First, our monthly office hours for paid members is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, July 8 to ask me anything about value-based design & getting an impact with your work. These vary in attendance from 1 to 10 people, and they’re always helpful for you and for me. Signup link after the jump!

First, two stories about how social proof can be put in your headline. Then, a lesson about why and when you should do so.

Our prices on new consultative work will change at 5p CDT today. Now’s your last chance to buy a teardown, roadmap, or call with us at our current rate. If you’re an active client, your fees will not change for the duration of your work with us.

A couple of weeks ago, I surveyed everyone about what we should write about next, and “post-LLM design” won by a landslide. I find this to be fascinating, because we’ve positioned ourselves rather firmly as skeptical of LLM, at least with respect to some of the messaging that exists around it.

For the first half of my career, tech was changing the world, and there was a lot of optimism & promise around it. We didn’t really question much. The iPhone came out, then we all made a bunch of apps, then we ruined taxis & hotels. The internet was a place where we could all connect with one another and understand the world’s information. Twitter had infighting, but we thought it was funny.

We already established that design is not dead. In this paid lesson, we’ll discuss the specific ways that design is surviving, alongside some steps for you to take.

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No.

Asking for design input from a wide range of stakeholders has its upsides and downsides. One downside is when someone sees a large company or influencer offering a specific solution, and they think “well, we should do that, too.”

On face, this is not a horrible idea. Other people did all of this work and succeeded, so why not us? It’s more efficient, helps us compete.

You know better, so let’s talk about it.

Some business announcements this week, and then a brief note on fiat plays:

• Our repositioning is more-or-less complete. If you find anything on our site that looks off or requires a rewrite, please let us know.
• We’re kicking off a major summerlong project on the topic of onboarding, and I’m doing a small literature review for it. I’m already intimately aware of Hulick’s work, but if you have any other books or resources for me to review, hit reply and point me to ‘em.
• For the first time in five years, we’re going to be changing our fees for new work in a few weeks. Since we could change it all right now, that means a lot of things are on sale as of the conclusion of this sentence. Now would be a very good time to book a roadmap, call, or retainer, if you feel so called. Thanks for your support of us, now & always.
• Lastly, one brief question: what would you like me to write about next?

In last week’s paid lesson, we defined the seam and discussed what you can do to address it. We’re building on that lesson by talking about why a style guide is important, and what makes it different from a design system.

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Our monthly office hours for paid members is today! Join us at 1p Central Time to chat about all things value-based design. Happy to answer any questions or pressing issues you may currently have. Find out what 1p Central Time is in your time zone here.If you’re a paid member, our meeting link is at the end of this email. If you sign up between now and 1p, we’ll send the meeting link your way.

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Financially, we have something here called the breakeven point, where we know we’ll be able to live comfortably, meet our expenses, and do what we want to do for the year. This typically comes around late August, when a lot of businesses lock in their strategies for the rest of the year and have chosen to get us involved. A couple of years, it didn’t happen at all. One year, it happened in early June because everybody suddenly invested in our work in response to a global pandemic.

I don’t want to jinx anything, but it’s nonzero likely that we’ll reach the breakeven point soon. Our existing client portfolio has not changed since last September, and a couple of them have chosen to hire us for more expansive work. With one more renewal, we’ll be good for the year.

Have you ever signed up for software that had a lovely-looking marketing page, and the product itself was… lacking? We call the transition between marketing & product the seam, and we think it’s of profound importance for your business.

A prominent seam results in lower retention and higher churn, plain & simple. Competitors can take advantage of it. And it’s just not a good look.

That’s because your marketing page promises something, and so your customers expect the quality of your design to translate, in some form, to the product. When someone goes through a well-designed conversion funnel, joins, pays you, and encounters something that looks like it was built ten years ago, they feel deceived.

In this paid lesson, we’ll discuss what the seam is, where it typically occurs, why it occurs, and what you can do about it.

First, our monthly office hours for paid members is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, June 10 to ask me anything about value-based design & getting an impact with your work. These vary in attendance from 1 to 10 people, and they’re always helpful for you and for me. Signup link after the jump!

