Principles Over Plans

On staying grounded when the ground keeps moving.

A conversation that keeps coming up

I've been having a version of a similar conversation recently with a number of design leaders in my network. These are people who have collectively led global payments infrastructure, shaped paradigms for identity and access management, refactored the back-end systems that developers depend on daily, and designed the complex tracking and logistics workflows that keep supply chains moving.

They're people I deeply respect - practitioners like me with fifteen or more years of focused, consequential work. And the conversation I've had with everyone has had a similar thread: how do you articulate that experience in a hiring landscape that has narrowed its lens to focus heavily on speed and output?

It's an interesting problem, and I don't think it's unique to design - I know my peers in product and engineering are feeling the heat as well. But it feels especially acute here, partly because of how fast the design tools and expectations for output have shifted, and partly because of a joke I keep seeing on LinkedIn about people calling themselves "full stack engineers" because they've been vibe coding.

In a very short window, the language around what we do and what we're capable of has been completely renegotiated. Everyone is repositioning and updating their headline, but not enough time has actually passed for most people to be a genuine expert in most of it.

I'd argue it's a small set of things that have been true across every significant period of change I've worked through, starting in 2008 in a contracting market, through the peak of the tech build-out years, through COVID, and into this current moment of AI-driven repositioning. These are the things that have consistently kept me grounded, and kept the work good.

Human-centeredness is not a pace problem

The products we design are used by humans. That sounds obvious, but watch how fast the lens gets deprioritized when speed becomes the primary metric. When designers and design teams are not encouraged to think through edge cases or non-linear flows in favor of shipping constantly, the cost gets deferred but believe me, it doesn't disappear.

Someone's going to be stranded at an airport because a state wasn't accounted for. A commerce agent will make a massive purchase because guardrails weren't scoped into the sprint. An expense report will break in a way nobody tested because the error state wasn't considered.

Being human-centered is not a philosophical stance that slows teams down. It's a form of risk management, and one of the most stable principles I've carried across every role I've held. The poor downstream effects of skipping it are tangible and measurable - they just show up later, usually as someone else's problem to fix. I'm writing this in May 2026, and I'll predict that within a year, companies who have felt the consequences of hasty decision making will begin hiring back people with a focus in service design, end-to-end design, and human-centered thinking.

Craft is contextual, not universal

Design systems, libraries, and standards exist for reasons. There's a version of craft that is precise and generic by design: a broadly accessible dashboard used across industries is doing exactly what it should when it feels neutral. And there's another version of craft that demands personality, specificity, and earned charm. They’re both valid - neither one is more “high craft” than the other. The problem is when people treat taste as an narrow trait rather than a practiced discipline. Alignment, typography, and spatial hierarchy are really not complex outputs - but they require judgment, and judgment requires development time. That's as true now as it was ten years ago, regardless of what the tooling looks like.

Judgment under ambiguity is the actual product of experience

Knowing which question to ask when the brief is incomplete. Knowing when to push back on a scope decision and when to ship anyway. Knowing how to hold a position with a stakeholder while keeping the relationship intact. I've made bad calls, and pushed back against the myopic decisions of louder voices. I've figured out how to advocate for better design as a fast follow, and worked my way into getting that work embedded into the first round of a deliverable - before it negatively impacted a user. It’s the range of experience that has sharpened the viewpoint I carry today.

Team health is a craft as well

A team that trusts each other ships better work. It recovers faster from bad calls. It gives and receives feedback in ways that make the product better rather than protecting individual contributions. Building and stabilizing a team through a period of organizational chaos is a skill that experienced practitioners have usually developed the hard way. This also feels like an important moment to sharpen both our clarity and our communication skills. In an era where our jobs depend on comfort with speed, how do we adapt our conversations to get real, speak plainly, and pair speed with purpose?

The conversation I find most interesting

If I were hiring someone to help shape a design org right now, I wouldn't expect them to have a tidy picture of exactly what’s next - I'd actually find it a little brittle. There's a kind of privilege in being able to map a career with that kind of precision, and most of us haven't worked in conditions that allowed for it. Markets contract, companies restructure, priorities shift overnight. The people who have stayed grounded through all of that aren't the ones who held tightly to a fixed vision. They're the ones who knew what they stood for, the patterns that have endured that make good design good, and stayed flexible about everything else.

Someone with rigid certainty about their future is going to keep running into disappointment as the landscape keeps shifting. Someone with a clear set of principles and the adaptability to apply them across changing conditions is going to stay engaged, stay energized, and keep doing good work.

There's an old saying that you make a plan and the universe laughs. What I've actually found more useful than a plan is a clear sense of what I won't do. That might sound like a negative frame, but I'd argue it's actually more directional than the alternative. "I will do X" is aspirational. "I won't do Y" is load-bearing. It tells you which opportunities are worth your energy and which ones will cost you more than they give back. It's how you stay grounded when everything around you is in motion.