I love artistic expression. I picked up an insatiable appetite for drawing and sketching at a young age, and I was fortunate that my parents allowed me to paint on almost any surface at home.

Later in life, I found out I could also paint websites, apps and interfaces. That’s how I became a UI/UX designer and frontend developer. The sole idea of being able to design an interface and building it myself became addictive and a huge motivator to push through long hours in all sorts of projects. But as my career matured, I realized that the endless pursuit for aesthetics and beauty was turning me into a bottleneck for the teams I worked in. Stakeholders wanted an POC or MVP, and I’d get so entangled on the details and crevices of the design that I’d prolong entire deadlines just because I was looking for perfection.

It was Bjoernn, my mentor and boss at one of my previous jobs, who spotted the pattern for what it was and saw the erosion it could cause to my career long term, no matter how good my intentions were. He worked on me with the patience, wisdom and understanding of a blacksmith, and I will always be grateful to him for doing it.

He helped me see the value of imperfect design, prioritize function over form and understand that a Kaizen approach of continuous improvement is the wiser path for creating digital experiences that solve real-world problems:

• You first design a raw product that aims to solve the core problem.
• However humbling it might be (or how vulnerable it might make you feel), you must then put that raw product in the hands of real users, and then you just observe.
• You do not defend the design, you do not explain gaps. Instead, you just let people experience it.
• Medicine is honest. If it’s working, you will perceive it, and users will tell you about it. If it does nothing, people will just tell you about it with even more passion.
• Only after the design has been put through this test of honesty, can you go back to the drawing table to refine. The magic thing is, with this approach, your aesthetic pursuit will have boundaries and be anchored to the real world.

This mental model to UI design and software development has helped me create more value in the last 2-3 years than I had during the entire rest of my career: More than a million USD in revenue across multiple companies and hundreds of thousands of end-users positively impacted (and counting).