I’m currently writing this in my garden, which is the sort of place that causes people to go slack-jawed and slow down as they walk through. I garden a lot. I pull weeds on my way inside and throw them in a little basket next to the door. I harvest plants from my raised bed and make lunches from them.

I pause for lunch every day. I make lunch every other Thursday for anybody who wants to show up. I’m sitting under a 12-foot-tall serviceberry bush right now, and in a couple of weeks its fruit will start to ripen, at which point I’ll be swatting squirrels & birds away as I pick the thing clean. Then I’ll make jam with it, jar it for my close people, and hand the jars out exclusively at my biggest party of the year, which is on the second Saturday of July.

Incorrect people have recently been declaring the death of design. This is weird, because we see design everywhere. We see design in places where we don’t expect to find design. We can only conclude, in this moment, that design has won.

So what now?

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One more about repositioning.

We often speak here about new positioning being easy to adopt, technically speaking. You change your home page, spin up a landing page, ask people if they’re interested. You put on new positioning like it’s a new outfit.

The real challenge is when you reposition after a decade of a previous positioning. That’s a fourth of your career! You’re kind of flushing it! Suddenly you’ve been boiling-frog’d into one of the most load-bearing decisions of your life.

There are ways to slow-pedal this and soften the impact. If you keep your existing portfolio of clients, and even your existing messaging and educational initiatives, you can test the new market without burning any bridges.

Expanding on our recent universally correct lesson about pricing, we’d like to talk about pricing tiers: namely, what goes into the strategies behind establishing each price, and what you can do to move into a correct space for pricing.

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Thanks for your patience while we were out in sunny, profoundly warm Mexico. I watched a thunderstorm roll in while drinking coffee on my balcony, overlooking the Caribbean, and I felt really grateful to be alive, doing what I do for all of you.

A few small announcements:

1. I’ll be doing teardowns at MicroConf Remote tomorrow, May 21, in the morning. MicroConf is one of those extended-family things that I’ve been honored to attend over the past few years, and I’m really grateful to be on some form of stage for them. Please come through & heckle!
2. I was quoted on the App Collective’s latest episode on the topic of how we vet trusted partners. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
3. Not a Draft-y thing, but we enjoyed this A/B test. Not a very high sample size, but you’re dividing by zero, so.

Okay, actual letter time.

Our monthly office hours for paid members is today!

Join us at 1p Central Time to chat about all things value-based design. Happy to answer any questions or pressing issues you may currently have. Find out what 1p Central Time is in your time zone here.

If you’re a paid member, our meeting link is below. If you sign up between now and 1p, we’ll send the meeting link your way.

As a humble reminder, we’re out at a conference this week. We’ll be back the week of May 19.

One of my favorite things about software is how there are so many bespoke cases that people end up with these roiling debates about how to do a thing. “Don’t charge less than $50 a month,” one says, forgetting that this is literally how dozens of thriving businesses work. “Never have a free plan,” they say, even though many businesses, including one I work for, use free plans as ways to cleanly ladder people into revenue generation.

And so there are still quite a few open questions. These are “myths,” I guess, to some, but for us they’re rules that just happen to get broken a lot. Let’s go through some of them, and outline some exceptions and contingencies.

As a humble reminder, we’re out at a conference this week. We’ll be back the week of May 19.

We’re aware that our positioning towards software is the most important technological event of the past century, and as a result, some people have questions about how we did it. We’ve undertaken a few initiatives, some done, some still in progress:

• Rework our website to reflect our new focus on software, which we wrapped up last week.

• Start from basics. Paid members have already received a couple of lessons on pricing & onboarding, with more to come.

• Outline a few years of new lessons on increasingly granular topics. Hoping to do this on the plane in a couple of days.

• Relationship building. Figure out where to speak next, who to talk to, etc.

Let’s talk about lesson planning. Content ideas are shockingly easy to brainstorm; you just need to make the writing prompts to get you going when you’re in front of a blank screen. I got this idea from Naomi Dunford at IttyBiz and have adapted it for our use.

