Good Design Needs A Little Wobble
I learned to balance a broomstick on my nose when I was 14. I also learned to juggle but let's focus on the balance.
The secret trick to balancing anything is gently nudging the object back and forth in a controlled manner, never letting it come to rest. You know which way the broomstick will lean next because you caused it to lean that way. It's proactive not reactive. The common misconception with achieving balance is thinking it's a static state of equilibrium when it's actually a dynamic pursuit that requires momentum.
Picture a sea lion balancing a ball on its nose. It's pushing the ball around rather than reacting to the ball tipping over. This constant motion creates the momentum, which makes adjusting balance easier. Balance is a result of continual motion rather than stillness.
Most designers I work with operate reactively. They wait for stakeholder input. They respond to test results. They adjust when priorities shift. They're exhausted by change they don't control. What if you caused the change? What if you created the wobble before the fall? This is how proactive design works: you create momentum through frequent small adjustments. You cause the wobble instead of reacting to the fall. You stay in motion instead of seeking stillness.
Product designers create momentum by generating evidence early and often. We cause the lean—share rough work, run small tests, ask hard questions—before others force us to. Each point of evidence we create gives us perspective on the problem while the cost of adjustment is still small.
Think of feedback cycles as waves with frequency (how often you get data) and amplitude (scope of each cycle). Aim for higher frequency, even with smaller scope. You control small, frequent waves more easily than rare, massive ones—just like small wobbles are easier to manage than big falls.
Despite this, collecting frequent feedback can be nerve-racking. Putting the work in front of people before it's "ready" can feel risky because of fears you'll be judged on a design that isn't great yet. Those risks are real, but the big advantage of collecting evidence early & often is that the cost of change is smaller. The effort of adjusting to change grows exponentially the longer you wait, or the bigger the study, test, or feedback cycle becomes.
Doing great work requires great effort. Frequent feedback doesn't change that.
Bad news does not improve with age.
People who've worked with me can attest to my bias for action. I champion sharing early and often, and I walk the walk. I share embarrassingly early drafts of my work with my peers, leaders, and team just to get ideas out of my head with real feedback and practice. If you can't share something with a few people on your team, how can you share it with the whole world?
A few years ago I volunteered to give a presentation to the entire UX design community at Disney—about 1,200 people. I'm not a confident public speaker and I don't routinely author original content. It was a formidable challenge to represent both my design values and my team well.
The best way to get outside my head and improve the talk was getting feedback from everyone I could. I shared truly awful first drafts with my teams and colleagues. Designers I managed were reluctant to provide critical feedback at first. I had to explicitly say: 'I need you to tell me what's not working. You're helping me, not judging me.' Once I reframed it as help rather than criticism, the gates opened.
I shared new drafts more than once a week for the month leading up to the presentation. Early versions buried my main point in the middle—feedback pushed me to open with it. My arcane anthropology examples confused people outside my team and feedback helped me cut them. The version I presented was unrecognizable from my first draft. To this day, people who attended still compliment the talk. That only happened because I caused dozens of small wobbles instead of waiting for one big fall.
Another example of building balance into our process came while we were designing Disney+ for launch. We created momentum as a team by holding open demos every week. These rituals were attended by cross-functional partners from engineering, marketing, and even data teams. Design was often at the bleeding edge of scope definition and sharing the visuals early helped resolve open questions, or prompt teams to refocus on the same priorities.
Momentum guides most product development frameworks. Agile, Lean, Shape Up—all build on shortening the cycle between action and reflection. All advocate smaller, more stable steps. Many designers fear these methods sacrifice time for thoughtful experimentation. They don't. Great work still requires great effort. These frameworks just ensure the effort compounds in the right direction.
Maintaining momentum and balance is useful in any project, from the Apollo program to a free solo climb of El Capitan. The Apollo team and Alex Honnold iterated toward their goals. You can evolve from a match to a lightbulb.
On your next project, cause the wobble. Share before you're ready. Test before it's polished. Adjust before you're asked to. Stay in motion, and you'll stay in control.
Ok. Here's a video of me juggling (not shown, my kids looking bored/annoyed):
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