to drive sales, a principle from industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss. This requires a holistic understanding of users, the medium, and business impact, mirroring the original practice of industrial design.
A design leader's responsibility extends beyond quality and execution to co-owning strategy with product. By leading a generative research function that looks 'around the corner,' design ensures the company builds the right products for the future, not just polishes current ones.
Ditch the standard 1-on-1 format. The most valuable use of this time, especially for creative roles, is a protected working session where a manager and report can whiteboard, brainstorm, and solve a specific problem together. This is far more impactful than asynchronous status updates.
Technical skill isn't enough to become a leader. Ambitious designers must develop and articulate a strong point of view on what the product should be and why. Leadership requires having convictions and the ability to rally the organization around them by making ideas tangible through prototypes.
Feedback, especially from leaders, can be ambiguous. The 'Do, Try, Consider' framework clarifies intent: 'Do' is a required change, 'Try' is a suggested exploration, and 'Consider' is a low-priority idea. This helps designers prioritize and act on feedback without misinterpreting suggestions as commands.
Design leaders must rapidly switch between high-level strategy and deep, hands-on critique. If they're not a strong practitioner, they lose credibility and can't effectively course-correct work, leading to quality issues discovered too late in the process. Operational skill alone is insufficient.
The instinct for a hands-on leader is to fix every problem themselves, which doesn't scale. Growing requires developing the intuition to distinguish between critical issues (glass balls) and less important ones (rubber balls) that can temporarily fail, freeing up time for higher-leverage tasks.
To give effective feedback, structure reviews at two key moments. At 20% completion, you can correct the overall direction before significant investment. At 80%, you can refine the nearly-finished product while there is still time for meaningful changes. Feedback at 0% is too early, and at 100% it's too late.
Frameworks for quality can only get you so far. The final, intangible layer of product greatness seen at companies like Apple or Airbnb comes from a single leader with impeccable taste (like Steve Jobs or Brian Chesky) who personally reviews everything and enforces a singular quality bar.