First, come up with a few primary topics that fit your positioning. For us, that involves:

First, our monthly office hours for paid members is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, May 13 to ask me anything about value-based design & getting an impact with your work. These vary in attendance from 1 to 10 people, and they’re always helpful for you and for me. Signup link after the jump!

Onboarding is massively important, but it usually doesn’t lend itself well to specific design patterns, since the goal is to create a specific outcome that is specific to your product’s value. In this lesson, then, we’ll talk about some of the principles that onboarding should follow, and dive into some examples.

They say that a pilot earns their paycheck every tenth landing. The theory: the plane mostly flies itself when everything goes well*. When you need to do something more complex – like, say, fly into ORD mid-derecho, as I’ve had the unfortunate fate of experiencing – then that’s where your expertise kicks in.

I have had the good fortune of earning my paycheck this past month, for all of my clients, for reasons both obvious and not obvious. One client watched a vendor turn usurious with a day to go in the contract; another lost a key staff member; a third shared with me a big, intractable problem around onboarding. In each of these, we flew into the storm, stuck the landing.

The common thread is advisory, brought about through establishing the expert position ahead of time. Expertise can be publicized in the form of whitepapers, process documents, surveys, books, and reports. Most of you know we’re experts in what we do, but many others, including some who hire us(!), need a little budging.

Because what we do is value-based design, but how we create value is through advisory. It doesn’t take long for people to start asking us bigger strategic questions that, on face, have nothing to do with the actual practice. But they have everything to do with the way the business works, and there’s always something deeper to explore.

Now that we’re focused on software, it’s time to turn our attention back toward a big topic: pricing pages. In this lesson, we’ll outline the baseline anatomy of a pricing page, so you can make sure yours is doing as well as possible before you start to break rules or make improvements.

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Why did we put a light bulb there? What is the point of a light bulb? Where are we attempting to put light, exactly? Are people really asking for light here in the first place? Could this be more easily solved by simply cutting a hole in the ceiling and putting a skylight in there? Do we need light when it’s dark out?

Why did the light bulb fail? Don’t we have LED lighting now? You can just buy a light that lasts for 15,000 hours and be done with it, so if the light failed and it is LED, why? Faulty wiring? A power spike? Do we need to make a warranty claim? Do we need to open up the ceiling and figure out what happened? If the light isn’t LED, why do we have incandescent or CFL bulbs in the first place?

What was the temperature of the light? Why? What is the function of the space? Are we talking a nice cozy home, or an office, or a hospital? Or maybe it’s a design consultancy where we need fully neutral 5000K daylight bulbs everywhere, so people can make sure their colors render properly?

What is our prior knowledge of this light? What value are people getting from this light? Have we talked to anyone? Why not?

Oh lawd, we’re talking about tariffs.

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Our monthly office hours for paid members is today! Join us at 1p Central Time to chat about all things value-based design. Happy to answer any questions or pressing issues you may currently have. Find out what 1p Central Time is in your time zone here. If you’re a paid member, our meeting link is at the end of this email. If you sign up between now and 1p, we’ll send the meeting link your way.

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New event alert! I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be doing live teardowns at MicroConf Remote in May. Come through! Submit your site! I promise to be firm but kind as I lovingly rip your work to shreds.

In our previous lesson, we defined & discussed process design. In this week’s paid lesson, we’ll connect that lesson with our evergreen piece on sources of truth go in depth about how we can connect sources of truth to yield deeper insight.

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Many wild events have happened in Draft’s history, and you could conceivably pick a few to qualify as the wildest. My consistent pick for the wildest happened in 2023, when design began the deepest winter in the industry’s whole history while we also had our second-best year ever.

Four things happened all at once:

1. We came to a global consciousness that design is a form of leveraged power, and those in power took it from us.
2. People in power wanted everything to happen faster, and since design frequently slows things down, design got cut.
3. Other tools appeared that appeared to make design more efficient to those in power. Whether or not this is true remains an open debate, but I think nobody is debating that people in power think the tools make design more efficient.
4. Global fascism, which has caused numerous tech workers to go on strike from the industry.

None of which are great! But again, we also had our second-best year ever – because prospective clients recognized the value of our work, and decided to take a chance on us.

