Product
Dashboards, onboarding, research rituals and the features we deleted. Notes from the product room.
The spreadsheet migration is the real onboarding
Most B2B onboarding is a spreadsheet migration wearing a wizard's hat. Column mapping, dry-run imports, inline validation, and the week-one trust dividend.
Permission UX: roles, extras and the politics of access
Role systems are where products quietly rot. RBAC patterns admins actually understand, invitation flows that convert, and audit trails designed as a kindness.
Dashboard design: twelve lessons from twelve dashboards
Twelve hard-won dashboard design lessons from a dozen B2B products: hierarchy of attention, progressive disclosure, benchmark context, and when to kill a chart.
Wizards that don't feel like tax forms
Multi-step flows get a bad name from bad implementations. Step economics, honest progress, save-and-resume, and the test for when one long page beats five short ones.
Running an accessibility audit that leads to fixes
Most accessibility audits produce a PDF and no change. Our format — automated sweeps, manual journeys, a severity taxonomy, and fix-forward roadmaps.
Settings screens grow up: running the product surface nobody loves
Settings rot quietly — accreted toggles, orphaned features, dangerous defaults. A rubric for what earns a setting, and the quarterly audit that keeps it honest.
Feature parity: deciding what mobile doesn't get
A decision framework for mobile/web feature parity: the task-context matrix, honest de-scoping documents, 'desktop-only' messaging with dignity, and cross-device handoff.
Onboarding checklists without the nag
Checklists can activate users or train them to ignore your UI. Sequencing by value, dismissible design and honest progress — lessons from shipped onboarding work.
Customer health scores: design them like you mean it
Health scores worth trusting: component signals over opaque integers, trends over snapshots, alert thresholds without noise, and sharing the score.
Jobs-to-be-done interviews: our exact script
Most customer interviews collect feature requests in research costumes. Our JTBD format: the timeline technique, hiring-and-firing language, and red flags.
Onboarding that activates: patterns we keep, patterns we've banned
Activation-focused onboarding: value-first flows, honest commitment devices, the checklist patterns that still work, and the seven anti-patterns we refuse to ship.
Dashboard design: answer first, chart second
Most dashboards are chart galleries that answer nothing. The question-first method: decision inventories, alert thresholds, and the five-element view that wins.