Don't Trust the (Design) Process

What you’re advocating for — intuition, iteration, vibe, play, even chaos — isn’t anti-process. It’s expert-level fluency in it. You bend the rules only once you’ve internalized them. You cut steps because you know the tradeoffs. You jump to the solution because you’ve seen the pattern a hundred times before.

That’s mastery...

But mastery is invisible to the junior team watching you work. They don’t see the ten years of bad wireframes you made to learn how to jump straight to the elegant solution. If they imitate your shortcuts, they won’t land where you do. They'll land in chaos, and confuse mess for magic.

So maybe the answer isn’t "Don’t trust the process." It’s "Don’t worship the process. Own it."

Because when we reframe process as a toolset, not a religion, we free ourselves to operate at our best.

The best design leaders I know don’t follow steps, they build their own internal compass, and then teach others how to build theirs.

Messy? Absolutely. But intentional & and that’s the difference.