Design Tenants (Decision-Making Rules, Not Principles)
Replace feel-good design principles with 3-4 opinionated tenants that settle recurring debates for good.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 95%
Most design principles (simple, clear, fast) are useless for decisions because nobody argues the opposite. Baxley advocates for 'tenants' instead: a tiny set of memorizable, opinionated rules that pre-decide the debates a team keeps re-litigating, so people can make aligned decisions without command-and-control. It moves a leader from control to choreography.
Origin
Baxley's formulation, credited to a story about Steve Jobs giving the Keynote team three tenants. The paper/plastic analogy and the 'clear thinking made visible' framing draw on Edward Tufte, whom Baxley cites.
Core principles
- 01A tenant is a decision tool; a principle is a platitude nobody would argue against
- 02You can only have 3-4 because everyone must memorize them without a handbook
- 03Tenants must be opinionated and directional, choosing one path over another
- 04Find them by noticing which debate the team keeps having, then settle it once
- 05At scale you shift from controlling every decision to choreographing via shared rules
How to run it
- 1
Spot the recurring debate
Pay attention to where the team keeps digging in and bifurcating into two camps over the same question, meeting after meeting.
Pro tip These repeated stalemates are the raw material for tenants; the friction points you to what needs deciding.
- 2
Pick a side and make it a rule
Decide as an organization that you go left instead of right, then codify that decision as a durable tenant so the debate never recurs.
Watch out You must be opinionated. There is no successful unopinionated software; the only question is what your point of view will be.
- 3
Keep the set to 3-4 memorizable rules
Constrain the list so everyone can internalize and apply them from memory, not by consulting documentation.
Watch out More than four tenants and people can't hold them in their heads, so they stop functioning as live decision tools.
- 4
Adjudicate design debates against the tenants
When a disagreement arises, return to the tenants: e.g. 'are we actually starting simple and forcing them to opt into complexity, or doing something else?'
Pro tip Tenants let a distributed team (many engineers, many locations) make the right call inside a shared groove without you in the room.
In the wild
Unable to control a product built by many engineering teams (most in India), Baxley set three tenants: (1) documentation is a failure state, (2) every interaction should start simple and the user opts into complexity, (3) the entire product should look and feel like it came from a single mind. Debates were resolved by checking against these.
→ Moved the org from control to choreography; the tenant on opting into complexity directly differentiated them from Tableau, which 'started with complexity.'
Asked how to think about Keynote, Jobs gave three: it should be difficult to make ugly presentations, focus on cinematic-quality transitions, and optimize for innovation over PowerPoint compatibility.
→ The third tenant pre-settled a fight that would otherwise have consumed the team 'gouging each other's eyes out' for a decade over compatibility vs innovation.
Common mistakes
Publishing aspirational principles as if they were decision tools
Words like 'clear' or 'beautiful' are fine platitudes but guide no choice, because no one ever argues to make the product confusing or ugly.
Writing too many tenants
If the team has to look them up, they can't use them in the moment; the list must be small enough to memorize.
Is it for you?
Best for
Design or product leaders scaling a team past the point where they can personally review every decision, especially in fragmented enterprise orgs.
Not ideal for
Feature-level micro-decisions; Baxley found tenants operate at the design-strategy level and broke down when applied to individual features.
From the transcript
“tenants are really decision-making tools”
“they're not useful as decision-making tools because nobody would ever argue the opposite”
“I needed to move from a mindset of uh of control to one of choreography”
“documentation is a failure state”
“every interaction should start simple and the user should have to opt”
“the entire product should look and feel like it came from a single mind”
“it should be difficult to make ugly presentations”
From the episode
35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond
Bob Baxley