Why I still care about this more than I probably should
Why I still care about this more than I probably should
After 20 years in design and product, I still care about this more than I probably should.
Not the outputs. Not the titles. Not the surface-level stuff.
The thinking behind it.
How decisions get made. Whether we are solving the right problem. Whether something genuinely works for the people it is meant to serve.
That part has never really gone away.
If anything, it has become more important over time.
What changes as you get more experienced
Earlier in my career, I cared a lot about the visible parts of the work.
The quality of the design. The strength of the output. The ability to point at something and say, “I made that”.
That made sense. It is how you build confidence. It is how you grow.
But as the scope of the work gets bigger, something starts to shift.
You realise that the output is only a small part of the story.
Behind every product, every feature, every experience, there is a chain of decisions. Some of them good, some of them questionable, some of them made under pressure or without enough information.
And those decisions shape the outcome far more than any single screen ever will.
The part that never really leaves you
What has stayed consistent for me is the curiosity around those decisions.
Why are we doing this?
What problem are we actually trying to solve?
Who is this really for?
What are their needs?
What happens if we get this wrong?
Those questions do not disappear as you become more senior.
They become harder to ignore.
Because you start to see the impact of getting them wrong.
You see products that look good but do not get used. You see teams working hard on things that do not move anything forward. You see effort being spent in the wrong places, often with the best intentions.
And you realise how easy it is for that to happen.
How teams drift
Most teams do not set out to build the wrong thing.
Drift happens slowly.
Priorities shift. Deadlines appear. Decisions get made quickly because they have to. Assumptions go unchallenged because there is no time to dig deeper.
Over time, the focus moves away from understanding the problem and towards delivering something that looks like progress.
The work keeps moving, but the connection to what actually matters becomes weaker.
From the outside, everything can look fine.
Inside, you can feel the gap.
Why building things still matters to me
I think that is why I keep building things outside of my day-to-day work.
Not because I have loads of spare time, and not that I enjoy insomnia episodes.
Not because every idea turns into something meaningful.
But because it keeps me close to the reality of it.
When you are the one making decisions, even on a small scale, you feel the weight of them differently. You cannot hide behind process or structure. You have to decide what matters and what does not.
You see very quickly whether something resonates or not.
That feedback loop is hard to ignore.
And it sharpens how you think about everything else.
What I care about now
These days, I care less about whether something looks good in isolation.
I care more about whether it works in the context it exists in.
Whether it solves something real.
Whether it makes sense to the people using it.
Whether it is worth the time and effort that has gone into building it.
That does not mean craft does not matter.
It does, a lot.
But it is only one part of a much bigger picture.
Why this still matters
After all this time, the reason I still care is quite simple.
It is very easy to build things that look right.
It is much harder to build things that are right.
And that gap between the two is where most of the interesting work sits.
It is also where most of the mistakes happen.