Thought Cards

Four product design convictions from Dave Plummer: customization as a confession, dropping niche features, defaulting for the user, and slot machines as dynamic rendering.

The old proverb about ships and harbors, and what it means when someone in your family sends it unprompted.

Content companies provide the platform but users do the scaling, and the key variable is friction.

If you can't explain your pricing, your UI, or your process so your mom could follow it, the problem isn't complexity. It's that you haven't decided what you're actually selling.

Stripe's framework for how AI reshapes buying, defined by what the human stops doing at each level, from filling forms to never prompting at all.

You can't share the aquifer until you've secured your own lake, because depth in your own niche is what makes coalition additive instead of dilutive.

You don't need to predict the future if your principles are sound, because good architectural decisions are robust across scenarios you didn't design for.

The cost of modern convenience is an involuntary autobiography that someone else owns.

The contract sets the visible floor, and the experience overflows it. Every time.

We autopsy our losses but toast our wins. Both deserve the same scrutiny.