Values Compounding
What 18 years of saying yes to the wrong things taught me about the things I won't trade
You don’t discover your non-negotiables at the interview table. You discover them the morning after you said yes to the wrong thing.
There’s a version of this essay I could write where I list the values neatly. Integrity. Craft. Impact. It would sound wise and not cost me anything to say. That’s not this essay.
This one is about how values actually form, not through workshops or personal mission statements, but through friction. Through the specific, uncomfortable moments where you found out what you couldn’t do, even when the money was right, even when the title was good, even when staying was easier than leaving. Eighteen years is a long time to accumulate that kind of data.
When we talk about values in a career, we tend to treat them like a fixed asset, something you have or don’t have, something you bring to a job. But I think values work more like compound interest in reverse: every time you violate them, you pay a premium, and the debt accumulates quietly over time.
I’ve signed offers I later withdrew. I’ve taken roles that looked right on paper and felt wrong by week two. I’ve stayed past the point of knowing better because leaving felt like admitting failure. Each time, the cost wasn’t just emotional. It was cognitive. You spend enormous energy rationalising a situation that your gut already closed the file on.
The real non-negotiable isn’t a value you defend under pressure. It’s the thing that, when you compromise it, makes you a stranger to yourself for weeks.
So when I talk about my non-negotiables, I’m not talking about a recruitment filter. I’m talking about the conditions under which I can think clearly, make good work, and stay honest with myself. Remove them and the design gets worse. The designer gets worse. The whole arrangement becomes an expensive kind of pretend.
What I won’t trade
I’ve learned these the hard way, not all at once, but one scenario at a time. Here’s what has survived long enough to call itself a conviction.
The first is that the user has to be real to me. I can work on complex products, and I can work on products I personally don’t use. What I can’t do is design for a user whose harm I’ve been asked to abstract away. The moment the product model depends on someone making a bad decision and I’m being asked to make that decision easier to make, I stop being a designer. I’ve sat with that discomfort before, I know what it feels like from the inside, and I know I’m not able to rationalize my way out of it no matter how the brief is framed.
The second is that I need to be able to tell the truth. This sounds basic, and it isn’t. I’ve worked in cultures where the social contract was agreement, where the value placed on harmony was so high that honest critique was quietly punished. I write a newsletter, I mentor, I’ve built a small audience precisely by saying the thing that’s true rather than the thing that performs well, and that isn’t something I can turn off at the office and turn back on at home. I need the ability to say “this is wrong” in the room where it actually matters.
The third is that the work has to outlast the quarter. I’ve shipped things that I knew were compromised, things where the right decision lost to the fast decision and the cost would be paid by someone else, later. I’m not precious about speed; fast is fine, fast can be good. But there’s a version of fast where you’re knowingly building debt that the next designer or the next user will pay, and I’m not able to treat that as a normal cost of doing business. The best environments I’ve worked in shared a belief that doing it right the first time saved everyone real time later, and that belief has to be in the room for me to do useful work.
The fourth is that the context has to fit my life, not just my resume. After enough years and enough moves across countries, companies, and life stages, you understand that a job isn’t just a job. It sits inside a life. It shapes how present you are at home, how honest you are with people who depend on you, how much of yourself you’re burning just to get through the logistics of a given week. A role that requires me to fragment those things, that treats the realities of a human life as the employee’s problem to solve alone, isn’t something I can sustain. I’ve tried before. It costs too much.
The compounding part
Here’s what I’ve observed over the years: every time I’ve held the line on one of these things, the next decision got easier. Not because I became more rigid, but because I became more legible to myself. I knew faster what I was looking at. I spent less energy in the grey zone wondering whether I was being too sensitive or not sensitive enough.
And every time I’ve compromised one, the cost wasn’t just the immediate discomfort. It was the erosion of the internal signal. The next time something felt wrong, I had slightly less confidence in my own read of the situation. The debt compounded, slowly, until it showed up somewhere I wasn’t expecting it.
Values aren’t a list you carry. They’re a pattern you build, or one you quietly undo, with every decision you make under pressure.
I’m not writing this to present myself as someone who’s always gotten it right, because I haven’t. The non-negotiables on this list are non-negotiables partly because I negotiated them once and regretted it. That’s actually how you find out what they are.
What I’m saying is that the pattern is now clear enough that I can act on it with some confidence. I know what environments allow me to do my best work and which conditions make me worse. At this point in my career, the time I spend in the wrong environment is time I don’t get back, not from a productivity standpoint, but from a human one.
What this means in practice
When I evaluate a role now, I’m not just reading the brief. I’m looking at what the product does to the person who uses it. I’m looking at whether design has actual leverage in the organization or whether the titles are there for optics. I’m listening for whether people can disagree with their managers in public. I’m asking what happens to work that doesn’t hit the metric, and what the team’s instinct is when craft and speed come into conflict. I want to know what users say about the product.
These aren’t interview tactics. They’re diagnostic questions I’ve learned to ask because I’ve seen enough times what happens when the answers are wrong and you find out too late.
Some of those questions are uncomfortable to raise, and I think that’s actually useful information. An organization that can’t handle a senior designer asking hard questions during the process is telling you something true about what it will be like to work there every day. I’ve stopped treating that discomfort as a thing to manage around and started treating it as the point.
But even then, it’s hard to get these signals fully until you’re onboard. In that case, we course-correct, no matter what cost.