Volume-of-Ideas Design Velocity
Great ideas come from many ideas; build a high-velocity, no-gate, ego-free making-and-critique culture.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 93%
A team operating system for producing innovation reliably, built on the maxim 'if you want to have a good idea, you have to have lots of ideas.' It combines relentless output (make new work every week), an open critique process with no gate to being heard, deliberate ego-dissolution, and rotation to keep perspectives fresh. Use it to build or reform a design/product team that should be inventing constantly.
Origin
Spiegel traces the approach to his own education — Stanford's empathy-driven product design program plus art school's brutal, high-volume critique culture. He operationalized it at Snap by meeting designers for a couple of hours weekly to review hundreds of new ideas.
Core principles
- 01Good ideas are a numbers game: generate many to find a few great ones.
- 02Velocity of making beats polishing single 'precious' ideas.
- 03There must be no gate to showing your work — anyone can put any idea on the list.
- 04Kill preciousness: when you make a thousand ideas, it's fine if most are bad.
- 05Rotate people across products to keep perspectives fresh and prevent boredom.
How to run it
- 1
Make constant output the norm from day one
New team members present work on their first day. Set the expectation that everyone is making things every week, not just thinking about them.
Pro tip Day-one presenting sets the tone for the person's entire tenure and dissolves ego early.
- 2
Run frequent, high-volume reviews
Meet regularly (Spiegel does ~2 hours weekly) to look at large volumes of new work — hundreds of ideas — rather than a few refined ones.
- 3
Remove the gate to being seen
Ensure anyone can bring any idea to the review with no pre-filtering, however good or bad others think it is. Over-relying on upstream filtering causes great ideas to get killed before they're heard.
Watch out Filtering processes quietly eliminate the very outlier ideas you most need.
- 4
Embrace brutal critique without ego
Normalize a rigorous, regular critique process. The point is learning, not defending a perfect idea — 'the ego sort of melts away' when you're generating in volume.
Watch out New designers often underestimate how much constant criticism the culture demands.
- 5
Rotate people across products
Don't let designers get stuck on one product or vertical for years; rotate them to bring fresh perspectives and avoid boredom.
In the wild
Spiegel meets the design team for a couple of hours every week to look at new work — 'hundreds of ideas' on a weekly basis — treating volume as the path to quality.
→ A steady flow of shipped inventions from a very small team.
A team member who had never done 3D graphics took online tutorials and simply figured it out rather than waiting for expertise or a mandate.
→ The team was 'off to the races' on new 3D capabilities.
Common mistakes
Treating one idea as precious
Believing you have a single perfect idea — and that rejection means you're a bad designer — blocks the volume needed to find genuinely great ideas.
Over-filtering before review
Gating which ideas get seen means innovative ideas get filtered out before anyone with judgment can consider them.
Is it for you?
Best for
Design and product leaders building a team meant to invent continuously.
Not ideal for
Execution-heavy teams optimizing a mature product where reliability matters more than novelty.
From the transcript
“if you want to have a good idea, you have to have lots of ideas”
“your first day that you join the design team, you present work”
“there is no gate to showing me work every week”
“we don't allow designers to get to get stuck on specific products or verticals for very long”
From the episode
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Evan Spiegel