Via Lenny’s Podcast

You’ll see a lot of [design] principles like Simple, Clear, Beautiful, Fast, Secure. You’ll hear these words and all these words are great. Obviously, I have nothing against any of these words, but they’re not useful as decision-making tools because nobody would ever argue the opposite. Nobody ever sat in a meeting and said, “Oh, forget ‘Clear.’ Let’s try to make it as confusing as possible.” […]

Tenets are decision-making tools. The classic one is “paper versus plastic.” It’s just too complicated to reconsider that [choice] every time you’re at the grocery store. So, you make a rule for yourself and you’re just a paper person or a plastic person and you move on from there. [Design tenets are like] that at scale.

[When Apple started working on Keynote], apparently the guy who was responsible for originating Keynote went to Steve [Jobs] and said, How should we think about Keynote? And Steve said, “I want you to keep three things in mind. 1. It should be difficult to make ugly presentations. 2. You should focus on cinematic quality transitions. And 3. You should optimize for innovation over PowerPoint compatibility.”

If you take that last one in particular, if [Steve] hadn’t said, “We’re going to go this way instead of that way,” that team would have spent the next 10 years gouging each other’s eyes out over whether they should try to go for PowerPoint compatibility or innovation.

— 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest and beyond | Bob Baxley, at 38:23

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Most companies adopt design principles like “simple,” “clear,” or “beautiful,” but design leader Bob Baxley argues these are meaningless platitudes because “Nobody would ever argue the opposite. Nobody ever sat in a meeting and said, ‘Oh, let’s forget clear. Let’s try to make it as confusing as possible.’”

Design tenets are decision-making tools that settle recurring debates once and for all. They share three characteristics that make them actionable:

• They force choices between competing priorities – Like Steve Jobs telling the Keynote team to “optimize for innovation over PowerPoint compatibility.”
• They’re memorable and limited – Stick to three to four design tenets so teams can internalize them without consulting handbooks
• They address your specific recurring debates – Focus on the arguments your team keeps having over and over, and pick a side. That is a design tenet.

Baxley shares examples of tenets his team at ThoughtSpot used:

• Documentation is a failure state pushed back against the idea that complex user interfaces are acceptable because everything can be explained in the user/training manual.
• Every interaction should start simple, and the user should have to opt into complexity differentiated their product from Tableau’s power-user focus.
• The entire product should look and feel like it came from a single mind combated fragmentation and inconsistencies across teams and user experiences.

These tenets guided thousands of decisions at ThoughtSpot. When Product Managers asked “Should we add this feature?” the team referenced the design tenets to evaluate alignment. When disagreements emerged, the tenets served as a shared language for arriving at a resolution.

The key is identifying where your team splits into camps repeatedly, then making an organizational choice to go left instead of right. As Baxley puts it, “There’s no unopinionated software that’s been successful. You have to have a point of view. The question is what’s it going to be?”

To create effective tenets, one must understand their competitive differentiation, target user, and product philosophy. Design tenets are not marketing slogans—they’re decision-making frameworks that help teams operate with clarity at scale.