archive
Raw material: the ideas I keep reaching for.
Quotes
Mental models
Inversion
Mar 2026Instead of asking how to make something succeed, ask what would guarantee its failure — then design those things out. For a clinical workflow: list everything that would make a nurse abandon the screen, and remove those obstacles before adding anything new.
Chesterton's fence
Nov 2025Don’t remove a rule, a step, or a piece of UI until you understand why it was put there. Legacy healthcare workflows are full of fences — some guard real safety constraints, some are just scar tissue. Find out which kind you’re looking at before you simplify.
Frameworks
Jobs-to-be-done
Feb 2026People don’t buy products; they hire them to make progress in a specific circumstance. The unit of analysis is the job, not the persona. When a clinician falls back to a phone call instead of the portal, ask what job the phone call is being hired for.
Double diamond
Sep 2025Two cycles of diverge-then-converge: discover the right problem, define it, then develop options and deliver the right solution. Its real value is permission — to explore widely before committing, twice, instead of converging on the first plausible answer.