Strategy & Principles

How I decide, direct, and unblock teams.

  1. Behavior outranks testimony

    Plan according to what people actually do, not according to what they say.

    Case study: Everyone said it was easy

  2. Sequence the machinery before the promise

    The interface pauses and waits for the operational logic, even in the case of the demo.

    Case study: None of it is interface work

  3. Anchor new structures in existing trust

    The new standards make use of vocabulary that has been inherited and of the existing patterns.

    Case study: Beat the spreadsheet or lose

  4. Tie artifacts directly to decisions

    If it doesn’t affect the decision, then it is shelfware.

    Case study: Decision-shaped, not poster-shaped

  5. Publish criteria, not verdicts

    Make a record of the rubric so that disagreements can be settled without causing escalation.

    Case study: Seven categories and the rule that placed the eighth

  6. Prioritize the failures nobody owns

    Revenue and trust are lost in unowned seams.

    Case study: A hold nobody owned

Honest. Kind. Curious.

Core Practice

Systems and operational capabilities applied across org boundaries.

Service Architecture & Journey Mapping
Cross-silo workflows spanning multi-channel touchpoints and unowned operational boundaries.
Information Architecture & Governance
Findability baselines, tree testing, card sorting, taxonomy standards, and long-term placement criteria.
Design Operating Models
Shared component systems, living changelogs, cross-functional intake frameworks, and decision rubrics.
Applied Research & Behavioral Modeling
Mixed-methods research and data-backed archetypes tied to enterprise KPIs rather than static persona templates.
Cross-Functional Alignment
Co-design workshops, domain-tailored roadshows, and worked examples that build ownership directly with engineering and product leads.

Running the team

Four designers, junior through lead, kept across three mandates.

Initiative lead

Me

Lead designer

Direct report

Reports to me

Senior designer

Direct report

Reports to me

Designer

Direct report

Reports to me

Designer

Direct report

Reports to me

Four direct reports, junior through lead, reporting to me as initiative lead.
I own the initiative; they own the tracks
Each designer carries out the entire track, putting the owner’s name on each line item, and I have responsibility for the result, the order in which things happen, and the discussions with senior management.
Priorities, re-cut twice a week
For each person, including myself, a numbered list showing what it is, who possesses it, its condition, and when—anything is included on the list only if it has an owner, and anything remains on the list only if there is a date.
Briefs are the handoff
If we have to deal with another team planning in response to our work, I start off by preparing the brief—outlining the intent, setting out the milestones from here to there and stating what we need back. Only then can they suggest a plan rather than having to guess.
The backlog is a decision
Intentionally, things are parked and kept in view together with the reason and a note to check for updates. Refusals are recorded so that they will survive the following reprioritization.
The formal layer
I was responsible for hiring, conducting weekly standup meetings, having one-on-one meetings, planning the career progression of my own reports, and ensuring delivery accountability for a partner team that I had not hired.

Applied AI & Org Systems

Operational tooling built to compress discovery cycles and resolve back-office waste.

Impact Initiative Mechanism & Scope

16 → 1

Prompt Benchmark

Tested 16 published prompt frameworks against 169 participants to standardize synthetic testing instructions on empirical behavior. The benchmark

3 Live

Evaluative Agents

Grounded in 6 customer insight studies; enables cross-functional teams to run rapid first-pass card sorts and tree tests prior to broad study recruitment. From personas to agents

$100K vs $5M

Verification Automation

Sized an uncounted workflow leak, authored functional logic for an AI verification step, and validated it across 231 live accounts to eliminate multi-day manual holds. The hold nobody told them about

4 Custom Tools

Practice Tooling

Custom workflows built for the internal team: note-to-brief synthesis, story-to-storyboard generation, automated executive recap decks, and root-cause failure sizing. How I run a practice

Frameworks

Frameworks and durable infrastructure shipped to date.

Next

The principles are only interesting if they produced something. See the work →

Start the conversation

or write to nachapman@gmail.com