One of the things I’ve just been beating my head against with this writing project is how to elegantly tie a bunch of things together. Product design is about a lot of things – but a lot of it is centered around finding a “focus” – some clearly defined problem you’re trying to solve. That focus enables two critical things: testing and collaboration.

Testing, because if you know what you’re trying to build, you can ask people whether you’re making progress in the right direction or not. Most product development processes I’ve seen are vague enough that any result can be interpreted as a good result. Which is useless.

Focus also enables everyone to know what they’re supposed to be doing, which is *the* foundation of collaboration. It allows you to distribute authority to people with expertise, rather than keeping all the decision-making in your own head, which inevitably turns you into a bottleneck and a huge point of failure. After all, you’re not an expert on everything.

But then, distributing authority requires a lot of team culture issues to be front of mind. Psychological safety first among them. Ability to communicate clearly. To communicate *intent* in addition to tasks, so that everyone can help reinforce that what you’re doing is aligned with that focus.

It’s kind of a ouroboros in a Gordian knot – everything is interwoven, and trying to explain it in some sort of linear order breaks my head, because I can’t find a way to explain one thing without a bunch of prerequisites, and untangling the web of prerequisites… well, I haven’t found the right sword yet.

I think perhaps one way will be to separate things more, rather than trying to integrate them more. Focus, Team Culture, Leadership (thanks to Eric Nehrlich for reversing my initial order) each being different sections – sort of a progression from the outside in – starting with the customer & what they need, structuring your team in a way that maximizes the experience and strength of the team, and then what your responsibilities are to your team and why your leadership can have a massive impact on all of that jazz.

Which provides some structure to the process. I think even with those things “separated”, I’m going to have some tendrils that tie concepts together across sections (maybe an explicit “prerequisites” block where necessary, or maybe a Jason Shiga-style “choose your own adventure” path through things if you want to follow that concept down a bit deeper. I dunno.

But at least it provides a reasonable starting point.