Over the years, I have read much about “craft” from different people, and I still never understood what it meant exactly. Later, I accepted that it was just another stupid word used by people to prescribe what they found convenient to others.
That led me to define my own signals to judge myself and my surroundings — indicators I can clearly state, rate, and use to compare myself to others as a builder/designer. They are 3: workflow brilliance, taste, and operational excellence.
Workflow brilliance in a product is when it does what it is supposed to do effortlessly. Free from individual taste. The goal is never to design the prettiest input field. It’s to get that input as effortlessly as possible first. If you are writing a legal document, the goal is not to make it short or simple. It’s to make it comprehensive with summaries, sections, translations, and real-life examples. Think of it as the skeleton on which the skin goes. Eyes can be blue or black, but the eyes must see first. And send the image down the visual pathway so the brain can construct the picture. Seeing the link between two adjacent parts, as a compound how they interact with other such compounds, dependencies, state changes, laddering updates in this lifecycle - addition and elimination, and second-order effects of those changes - is all a skill. Cohesion precedes coherence. Design inventions that shift paradigms happen on this layer.
Taste is a never-ending pursuit in life. It’s the difference between owning a two-bedroom apartment next to a gutter versus aspiring to own a beach-facing villa on a cliff. Both provide a roof, but the latter makes this mundane life a noble pursuit. Taste is also not wearing red underwear with white linen pants. Taste is the coziness in a quiet, dimly lit room. It’s a clean kitchen top after a good meal. A shoe wide enough to fit your foot. It’s like sunlight on water. It’s bringing out the softness in people, not survival. It’s about deciding what needs to be obvious, what should be easy, and what should be possible in interface design. It’s not slapping a meaningless animation in the middle of the screen, dropping confetti after every purchase, or making people rate emotions on a 5-point scale. It’s the need for harmony - in place, in the right proportion, and at peace with its surroundings. I’ve seen people often mistake the need for harmony for uniformity. That’s lazy. Bentleys are harmonious. So are Aston Martins. Or Porsche. But Lamborghini is bad taste. And Volvo’s, while harmonious, are low ambition.
Operational excellence is the instinct to constantly bring your designs to production, leveraging group effectiveness without giving away your individual effectiveness. Your genius work is only better if the people it’s for can use it, which multiplies the business for the company. It means driving with a sense of accountability: “I am responsible if this fails”, and using/moving people around you to make the right decisions on “workflow brilliance” and “taste”. It means managing your boss’s anxiety on expedited timelines or intentionally introducing short-term inconsistencies/ambiguities as a segway to your larger initiative. It’s somehow convincing engineers to build designs you’ll throw away later because that’s the only path to build momentum on an idea. It’s making product leads understand that “longer-term ROI comes from a variety of factors, many of which, if measured individually, won’t make sense” as my old boss puts it. On some days, it also means doing what others say because the battle otherwise isn’t worth the reputation/allies you’ll lose personally in the process (live to fight another day?). Without a talent for this, uplifting the system without chaos is hard. Lack dominance and end up with a Frankenstein. Bulldoze your way, and no one wants to work with you again.
I judge myself on this dance. Everything else doesn’t matter.