Working principles · 01—32
Mantras.
Hard-won mantras shaped through experience: building Newicon, working with teams and pursuing personal projects.
Some are original, some are borrowed or adapted from people and companies I admire. They are not commandments. They are prompts: useful ways to challenge an assumption, unlock a conversation or find a better next step.
01—08
Transparency and trust
09—16
Empowerment and growth
17—30
Innovation and engineering
- 17.The simple, not the complex
- 18.All requirements are wrong
- 19.Challenge constraints
- 20.Don’t #!@$ the customer
- 21.Pragmatic, not dogmatic
- 22.Use first-principles thinking
- 23.Aim to be less wrong over time
- 24.I don’t know is a superpower
- 25.Build rather than buy core skills
- 26.Ask why, why, why, why, why
- 27.Automate
- 28.Organise around the value stream
- 29.Be bold and break things
Make it visual
Close mantra ↑Humans devote an extraordinary amount of brainpower to visual processing. Making work visual makes it easier to understand and manage.
Use visualisation to turn complexity into something people can see and act upon:
- Use whiteboards.
- Create dashboards.
- Summarise a complex problem on one A3 sheet.
- Use the dark-cockpit principle: do not show 100 flashing things when two large red signals explain the problem.
- Use interface and experience design to create meaningful representations.
- Think in interfaces, not implementations.
31—32