Luc Cheung

A trick to learning a complicated topic is realizing how many complex details are a cousin of something simple. John Reed writes in his book Succeeding :

When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles – generally three to twelve of them – that

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The opposite of process is chaos, but an in-between is rapid adaptation, emphasis on rapid . Limit scope as much as possible, ship small things fast, and react to feedback quickly.

The design process assumes that dev time is the utmost priority, and this moves a bulk of labor into the design process. This is a faulty premise. The most valuable thing... See more

At the core, strategy is about focus, and most complex organizations don’t focus their resources. Instead, they pursue multiple goals at once, not concentrating enough resources to achieve a breakthrough in any of them.

What is impossible, however, is concentrating on two tasks at once. Multitasking forces your brain to switch back and forth very quickly from one task to another.

This wouldn’t be a big deal if the human brain could transition seamlessly from one job to the next, but it can’t. Multitasking forces you to pay a mental price each time you interrupt one... See more

The more senior the designer, the more abstract the problem they should be solving.

To break it down more tangibly, let’s look at some examples of levels and appropriate responsibilities:

Designer Lvl 1: Design a form that lets people edit their profile. Pretty scoped—assumes there is a profile, and that the solution takes the shape of a form.

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Jobs would often test people, asking them, “how many things have you said no to?” Ive was up to the task of answering, only he didn’t mean it, and Jobs read right through him.

I would have these sacrificial things, because I wanted to be very honest about it. And so I’d say, “Well, I said no to this and no to that.” But he knew that I wasn’t

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