I think about design the way I think about leadership. Both work best when the people around you have internalized the direction. They’re using it in conversations you’re not in the room for. I helped ground my team at Google in Critical User Journeys, and it became the shared language engineers used in hallway conversations without prompting. That’s the signal I look for. Not compliance. Adoption.

The Swedish have a word I keep coming back to: lagom. Usually translated as “just right,” but the more useful reading is the resolution of tensions without compromise. I’ve navigated that across cultures and time zones, across companies operating at billions of users and startups where the design foundation didn’t exist yet. Scale and intimacy. System and detail. Machine speed and human direction. What the business needs and what the person in front of the screen actually experiences.

The goal was never to split the difference. It was to get everything to where it needed to be, then weigh it again.

If something in the work resonated, the email icon below is the right place to start.