In our previous two lessons, we set forth the idea of executional velocity and described why it’s important for teams to pursue, especially those that are beginning to scale. Usually that happens through the intentional creation of structured process.

In this lesson, we’ll talk about how to design a process, and how to apply your design skills to the creation of generous execution in any organization.

First, our monthly office hours for paid members is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, April 15 to ask me anything about value-based design & getting an impact with your work. These vary in attendance from 1 to 10 people, and they’re always helpful for you and for me. Signup link after the jump!

We are never not reworking the stupid website. The world changes; you change; you adapt. Since we’re usually busy serving our clients – and since we’ve been fully sold out since 2022 – I don’t know if we make changes often enough, but we eventually get around to it. Last week we got around to it. We got rid of some things, reworded some other things, and scrubbed a position that was no longer working for us.

The goal is correct plumage. You are signaling to a person in a way that solves their urgent, expensive problem. You do so in a way that reads the room & meets the moment. When it works well, you find kindred spirits. When it works poorly, you try to do everything for everyone, and you bungle your positioning.

In last week’s masterpiece, we coined the term executional velocity and answered a few questions about it:

• What is executional velocity?
• What’s the difference between executional velocity & productivity?
• How can we identify the main operational issues that harm executional velocity?

This week, we’re going to answer a few more questions:

• Why isn’t executional velocity discussed more broadly?
• What’s the relationship between executional velocity & key business goals?
• Under what circumstances might additional executional velocity not be desirable?
• What are some of the ways that we can address normalized deviant practices that actively harm executional velocity?

I printed a few copies of our WTF notebook, and I’m seeking beta testers. Hit reply with your mailing address if you’re able to use it for a bit and provide me with brutal, unflinching feedback in return.

Our recent paid lessons have focused on some of the dynamics that occur in teams that are over, oh, say, 7 people. By that point, roles are defined, people wear fewer hats, responsibility gets meted out, and power structures become more readily apparent.

Most businesses are this large, but what if yours isn’t? How does value-based design manifest in smaller teams, or with solo practitioners?

I’ve been lucky enough to watch several dozen growing businesses from the inside over the course of my career. Some have been successful, scaling effectively and growing into new markets. Some have been… less successful. And really, the thing that separates the two is execution. What defines the ability for a team to do things, and do them well?

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Our monthly office hours for paid members is today! Join us at 1p Central Time to chat about all things value-based design. Happy to answer any questions or pressing issues you may currently have. Find out what 1p Central Time is in your time zone here. If you’re a paid member, our meeting link is at the end of this email. If you sign up between now and 1p, we’ll send the meeting link your way.

We wrote a brief guide to why we use email when communicating with people. This joins a few other explainer bits that outline our principles & motivations.

Precisely three of you wanted a WTF notebook. I may print some as zines for my close people. We love a fun side project.

First, our monthly office hours for paid members is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, March 18 to ask me anything about value-based design & getting an impact with your work. These vary in attendance from 1 to 10 people, and they’re always helpful for you and for me. Signup link after the jump!

Let’s say you ran an experiment, and it had a notable result. Win or lose, doesn’t matter: you felt something. Surely it will affect the prioritization of your existing work.

In this paid lesson, we’ll talk about how – and what to do about it.

I was recently at dinner with a dear friend who went independent after a decade of working in a consultancy. One day a while back, the consultancy got a new CEO. For their first few months, the CEO would walk around with two notebooks. One was the regular ol’ black notebook that you expect every knowledge worker to have. The other was red, and it had the letters WTF written on the front.

Every time the CEO heard something that sounded absurd or horrible to them, they would put their regular notebook away and write it down in the WTF notebook. As you would expect, being the CEO of a new-to-them company, they rapidly filled the notebook.

I think of this often as a consultant. I am frequently called to be present in WTF situations. Some are obvious, but most are not, or they would have been addressed without me in the room, right? It’s incumbent on me to figure out the real reasons I’m hired, which are frequently subtle, requiring some digging. You ask questions, poke around corners, pull on threads, and find an expensive WTF.

