Product Designer
Austin, TX
Joined January 2011
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Dano retweeted
Stripe dashboards are boring.
So I built mine as a forest.
Every tree is a real subscriber.
Big customers grow into big trees.
When someone is about to cancel, their tree turns orange.
When they churn, the tree dies.
When a payment comes in, it rains.
You can scroll back in time and watch your whole business grow.
It's not launched yet.
Should I ship it?
@tibo_maker @levelsio @robj3d3 @marclou @jackfriks
Dano retweeted
I've heard this too many times now. "We cycled through a few different Heads of Product... they never work out."
The pattern looks like this...
1. Founders notice they aren't shipping product.
2. They think a Head of Product will fix it.
3. Head of Product comes in, and spends time/energy at the "strategy" level of framing.
4. The strategy from the Head of Product misses the mark.
5. Founders realize they probably have better ideas about strategy.
6. Founders explain what's important to the Head of Product.
7. Head of Product doesn't have the right skills to translate "this is what we want to solve" to a blueprint of what to specifically build.
In the end, it's a mix of wrong output and no output.
What went wrong here? The #1 mismatch I see is that founders don't know what to expect from the Head of Product, and vice versa.
Founders think they should delegate strategy, which is often not the case.
Heads of Product think they should contribute strategy, which is often not the case.
What's missing is this ... very often Founders have a good nose for what needs to get solved. What they need is someone who can NARROW DOWN and TRANSLATE that into a specific concept with good UX that's technically legible.
But instead what happens is both compete for the "set the strategy" role. And nobody is problems into frames into shapes to go build.
My #1 advice to founders thinking they need a head of product. Ask yourself: do you actually NOT know what you want, strategically? Are you really looking to outsource strategy?
If it's not actually about bringing in someone from outside to set the direction for your whole product ... then you need someone who is skilled ONE LEVEL DOWN in concreteness. Meaning someone who can listen to you about what matters, whiteboard the solution that pulls it all together, and work with technical people to make it happen.
There is a HUGE gap in the market today. We need product people who can work ABOVE the level of Figma-visuals and BELOW the level of "company strategy". So much work of getting to what we actually ship — the blueprint — is in-between.
And let me tell you ... if you EVER go to a product conference, prepare to be deeply misled. There are WAY TOO MANY talks about "strategy" when nobody in the room is truly responsible for strategy.
Product is ultimately about understanding the purpose and translating that into a specific design. A Head of Product who can't whiteboard a UI flow or make technical trade-offs with engineers isn't heading product. They're trying to play CEO.
Dano retweeted
So lemme show you what i am working on rn
Klick (might change the name later)
It’s basically gonna be a cursor click animation library, you will be able to add really cool click animations to your cards, pages, and components with just one CLI command.
And this is the homepage i designed for it, tell me how it looks
This project is gonna be crazy, i have spent a lot of time making sure everything feels really polished and good, just wait till i complete it, it’s gonna be insane
Dano retweeted
you have to be a little obsessed and crazy to truly push on craft and design. smaller teams with passionate builders shine here.
craft is spending 7 hours on the minuscule polish thing you thought was going to take 30 minutes but you keep going deeper. the thing that is absolutely of trivial necessity that most would think is a waste of time. sane people would compromise and find another solution.
crazy people that eschew the standard way of designing and building common interactions, UI, and hardware just to see how it feels, or to tug at an inkling of a vision
then do that about 100 more times throughout your product before you're remotely proud of it. it can't be outsourced or handed off to others to implement.
Dano retweeted
building ambient software is one of the most difficult problems on the planet.
the dominant paradigm for product dev has always been relatively straight forward, e.g. user expresses intent & system executes. it’s readable, debuggable, & falsifiable.
ambient fundamentally inverts this contract because the system has to infer intent from context the user never explicitly surfaced, & be right often enough that the inference itself feels like a feature rather than an intrusion.
traditional pm/eng optimizes for “did the user accomplish the thing they asked.” ambient optimizes for “did we model the user’s latent state well enough that they didn’t have to ask.” the former rewards explicitness, instrumentation, & funnels. the latter rewards a kind of editorial restraint that looks like doing less.
this is why there have been very few if any companies that have ever been remotely successful here.
Dano retweeted
The obvious path for designers in the AI age is to move closer to code.
But the more valuable path may be upstream: closer to the customer, the business, and the problem.
If everyone can prompt agents to code, the scarce skill becomes knowing why, what, and how to build.
Dano retweeted
Massive fallacy right there
Watch Steve Jobs in his famous video where he says his most important skill is saying no.
He was no engineer - he was at the top of product. You make good products by saying no to all things that shouldn't be in the product.
It's not at all about not having enough coders, that has nothing to do with it. It's about product purpose, design, usability
If anything AI will make it easier to make bad products
Dano retweeted
Every time I see a tweet saying “I can vibe code this in a weekend” - I think of the slack notification system..
It takes time, persistence and effort to get the details right.
Sure, a lot of simple workflows will get vibe coded away. And maybe you can put this in Claude Code and get the code right in one shot.
But quality, depth and great systems will still have value and take time. You can’t vibe code lessons.
Now and forever.
🤯
3. Multi-columns magazine layout, but _responsive_ and dynamic chenglou.me/pretext/dynamic-…
Dano retweeted
Excited to share something I've been working on.
3 years of color tools. 2 months building this.
Supa Colors generates palettes where every shade looks balanced — visually, not just mathematically.
Really proud of it.
🔗 supacolors.studio
Dano retweeted
on subtraction
adding is easy. someone asks for a feature, you build it. user hits a bug, you patch it. flow feels blocked, you add a shortcut. new trendy idea, you add a new concept. repeat until you have 50 buttons and no one knows where to start.
the hard part isn't building anymore. it's choosing:
- what to make – and what to leave out
- how to make it – so it strengthens the system instead of fragmenting it
- what to remove – even when it works, if it doesn't belong
addition is momentum. subtraction takes conviction.
you have to see the whole, not just the parts. you have to believe that fewer things, done right, will carry more weight than a hundred things scattered.
most products don't die from missing features. they die from accumulation. from losing clarity. from becoming everything and meaning nothing.
think slower, then act fast. slow down after the burst. tie it all back. so the foundation can carry what comes next.
keep focused, and simplify.
Dano retweeted
You’ve maybe heard from me on this topic too many times, but this is the last I’ll offer (at least for now).
My worry isn’t the code or the tools themselves. The question is how we keep thoughtful design alive even as new tools and technologies emerge.
linear.app/now/design-is-mor…
