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Hey 👋 2026 is here! Let's dive into the first edition of the year.
Staying close to the work can look like micromanagement, but staying ‘strategic’ from a distance is how craft and user evidence quietly disappear.
This week: a 5-line reality scan to keep leaders informed without status theatre, a jam format to improve one tricky screen, and a lightweight setup for getting user research into decisions.
Build: a 45-min jam format for one risky screen
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Shape: make research queryable + design decisions constrained by real code
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Ship: a 5-line reality scan that replaces status theatre
Enjoy 🦄 - Adam at Unicorn Club.
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🏗️ Build
Make better interfaces.
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Use this when critique goes vague: jam on a real error state together, down to hierarchy and copy, with riffs framed as options not directives.
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Why it matters: Leaders stay “strategic” to avoid micromanagement, so craft drifts and juniors stall, but jamming keeps standards and thinking visible in the work.
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Try this: Book a 45-minute jam on one error state, then capture Changed / Why / Watch in the design doc or pull request description.
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🧩 Shape
Shared foundations across teams.
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Editor’s pick
Turn scattered research into something people can consult when they are writing invoice emails, picking defaults, or debating edge cases, not just when UX is in the room. The useful twist is treating personas as interactive lenses, not poster summaries.
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Why it matters: Research rots in folders, so teams guess at user intent and ship avoidable friction, which drives rework and support load.
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Adopt this week: Create 3 persona lenses plus a single Q&A prompt, store it in your research repository README so anyone can ask and cite answers (45 mins).
Question:
Answer as: Persona A / Persona B / Persona C
For each: likely reaction + why
Agreement / disagreement
Recommendation (copy or default)
Evidence used:
Gaps and next research:
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This bites when architecture gets decided by people who are not touching the code: concrete constraints and consistency dominate, so “generic” redesigns of shared behaviour rarely survive implementation.
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Why it matters: Abstract designs ignore the real codebase, so changes turn into risky refactors or awkward component contracts, but grounding decisions in current files keeps delivery safer and faster.
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Adopt this week: Add a “Concrete constraints” section to your next design doc, linking two existing files and naming the implementer before approval (20 mins).
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Stop treating usability tests as the green light for a fixed idea: this shows how big-bet thinking turns discovery into a checklist, leaving teams polishing interfaces around assumptions nobody can challenge.
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Why it matters: “Learning” without action becomes theatre, so you waste weeks shipping the wrong UI, but explicit stop rules force real decisions based on evidence.
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Try this: For your next feature, add one stop rule and the metric that triggers it at the top of the experiment plan (30 mins).
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Free 30-minute Lightning Lesson on Thu, Jan 8, 2026 (4:00 PM GMT) about preparing research inputs for AI and validating outputs, hosted by Nick Babich.
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🚀 Ship
Release, measure, iterate.
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Reframes biweekly updates as leaders staying exposed to messy reality, not micromanagement. Useful when risk only surfaces at review time, or when interface quality issues show up in QA too late.
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Why it matters: Filtered updates create false certainty, so teams hide risk until it is expensive, but a short scan keeps escalation routine and decisions grounded.
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Adopt this week: Replace your next status update with this 5-line reality scan, stored in the delivery update doc and linked from release notes (15 mins).
Shipped:
Learned:
Risk / regression watch:
Indicator (metric/signal):
Decision ask: (not for scoring) Yes/No on ___
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Thanks for reading
Adam from Unicorn Club
Follow me on X or BlueSky
Connect on LinkedIn
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