Dan Luu’s immortal, essential “Normalization of deviance”, a URL I have memorized, speaks to this issue:

There is always a Big Problem. Sometimes the Big Problem is stated; sometimes you must figure it out yourself.

Your goal as a value-based designer is to laser-focus on the Big Problem until it is comprehensively solved. Then, you either find yourself another Big Problem, or you run out of them and show yourself out. In this lesson, we’ll cover some example Big Problems, layout the process for identifying them, and provide next steps.

Our monthly office hours for paid members is today! Join us at 1p Central Time to chat about all things value-based design. Happy to answer any questions or pressing issues you may currently have. Find out what 1p Central Time is in your time zone here. If you’re a paid member, our meeting link is at the end of this email. If you sign up between now and 1p, we’ll send the meeting link your way.

After some current events, it’s come to my attention that some of you might want to know more about my tech stack.

I hold a few key principles in order to remain in right relationship to software:

There’s a meme in my consulting circles:

$500 client: “I just feel as though with this investment I am about to make in you, that we should understand how our lives are about to change and I need results and you need to bring them, I am entrusting you with our livelihood and lives.” $50,000 client: “Money sent, thanks”

In this week’s paid lesson, we’ll talk about how to generate more of the latter for you.

I got interviewed for 10-Minute Ecom Success, because I’m the kind of person who can sum up a total design worldview in precisely 10 minutes. I think this turned out pretty good! My thanks to Marc for having me on the show.

Last year, I took one look at the 10-day weather forecast in Chicago and booked a flight to another continent, because I’m normal and reasonable and do things that are universally correct. You would do this, too. You work in ecommerce; you went through the holidays; you’re tired; the two-week break was not enough. Holiday closure is not vacation, either, not when the whole rest of the world stops and that’s why you give yourself permission to follow suit.

I, somewhat famously, very rarely take vacation, which is a bit the curse of running an independent business, a bit the fact that I like my job, and a bit the fact that I simply forget to, that living here is great, that vacations often involve trips and rest. I still worked a little in Paris. I did some housekeeping over the holidays. I took intermission from content in October & November, faded back a little. But I still worked that whole time; you just couldn’t see it.

First, our monthly office hours for paid members is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, February 18 to ask me anything about value-based design & getting an impact with your work. These vary in attendance from 1 to 10 people, and they’re always helpful for you and for me. Signup link after the jump!

I’ve talked around the concept of voice & tone in past lessons, but we’ve never stabbed it dead. That happens today.

In short, voice is the essence of your brand’s approach to communication, and tone is how it changes over time. Put another way, your voice is the person, and your tone is the circumstances.

New case study: We redesigned Buttondown, which is both the best way to start a newsletter and the reason why you’re reading this. We’re proud of the work we’ve done, and grateful that it resulted in a 18% conversion rate bump.

If you run a software business and want to make the most of your inbound traffic, get in touch.

I’ve been reading an excellent book by David Baker recently, and one quote feels very Draft-y:

Value-based design is grounded deeply in delegation process, where it’s clear who gets to change the design and when, and it’s clear what happens if someone wants to change the design.

When these processes break down, the value-based designer loads their business’s home page and sees something surprising. Surprises are, of course, signs of low-quality decision making in immature organizations, so in this lesson we’ll talk a little about what happens when you encounter phantom changes – and how to change internal processes so they’re unlikely to ever happen again.

Let’s answer four more of Scott Berkun’s questions today. We already did three. That was fun, right? Four more.

If I know PMs and VPs often know little about design, how can I stop being surprised and disappointed? And instead be better prepared to handle these common situations?

I’m uncertain what designers are being surprised & disappointed about here, but I can guess a few:

• Work not shipping
• Fiat plays
• Terrible questions
• Critiques gone off the rails
• Being fired

Shipping does not conclude design, because only the death of business is able to conclude design. That notwithstanding, there remain deep questions about what happens to design after it’s put in front of customers.

In this lesson, we’ll talk about the measurement, governance, and maintenance of quality design. Both of these are essential forms of design, and they tend to be overlooked in organizations that incorrectly believe that design “ends” once it’s been shipped or, worse, handed off to be built. How do we stick the landing?

