Writing Specs & Designs

"I just found if I got on the whiteboard and drew really badly... Somebody else will go, "No, no, no, it doesn't work that way. Give me this pen," and start doing it. And it gets you so fast to a shared vision... I know designers spend all this time making wireframes and I'm like, that's the lamest use of time ever."

"Every tap on a mobile app is a miracle for you as a product developer because users will turn and bounce to their next app very quickly... Every tap that you get, every single one is so scarce that you should be optimizing everything."

"You should be designing the hierarchy, the pixels, the flows, everything. That's on you. And products live and die in the pixels."

"We stopped spending so many cycles on design explorations of static mocks or walkthroughs and said, 'How quickly can we get into prototyping the path in real software, even if it's messy and you throw it away,'... You got to live and touch and smell the software. You can't just look at it."

"I would suggest learn how to sketch, learn Balsamiq. Having that ability to think at a conceptual level about how UI and UX works is I think a critical part of being a product manager. And if it's a skill that you don't have today, there's great resources to be able to work on that skill."

"The output of the shaping session is... some kind of drawing or diagram where engineers, product, and design are all looking at that and they’re saying, 'We understand that. I know exactly what to go build.'"

"In a shaping session, you can’t collaborate on something so high fidelity. So we need also some ways to collaborate... like breadboarding and fat marker sketching. These are tools to help us express an idea very, very clearly in detail. We’re going to hit this button and from this button, go to here. This calculation runs, then we get this answer."

"I'm not sure what the point of this story is other than maybe it's something about, I think we all do this as designers and product people. We take these shortcuts that we think that we'll go back later and clean up. Sometimes, it's literally been 30 years that little design detail lingers three implementations later and now it's just a part of the way that these Apple products work."

"The thing that I learned from him the most was the power of prototyping. And that even though he was such a great product thinker, he would always say, 'I can't tell you if this is going to work. I have to feel it. I have to try it. And a mock-up doesn't tell you what it's going to feel like.'"

"If you're doing it right, it'll be faster and you need to have an engineering infrastructure that enables prototyping... you write code that is never going to make it to production so you can just crank it out much faster and then you can see what works and then you build the production code."