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← People and their mental models

Derek Briggs's mental models

4 claims Derek Briggs made fit 3 mental models. Most often: Leverage, Bottlenecks, Feedback loops. Everything they said here.

Models we see in what they say

Our reading: their claim applies the idea without naming it. The claim is theirs; filing it here is ours.

Leverage

Tools, code, capital and debt multiply what one person can do, in both directions.

Used by 32 others

Companies waste their time hiring many specialists to own every area when that expertise can be deployed horizontally through Markdown files.

  1. Derek Briggs Designer and developer I think companies are wasting their time if they're trying to hire tons of these people to be responsible for all these areas when you can very horizontally deploy them through Markdown files. Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopifyyoutube.com · 3 Nov 2026 · 47:03 into the videoAll korrents from this video
    I think companies are wasting their time if they're trying to hire tons of these people to be responsible for all these areas when you can very horizontally deploy them through Markdown files.

    Watch from 47:03 plays here

    ↗Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopifyyoutube.com

    3 Nov 2026 · video · 50m · spoken · machine transcript

Taste and craft should be documented as simple markdown skills that every designer's and engineer's agents use, so that greatness happens by accident.

  1. Derek Briggs Designer and developer I think it's incredibly critically important to deploy taste and craft and quality and knowledge around what tools we need to use and what strategies we need to use to achieve the level of quality we're looking for. We need to document those in just simple markdown files of how I'm approaching this, what I'm doing, and here's the outcome. So that those skills can then just be deployed through our skill packages throughout our designers and our engineers to where greatness accidentally happens. Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopifyyoutube.com · 3 Nov 2026 · 26:32 into the videoAll korrents from this video
    I think it's incredibly critically important to deploy taste and craft and quality and knowledge around what tools we need to use and what strategies we need to use to achieve the level of quality we're looking for. We need to document those in just simple markdown files of how I'm approaching this, what I'm doing, and here's the outcome. So that those skills can then just be deployed through our skill packages throughout our designers and our engineers to where greatness accidentally happens.

    Watch from 26:32 plays here

    ↗Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopifyyoutube.com

    3 Nov 2026 · video · 50m · spoken · machine transcript

Bottlenecks

A system moves only as fast as its narrowest point; speed up anything else and nothing changes.

Used by 91 others

Users never see the Figma files, so a design team's quality is only as good as the UI engineers who implement its work.

  1. Derek Briggs Designer and developer I say all the time that the users never see the Figma files. Like, your design quality and your design capabilities of your team is only as good as the UI engineers that are implementing it. Derek Briggs - Creating a design culture of craft (Dive Club Ep. 34)youtube.com · 18 Jan 2024 · 14:02 into the videoAll korrents from this video
    I say all the time that the users never see the Figma files. Like, your design quality and your design capabilities of your team is only as good as the UI engineers that are implementing it.

    Watch from 14:02 plays here

    ↗Derek Briggs - Creating a design culture of craft (Dive Club Ep. 34)youtube.com

    18 Jan 2024 · video · 40m · spoken · machine transcript

Feedback loops

Shorten the loop between doing and finding out; whatever a loop rewards is what you become.

Used by 65 others

Shipping something without any data on its success leaves no way to know whether it was the right thing for the company.

  1. Derek Briggs Designer and developer I think people need to be ruthless around knowing and being confident that the solutions that they're designing and shipping are meeting the goals that they set out to achieve. If you're shipping something without any sort of data around its success, I don't understand how you'll be able to know if what you did was the right thing for the company or not. Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopifyyoutube.com · 3 Nov 2026 · 33:22 into the videoAll korrents from this video
    I think people need to be ruthless around knowing and being confident that the solutions that they're designing and shipping are meeting the goals that they set out to achieve. If you're shipping something without any sort of data around its success, I don't understand how you'll be able to know if what you did was the right thing for the company or not.

    Watch from 33:22 plays here

    ↗Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopifyyoutube.com

    3 Nov 2026 · video · 50m · spoken · machine transcript