Build Design Systems With Penpot Components
Penpot's new component system for building scalable design systems, emphasizing designer-developer collaboration.

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Over the years, you start hearing some phrases that keep coming up over and over in product or design meetings. They can be indicative of laziness, disorganization, or a poor process — so it’s actually important to address them. Here is my collection of the phrases I’ve heard, and how you can respond.
A/B tests consume a lot of time and effort. Do you really feel it’s worth investing that time? It may be a better use of our time to make a gut decision on this, or find proxy data that we can use now.
How many of our core users will actually need this? Can we instead show this feature only when we think a user would actually need it?
Is it actually helpful to keep our designs consistent with Facebook here? If our users are truly expecting consistency, then that’s fine — but otherwise let’s think more about the right experience for our users.
Ok, so what’s the plan for filling that gap in our analytics?
No, it’s better to cut this altogether. We already have a ton of features in our backlog that are higher priority. It’s better to stay focused.
We can add that to our mental library of anecdotes to pull from, but let’s not change our decision making process so suddenly.
The world is getting fed up with notification spam. This will just get us blocked by the user. Let’s think a bit more about why they aren’t doing X.
Making tough design decisions is an order of magnitude more complex without a clear definition on a few types of users to target.
Hey — you’re usually right, but in this instance, can you elaborate on how you know that?
If you’re spending most of the time in your life building a product, don’t let group laziness mess it up. Be assertive, hold everyone to high standards, and good luck!
This post was written by Chris, the founder of Purple. We’re building planning boards for designers where you can keep all of your project work in one place — lists, documents, designs, prototypes, etc. We integrate with a lot of the great tools you already use. Head over to www.purple.pm to sign up for the free beta.
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