Howdy, picnickers! Today’s post is another reflection ahead of an upcoming talk (“Strategy happens in low fidelity” at EvolveDigital; come say hi!) about, as you might expect, low-fidelity design artifacts.

Honestly, the fact that the topic of lo-fi work is such a third rail in Product never ceases to amaze me. Whenever I propose that low fidelity is valuable, I am met with a parade of comments that it is simply no longer necessary, because we have design systems. Nowadays, the responses also mention vibe-coded prototypes as well: why spend time in low fidelity when an AI can regurgitate an approximation of a mockup in a few seconds?

This is a rhetorical question, but nevertheless Scott Kubie has a great answer here: when you are solely focused on high-fidelity execution, you are just fiddling around the edges of what has been set in stone by the work done on the conceptual and operational levels. High fidelity artifacts distract us from decisions at that level, by making us think that those decisions have already been made.

This can be difficult for designers to understand, because we are not accustomed to being involved in those decisions, or more accurately, being involved in the painful drawn-out conversations that lead up to those decisions. We like to think about our artifacts as standing on their own, rather than as part of a sense-making system.

Though to be fair to designers, this is a fault shared by almost everyone. Consider, for example, those hideous PowerPoint slides with multiple columns of 10pt bullet points that get read out monotonously at meetings where nobody pays attention. They are like that because no one pays attention at those meetings, so the decks need to stand up on their own when people skim them afterwards to pretend that they were listening.

You might notice that this is a bit of a vicious cycle. The slides have to be bad as slides because they won’t be consumed as slides, and the reason they won’t be consumed as slides is because they are bad slides.

This is because, unlike our products, our meetings are rarely designed. Outside of tedious Scrum stand-up status reports (which Tom Kerwin helps us avoid) or nice-sounding but ultimately nonsense frameworks like Team Topologies, meetings tend to take shape entirely by accident. Attempts to fix them tend to be limited to crude measures like time-boxing that fail to make them any more productive (this is actually a good example that “meetings make me less productive” is a nonsense claim because we cannot measure productivity).

Thus, people came to the erroneous conclusion that since their meetings are bad, all meetings are bad, and therefore getting rid of them is good. Shopify did this two years ago (if you’ve been following this newsletter at all, you’ll have a sense for how good Shopify’s org design is — which is to say, not very).

One of the things that happens when people don’t talk to each other is they start Just Doing Things. We had a series (1, 2, 3) on that phenomenon recently, but one quick example of what happens when teams don’t properly communicate is Sebastian Hans’s API of Endless Possibilities, where the lack of shared mental models creates an unmaintainable monster. When people do reach the end of their personal knowledge or agency, they are inevitably forced to reach out to others; this creates shadow power structures within your organization that get in the way of executing good ideas and empower the worst people to push their own agendas. And there’s no shortage of such situations: 80% of Americans work in a toxic environment and (to glibly summarize a thorough scientific study) ain’t paid enough for this shit.

So, stop designing your collaboration by accident. Part of that is going to come from low fidelity artifacts, the beauty of which is that anyone can make them, and they don’t give conceptual ambiguity anywhere to hide. But the other part is going to come from the feedback loop between the artifacts and the people; thinking out loud together; meetings. Showing up as a peer, rather than a concierge of other people’s decisions. And knowing how to disappoint people when you need to.

Happy meetings!

— Pavel at the Product Picnic