I grew up on a steady diet of martial arts movies Enter the Dragon. Fist of Fury. Bloodsport.
Bruce Lee slicing through opponents with surgical precision. Jackie Chan turning ladders and brooms into improvised weapons. Van Damme landing slow-motion head kicks that were somehow both brutal and balletic.
As a design leadership coach, I’ve spent years helping talented designers navigate the messy, ambiguous world of business. One theme I keep seeing — sometimes subtly, sometimes not — is how easy it is to fall into an unhelpful mindset when collaboration gets hard.
In 1999, James Dyson made a controversial decision.
After a decade of painstaking invention and a wildly successful UK launch, Dyson—the man and the company—relocated vacuum cleaner manufacturing from Wiltshire, England, to Malaysia. The move provoked public outcry. How could a proudly British inventor, one who’d made a name railing against poor design and shoddy performance, outsource to Asia?
In 1950s post-war America, an advertising executive named Rosser Reeves proposed a simple formula: you could have it fast, cheap, or good — but only two at a time. This “Project Management Triangle” quickly became corporate gospel, the kind of phrase you’d find taped to the side of a developer’s monitor or printed on a mug in a product manager’s cupboard. It was neat. It was true. And like most good slogans, it masked a deeper, more complex story.
In any fast-moving product team, there’s a familiar pattern. A confident roadmap is shared. Timelines are tight but “doable.” Enthusiasm is high. Then, just as the meeting is wrapping up, a designer tentatively raises a hand and asks:“Have we thought about what happens if…?”
As thousands of designers settled into a cavernous event space on the outskirts of London—laptop bags slung over shoulders, Stanley cups of cold brew in hand, waiting to hear about the latest feature roadmap from Figma—it struck me how familiar this all felt. Not just the scale and spectacle, but the underlying dynamic.