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Hey 👋
This week: co‑own outcomes with engineering, move AI beyond personal speed to team strategy, and add decision‑making guardrails to cut "workslop" and ship more predictably.
Also could you let me know what you think of the new Build/Shape/Ship format? Less than 30 seconds of your time.
Thank you! - Adam at Unicorn Club 🦄
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🏗️ Build
Make better interfaces.
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Practical ways to defend your design: adapt process to context, back choices with evidence, expose work early, and speak stakeholder language.
Why it matters: Clear rationale cuts rework and accelerates alignment, so teams ship the right UI faster.
Adopt this week: Draft a one‑page decision brief for an active feature: problem, evidence, options/trade‑offs, rationale, expected impact, and the next test.
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🧩 Shape
Shared foundations across teams.
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NN/g reframes dev–design from turf wars to co‑ownership, with practical moves: one‑to‑one partnerships, shared vocabulary, low‑jargon comms, and acknowledging invisible work.
Why it matters: Co‑ownership reduces late friction and improves earlier trade‑offs across disciplines.
Adopt this week: Run a 30‑minute vocabulary sync: agree 6–8 shared terms (e.g., “breakpoints” vs responsive behaviour) and document them where everyone can find them.
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A three‑month study finds AI makes individuals faster, not teams better; the unlock is DesignOps: governance, guided experiments, shared training, and documentation.
Why it matters: Without strategy, AI creates uneven quality and collaboration debt. With it, teams get faster and better together.
First step: Draft a one‑page AI usage charter and inventory current AI touchpoints across scoping, prototyping, and handoff.
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🚀 Ship
Release, measure, iterate.
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Counter the “try something” reflex by co‑authoring a simple narrative tied to two measures of predictability, reviewed every two weeks.
Why it matters: Narratives drive decisions; anchoring them to measures reduces thrash and improves delivery reliability.
Try this: Write one sentence that reframes “predictability” for your team and attach two leading indicators. Set a fortnightly check‑in.
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A lightweight decision log pairs “write it down” with “get back to it” so teams learn and improve future calls.
Why it matters: Builds organisational memory, reduces repeat mistakes, and speeds future decisions.
Adopt this week: Create a 7‑field template (decision, context, options, bet, date, owner, follow‑up) and log the next two non‑trivial calls.
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AI‑generated “workslop” shifts validation costs downstream; the fix is ethical centaur‑style use with provenance and review guardrails.
Why it matters: Unchecked workslop erodes quality and slows teams as they re‑validate everything.
Adopt this week: Add an “AI provenance” note to PRs/docs: what’s AI‑authored, sources checked, and reviewer checklist.
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Get our "7 Positioning Sins That Cost B2B Brands Millions" guide when you join. It's free, join 10,000+ B2B executives.
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Daily rundown of what's happening in tech and what you shouldn't miss. Read by 200,000+ professionals from Google, Apple, OpenAI...
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🎲 Also worth a look
A few extras we've found.
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Evidence from McKinsey, HBR, Adobe, Forrester and the NEA linking design to revenue, TRS and growth.
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A short, friendly roundup of the most useful AI tools, ideas, and real‑world examples for developers - curated by Zoran Jambor (CSS Weekly).
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Argues AI’s real value is aiding evidence‑guided discovery, not artifact churn.
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Treat the case study as your product: hook, context, iterations, outcomes, lessons.
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Other ways I can help...
Here’s how I can help you tackle your next challenge:
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🎯 1:1 Mentorship – Personalised advice on portfolios, career moves, or challenges you're facing.
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💡 Hire Me – Let’s work together to launch your vision, get expert guidance and make an impact.
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Thanks for reading ❤️
Adam from Unicorn Club
Follow me on X or BlueSky
Connect on LinkedIn
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