G'day, I'm Brody MacLean, a multi-disciplinary design lead from Sydney, Australia. :-)
Currently, I am Design Lead at Atlassian, focusing on design quality & visual integration of our AI Design Kit.
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Posted 21h ago
Every product reaches a point where it becomes too complex to be useful in order to meet the needs of the business.
The biggest problem is that product teams are incentivised to add more features, not to improve the foundations of the product, so it’s impressive, at Slacks trajectory in 2020, that they were self-aware enough to identify and address things from the ground up.
We found ourselves shipping a kitchen drawer full of useful tools to our customers – knives and forks, spatulas and whisks, tongs and corkscrews, hell even a few citrus zesters and melon ballers – but everything was so jammed together that you couldn’t find what you were looking for. Look out for the mandolin in the back.
It was a mess. We were at a tipping point of product complexity. While we were preoccupied re-engineering our codebase into a scalable service and reorganizing our company into a public-ready business, our product had suffered. Inertia, complexity, and feature creep had caught up to us. Entropy was setting in.
Rethinking Slack
buildingslack.com
Rethinking Slack
buildingslack.com
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2014 book
The Obstacle Is the Way
Ryan Holiday
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” — Marcus AureliusWe are stuck, stymied, frustrated. But it needn’t be this way. There is a formula for success that’s been followed by the icons of history—from John D. Rockefeller to Amelia Earhart to Ulysses S. Grant to Steve Jobs—a formula that let them turn obstacles into opportunities. Faced with impossible situations, they found the astounding triumphs we all seek.These men and women were not exceptionally brilliant, lucky, or gifted. Their success came from timeless philosophical principles laid down by a Roman emperor who struggled to articulate a method for excellence in any and all situations.This book reveals that formula for the first time—and shows us how we can turn our own adversity into advantage.Show more
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2026 TV show
Free Bert, Season 1
Bert Kreischer tries to fit into Beverly Hills society when his daughters attend an elite private school.
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Posted Jan 31
The K-Shaped Future of Software Engineering
A ton of stuff here applies to Design and Product too.
Ian Tracey discusses the evolving landscape of software engineering, emphasising a “K-shaped” future where some skills become increasingly valuable while others diminish.
The K-Shaped Future of Software Engineering
ian.so
The K-Shaped Future of Software Engineering
ian.so
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2024 book
Hardest Geezer: Mind over Miles
Russ Cook
Hardest Geezer, Russ Cook, is the first person to ever run the entire length of Africa. From his starting point in Cape Agulhas, South Africa, through sandstorms in the Sahara Desert, rainforests, mountain ranges and long empty roads stretched out for miles in front of him, Russ ran the equivalent of 386 marathons before finally crossing the finish line in Tunisia 50 weeks later.Through attempted kidnaps, an armed robbery where he was held at gunpoint, and the gut-wrenching moment when he was denied the right to cross Algeria and whole challenge was left hanging in the balance, Russ never once contemplated giving up. When he crossed the finish line in Ras Angela, he did so with the eyes of the world on him.Africa may have been his most physical challenge yet but it certainly wasn’t his first. For years, Russ hid from the realities of life by drinking too much and losing himself in the world of online gambling, and it wasn’t until he discovered running and sought out endurance challenges that life took a different turn. He soon learned that you don’t get to avoid the struggle, but you do get to choose it.Show more
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Posted Jan 23
The musings of Fabricio Teixeira on what he loves about design and what he’s learned along the way.
Lessons of Design
lessons.design
Lessons of Design
lessons.design
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2026 TV show
The Pitt, Season 2
A realistic examination of the challenges facing healthcare workers in America as seen through the lens of the frontline heroes working in a modern-day hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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Posted Jan 12
I have to admit, I have to agree with Jason Fried on this one — and admit that my house has a lot of these problems.
Neither my wife nor I could tell you what each of the buttons on our Philips Hue tap dial switches do. So much so that I’ve had to set a reminder to turn on all our lights and disable the auto-lock from the front door when the cleaners are coming.
Which reminds me…
Jason Fried writes on his blog:
The TV is the latest Samsung which has a baffling UI just to watch CNN. My parents aren’t idiots, but definitely feel like they’re missing something obvious. They aren’t — TVs have simply gotten worse. You don’t turn them on anymore, you boot them up.
Thermostats… Nest would have been an upgrade, but these other propriety ones from some other company trying to be nest-like are baffling.
And the lag. Lag everywhere. Everything feels a beat or two behind. Everything. Lag is the giveaway that the system is working too hard for too little. Real-time must be the hardest problem.
The big regression
world.hey.com
The big regression
world.hey.com
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