Our monthly office hours for paid members is today! Join us at 1p Central Time to chat about all things value-based design. Happy to answer any questions or pressing issues you may currently have. Find out what 1p Central Time is in your time zone here. If you’re a paid member, our meeting link is at the end of this email. If you sign up between now and 1p, we’ll send the meeting link your way.

When we think of spaceholding, we normally resort to a personal context, where we console someone in crisis or grief. Or maybe we’re on a therapist’s couch, and they’re doing the work of spaceholding.

That is not what happens in design. When we speak of spaceholding at Draft, we specifically mean the process of managing the emotional & energetic tenor of others in order to get work shipped. It isn’t a whole lot different from what happens on the couch, but there’s a whole set of mostly-unspoken professional rules around it.

Imagine an invisible grid of boxes superimposed on your site. Tapping each one does something. The rules aren’t immediately clear – you need to create an interface for that. These are your tap targets.

Take a slider. You would think that tapping only the slider would control it. In practice, though, there’s an area around the slider that controls the same thing. You can safely tap white space, control the slider, and never think twice about it.

This separation between control & intent is a key pillar of mobile-first interface design. In this lesson, we’ll talk a little about tap targets, and outline how to use them in your app.

What does the present moment look like for value-based design? There are numerous opportunities for profit generation. Points of leverage always exist for us.

On the more production-grade end, design is load-bearingly critical in down-funnel activities. After all, you can never have a too high-converting checkout form.

It’s also highly useful in the more performance-based aspects of tech work, especially now that we’ve all learned to code & measure our impact. A faster-loading pricing page is likely a better-converting one.

Speaking of pricing pages, design will niche to supporting individual activities. “Pricing designers”, “onboarding designers”, and “checkout designers” will come to exist. From specialization comes real expertise.

First, our monthly office hours for paid members is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, January 21 to ask me anything about value-based design & getting an impact with your work. These vary in attendance from 1 to 10 people, and they’re always helpful for you and for me. Signup link after the jump!

Happy new year, y’all. Feels good to be back. Got a fun one this week.

In his recent excellent book The Four Conversations, consulting consultant Blair Enns describes a term called the flip, where a prospective client begins to view you as a consultant, not a contractor.

Intermission is over. I emerged from deep rest, deleted all of my unread email, and now here we are. I hope you had a good few weeks.

First, I wrote some text about a gift I gave to myself, which was a long time coming.

When I wasn’t cooking on the aforeposted gift, I spent most of deep rest reading. Of the topics I circled around, the most Draft-pertinent regards the ongoing structural remediation of design.

The past two years have witnessed a significant collapse within contemporary design. A few hundred thousand of us were laid off by businesses who chose to abandon design. By abandoning design, businesses became more hostile towards customers. A few high-profile incidents occurred, and a term got coined, but we are really only witnessing the beginning of tech’s find-out phase.

When a team size increases past 1, it’s necessary to create a source of truth for coordination, delegation, and ongoing reference. That includes:

• What needs to be done
• What’s already been done
• Conversations around how to execute on what needs to be done
• The results of any learning or research

This is 101-level business practice, but we see organizations messing things up in key ways. In our final paid lesson before we enter deep rest for the holidays, we talk about how to create & manage sources of truth in any organization.

I got interviewed on Step by Step Business. Parmesan is also depicted on the aforelinked.

Scott Berkun is smarter than me. He wrote the book I wish I had written in this moment. His work pushes us to be better designers. And recently, he wrote a post that asked eleven questions that should be in every designer’s browser history.

While I don’t know if I personally search the web in complete sentences like that, the questions are excellent. They’re also kind of hard! Some of them likely have book-length responses, or they involve practicing design for decades. At least one of them has a really spicy answer. Another is probably answerable with therapy.

Continuing from last week’s lesson, we’d like to go deep on what happens when you start on a new team: what power you have, how you can change behavior, and how you can gather power going forward.

Power is the most important component of design. After all, learning design is pretty easy, but how do you get it shipped? How do you measure its impact? How do you get an impact?