Getting Clarity at High Velocity

~5‑minute read, unless you skim like I do.

A friend told me last weekend that we prototype conversations for a living. Guilty. If an idea hangs around my head longer than a hot sec, it ends up in Figma, Vercel, or a badly named internal repository. The only thing that keeps my brain from going nuts is getting the fuzzy stuff out of my head …fast

Here are the principles I fall back on whenever the fog rolls in:

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Draw first, talk later

A while back I stumbled onto a white‑paper about Model‑Context Protocol (MCP). Could’ve dropped a “hey team this is cool“ on our Slack channel. Instead I hacked together a demo that applied this concept into our own API with: “Learned this today, thoughts?” Engineers panicked (in the fun way), questions spilled out, and within an hour everyone understood MCP because they could poke at it.

Build > Yap

Tiny rule: If you can sketch it faster than you can explain it, sketch it.

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Make experiments cheaper than opinions

At Booking.com the default plan for a new idea was break into 1000 tiny pieces and run a/b tests for a month. The idea in this case was how we could get rid of lots of the "5 people are looking" red warnings on the website by replacing them with subtle motion so I built the animation (quite large experiment for my team's standards), shipped an A/B in about a week let the numbers decide. Spoiler: I was wrong at first then learned what right looked like.

Mini‑rule: it costs more to argue than to test.

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Stamp everything DRAFT—PLEASE BREAK

Lessons in humility: I once mocked up a jokey 404 page for a railway‑management client… picture a train literally off the rails. Two days later devs were building it, legal nearly fainted, leadership… not amused. Now every early artifact gets a bright badge: SKETCH, NOT FINAL.

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Hit the off‑switch on purpose

Endurance racing teams already know this: a race car can lap at flat‑out qualifying pace for hours, but try it and you end up slower. Fuel burn like crazy, tires get shot, and drivers rack up micro‑mistakes from the mental strain. The winners run disciplined stints: push, cool, pit, repeat. These planned coast phases keep the average speed high.

Work sprints are the same. Your brain only delivers race pace clarity because it knows, or at least hopes, the pit lane is waiting: Mountain biking, playing video games, fresh snow… whatever gets me fully offline. Step away, swap tyres, top up gas, then come back ready to go.

TL;DR

Clarity at speed isn’t about being the quickest person in the Zoom call, it’s about making everyone else quicker because the path is suddenly obvious. Sketch early, test cheap, label drafts, measure the shiny bits, and take a breather before you melt.

Works for me… most days, anyway.