Delivery
Shipping fast without shipping garbage
Speed is not the same as haste. The projects that ship quickly and hold up share a few habits, and none of them are about working longer hours.
Decide the shape before the details
The expensive mistakes happen early: a flow that should have been two screens, a feature that should have been a setting. We spend the first two days arguing about shape, and the rest of the project filling it in. It feels slow. It saves weeks.
Build the ugliest working version first
A working path through the product, however unstyled, tells you more than a beautiful mockup. We ship that internally on day three, use it, and then design against something real.
Keep the handoff in the room
Design and engineering working in the same cycle removes an entire category of delay. The person who designed the screen is the person who answers the question about it.
Stop at the right point
Shipping fast also means knowing when the marginal hour buys nothing the user will notice. We keep a short list of things we deliberately will not do, and we write it down before the pressure starts.