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?

Let’s begin.

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?

The rest of this post is available to members. Upgrade now to get:

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.

Most brands don’t have these, which sucks for two reasons:

1. Your default voice & tone are not necessarily those of your brand.

2. As you grow, inevitably multiple people will be writing. You want your writing to sound like it’s coming from the same person, and you want that to be a separate entity than the rest of you.

So let’s talk about how to build these for a small team. I’ve done this recently for one of my favorite clients, and I’m excited to share the template we used.

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.