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🧭 Make design decisions stick — 1‑page brief

October 1, 2025

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.

Articulating design decisions

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.

🧩 Shape

Shared foundations across teams.

From Confrontation to Collaboration: The Developer-Designer Relationship

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.

Beyond individual productivity: rethinking AI strategy in product teams

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.

🚀 Ship

Release, measure, iterate.

“But We Have To Try Something!”

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.

The Attribute of Greatness: Decision Log

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.

"Workslop" was the logical outcome of productivity maxxing

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.