Developing Sourcegraph's product design principles when gut instinct doesn't cut it

As we’ve grown over the last few months, the Sourcegraph design and product teams have found ourselves having more discussions around product and design decisions. This is a common challenge for design teams everywhere: there are often many valid ways to solve a problem, each with its own set of tradeoffs and assumptions. A small team can rely on intuition, experience, and shared trust to make decisions in these moments. But gut instinct doesn’t scale.

The design and product teams were at an inflection point. That’s why we decided it was time to come together to define our product design principles. I’m going to go into how we did this and what principles we settled on, but first I’ll cover some basics:

A strong set of design principles gives the team a way to make consistent decisions based on a shared idea of what we’re trying to achieve. They introduce constraints that help reduce ambiguity, particularly when there’s more than one possible solution to a given problem. They also give us a way to capture our commitment to inclusion at every step of the design process.

Designers use design principles to guide their explorations and outcomes. Product managers use design principles to shape priorities and features. Developers use design principles as a lens to collaborate on design, from discovery to delivery.

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