Sometimes it pays to stare, to sit with ideas, to think, to see all the cards laid out in front of you for days until a coherent narrative appears. For me, it was looking at a pile of disconnected features and ideas and being unable to figure out how they did or did not fit together.

After over a week of coming back to various lists and filling in the details, a bigger thematic picture emerged.

I now know what stays and what goes and how to help my team make decisions along the way without me.

The work that’s left to do is all about being Consistent and Complete.

Over time our product has left behind a bunch of small improvements that are obvious to us and our users, but for various reasons were cut from scope with the initial feature implementation. And as our application has grown and matured, we’ve sometimes developed better user experiences and/or better components and patterns in our implementations to achieve similar ends. We need to pick up after ourselves, finish our rough edges, and use our best implementation everywhere, every time.

Now to convince the leadership team, and prove that these guiding principles can be used to say “no” to some things and “yes” to others.