The method
How I build
This is the reasoning underneath the work, in the order it actually gets used. It is not the pitch — it is what you would find out in the first week anyway, written down so you can disagree with it before you pay rather than after.
Execution stopped being the constraint
Work can be written, designed, coded and prototyped faster than at any point in the past. Producing another output is no longer the hard part, and a studio that sells output is selling the part that just got cheap.
What did not get cheaper is knowing which output is worth making. As execution becomes abundant, orientation becomes scarce — so I organise everything around the consequential decision rather than around the deliverable.
A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision.
Forty-seven years later a model can produce twenty plausible directions in an afternoon. It still cannot tell you which one your company should commit to, and it cannot be accountable for that choice. So the line falls somewhere specific: tools execute, AI reduces uncertainty, and a person decides and stays accountable for it.
Where judgment is actually required
Not all work needs this. Judgment is required where uncertainty and consequence are high at once: several futures are genuinely possible, the outcome matters, and somebody has to choose before certainty is available.
It matters, and the path is known — training, precedent or expertise already removed the doubt. Often the product of enormous accumulated skill: turning what was once uncertain into repeatable practice is what mastery looks like.
Several futures are genuinely possible, no procedure removes the ambiguity, and someone must still choose. Founding or pivoting, positioning, naming, choosing a direction, committing to a strategy.
Predictable and low-stakes: admin, maintenance, the standard checklist. Necessary, and the first thing worth automating — there is little reason to spend scarce judgment here, and finishing it is not progress.
Sketching, prototyping, playing with a possibility while being wrong is still cheap. Worth protecting deliberately: it is where the options come from, and without it decisions get made from the first available idea.
Uncertainty on its own creates curiosity, but without consequence it stays play. Consequence on its own creates importance, but without uncertainty it is just execution. The intersection is the only thing I ask anyone to buy — work whose path is already clear does not need a week, and I will tell you when that is what you have.
The ground a product crosses
Products differ. The ground does not. Every product I have worked on moves through the same three disciplines in the same order, up one side and down the other.
The whole climb
Brand, then UX, then UI on the way up — the summit, where what to build gets settled — then the same three coming back down as it meets real users. Point at a stretch to see what it is.
You start at brand, because it is the hardest thing to pivot later and it sets the lens every decision above it gets made through. You climb through UX to UI, where brand and experience finally have to agree with each other in a single artifact — which is usually where the consequential decision sits.
That turn is the Summit, and what it produces is a shape: settled far enough that someone can build from it, loose enough to leave the how open, bounded enough to be finished. Then the same three in reverse, and this is the half most studios do not sell. Going up, each discipline is a belief. Coming down, each one is tested.
- Ascent — what you believe
Working in hypothesis. Each answer is the best judgment available before contact with reality.
1BrandWho is this for, and where do we sit against everyone else?The core user, positioning, naming, identity, the system that carries them.- Who exactly is this for, and who is it not for?
- What do we stand for that the alternatives can’t credibly claim?
- What are we called, and what do the mark, colour and type have to say?
- 2UXWhat should the experience be?Journeys, flows, prototypes — the experience as hypothesis.
- Which single journey has to work before the rest of the product matters?
- What happens in the first five minutes, before anyone is convinced?
- Should we build this or that — and what evidence would settle it?
- 3UIWhat does it actually look like?Hero screens and exploration — where brand and UX first have to agree.
- What does the hero screen look like when brand and experience finally agree?
- Which directions are worth exploring, and which one do we commit to?
- What components does this product actually turn out to need?
- SummitHas it found its shape, and is that shape worth committing to?The Decision. The shape is settled — concrete enough to build from, bounded enough to finish. Everything below is execution.
- Descent — what turns out to be true
The same three, now exposed. Every belief formed on the way up gets tested on the way down.
4UIDoes the system hold as it extends?The real components — variations, states, the set the build uses.- What variations and states does each component need to survive real use?
- What must engineering be able to build from without us in the room?
- Does the pattern still hold at the twentieth screen, or only the first?
- 5UXWhat is the experience, actually?Beta and early testers on the real thing, rather than a prototype.
- What are early testers doing that we never designed for?
- Which assumption the prototype rested on turned out to be wrong?
- Given what beta showed, what do we change before opening it wider?
- 6BrandDoes the market hear what we meant?The website, the launch, the story — the product meeting its market.
- What should the website say, show and do?
- What do we say when this meets the market for the first time?
- Does the story we told at the base still describe what we built?
Almost nobody starts at the bottom. You start where the product already is, and the useful question is not what to do first but what is still unclimbed above you. Arriving part-way up is normal — it just means some decisions below you got made by default rather than on purpose, and if the thing is stalling, a skipped stretch is the first place I look.
The whole hill is months of work with building in between — that is the honest shape of a product’s life, and no week buys all of it. What a week can buy at the very bottom is the entire ascent, compressed: when nothing is built and nothing is committed, the cheapest available move is to make the idea real enough to be wrong about. That is the week I sell. Higher up, the ground is heavier and a decision costs more to unmake, so a week there buys one decision rather than a product.
The week
A Climb is a bounded run at one Question. It starts when the Question is written down, it reaches its Summit the moment that Question resolves into a Decision, and it ends with the artifacts needed to act on it. One Question, one Summit, one Decision — that shape does not change with size.
Monday is kickoff: I confirm and sharpen what was already agreed, so the week arrives with a subject rather than going looking for one. Wednesday is the Summit, and it cannot slip — if a question cannot be decided by Wednesday it was too big, which is mine to catch before you pay rather than yours to discover on Thursday. Friday is delivery. Everything between the meetings is written down in your portal the day it happens.
Nothing is scheduled until the Question, the date and the artifact are in writing. You are not buying a week of my attention and finding out afterwards what it was for; and if what you describe is not week-sized, hearing that costs nothing.
What accumulates
Every week leaves a Decision and the reasoning behind it, the artifacts that support or act on it, and one reflection on what was learned. It lands in your own workspace and it is yours. A decision is permanent — a change of direction is a new decision that supersedes the old one, never an edit, so a reversal stays legible as a reversal.
Which is the part that compounds. A year in, you can answer why the product is the way it is — not from memory, but from a record of what was uncertain, what was chosen and what it ruled out. New people can read it. The second hill costs less than the first, because by then you have learned to read the ground.
Nothing renews and nothing carries forward automatically, which is the only reason not yet stays a real answer once I have an interest in you continuing. Pick it up in three months and the record is where you left it.