war
Using akido on the landscape
Always allow them an escape route
Thoughts On Shitpost Diplomacy
Your intention to cut
A Quote by Miyamoto MusashiThe primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him.
The McNamara fallacy
A DefinitionThe McNamara fallacy, named for Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven.
The fallacy refers to McNamara's belief as to what led the United States to defeat in the Vietnam War—specifically, his quantification of success in the war (e.g., in terms of enemy body count), ignoring other variables.
The Art of War
A Book by Sun Tzu
A Q&A with Figma's VP of Product
Since we launched FigJam back in April, teams having been using it to grow all kinds of ideas into great designs. We recently caught up with Figma's VP of Product, Yuhki Yamashita, to hear what it was like to build FigJam and how things have changed since then. Here, he reflects on the evolving role of design and product management, what it means to welcome “non-designers” into the process, and the future of FigJam.
Stretching the product
When we’re thinking about where to take our product next, we actually take a lot of inspiration from our customers and the Figma Community, to see how they’re stretching our product in interesting or unexpected ways. We saw this happening in the early days of the pandemic. Our users were starting to use Figma for everything from brainstorming ideas to running team warm-up activities, to even putting on social events for people to get to know each other. We saw a lot of use cases that got us thinking.
Engineering, design, and product management
The boundary between engineering, design, and product management is blurring. Some of us used to have a mental model in which roles and responsibilities dictated how things work—that designers do one thing and engineers do another, for example. Increasingly, more people are crossing team lines to problem solve together...Now, it’s not about who “owns” what—it’s more of a collective endeavor. And the roles have become more interlocked, and I think that’s fundamentally a good thing.
Embracing the mess
Design is non-linear. At Figma, we often talk about “embracing the mess,” and that really means leaning into the chaos and complexity that makes the design process what it is. Even once you have the seedling of an idea, you need to explore and iterate, then pull back and evaluate to see what’s working and what’s not. Sometimes you’ll scrap an idea after a brainstorm session, and other times you’ll get pretty far with a concept, but still need different perspectives and input to move forward.