When customers buy your products they aim for three things beyond function: social status, positive emotions or saving money. If you build products focused on status or emotions you’re golden. Focus on saving money and you’re in a race to the bottom.

Your product isn’t just features. It’s what those features deliver.

We might have strong feelings about the products we build, but as soon as those products hit customers we have facts.

What we are left with are opinions on how to look at those facts.

One of the greatest strengths is not what you know, but the ability to collect brilliant ideas from everyone.

Remix them, create something new and lavishly praise the people that came up with the ideas.

I’ve been running Design Sprints for years since the method was first introduced as a book.

One practice that really stuck with me is “Always Be Capturing”.

The concept is simple: as the facilitator, you capture ideas on post-its or whiteboards the moment people share them. This small practice has some great side-effects. It saves the in-the-moment discussions and thoughts, shows the participants their ideas are important, it creates a visual summary that we can use as a “was this what you meant?” and probably the best part is that it creates a collection of ideas that we can organise later.

I use this during conversations, while listening to audiobooks, or podcasts. I’ve set up a quick shortcut on my phone that opens a text area and saves notes directly to my favorite note-taking app.

The beauty of this system is its simplicity. Capture first, then group, filter, and remix later.

No field has stayed unchanged in the face of new technology. It either transforms or eliminates jobs.

Don’t wait for perfect to start.

Creativity starts after your first idea ends.

The cost of entry for AI is lower now than it will ever be again. If we only use AI for quick answers we’ll struggle to justify higher costs in the future. Those who use AI as a thinking partner will see the value differently. They’ll happily pay increased prices because they’ve experienced AI as an affordable teammate rather than just a fancy search engine.

Every piece of text you write adds weight to the story you tell.

At some point that weight makes the story complicated and hard to understand.

Weight becomes the blocker for advancing. You have built debt.

This applies to generating code with AI too.

It’s powerful but can produce code in wrong places, fix unintended problems and make assumptions about what to write.

Just because AI can create a lot quickly doesn’t mean it’s creating what we need.

The real question isn’t “how many hours did you work?” but “did you deliver the value promised?”.

If the client is happy with the results then you’re delivering what they’re paying for.

Hourly billing punishes efficiency and expertise. Outcome matters, not the time spent.