Writing
Design Leadership

Hard vs Soft Design

Martial arts often distinguish between “hard” and “soft” styles. Hard styles focus on direct, powerful strikes—punches and kicks designed to break through an opponent’s defences through sheer force. This is the approach many design leaders take when "battling" their organisations for greater influence, hoping to raise design's impact by pushing hard for recognition. While understandable, this forceful, head-on approach can be counterproductive, especially when designers face opponents with more authority or entrenched interests.
Design Leadership

Just Grow Up: Why Design Maturity Models Might be Harming Our Industry!

Designers often look to design maturity models as benchmarks, comparing their own companies to idealised industry standards and thinking, “We’re so behind!” This can spark a drive to “improve” the company’s design maturity, which often translates into attempts to “educate” leadership on what they’re doing “wrong” or how the organisation can “catch up.” But is maturity really the most useful framework here? Or might labelling a company as “immature” potentially miss the point? 🤔
Tech Culture

The Future of Design: How AI is Shifting Designers from Makers to Curators

When we think about designers, two main characteristics often come to mind: craft skills and taste. Craft skills are the technical abilities that allow designers to manipulate tools—whether physical, like pen and paper in the early days, or digital design software like Photoshop and Figma today—to create their desired output. Taste, on the other hand, is the ability to perceive and refine quality in design, guiding the look and feel of an output toward something that feels refined and cohesive.

Why VCs Turn Founders Down (Note: It’s Not Always About the Idea)

Successful founders need to have a high degree of confidence in their chosen concept. As such, when founders fail to get investment, they’ll often walk away from a VC meeting thinking, “They just didn’t get my idea.” While this might be true, there are a whole host of other reasons why a VC might pass. Many first-time founders assume it's always about the idea—when often it’s much more about execution, the team, and the market. Understanding these reasons in advance can help you avoid the most common pitfalls and allow you to approach your next pitch with confidence.
Tech Culture

The Real Reason Why Executives Don’t Want you Involved

We’ve all been there. You get hired for your expertise in a specific domain, and yet for some reason the powers at be seem to ignore your input, make a bunch of random decisions you think are at best ill-informed or at worst just plain wrong, and then hand it to you for implementation. If only they’d have consulted you sooner and you might have been able to avoid this mess.