A few months ago I took my daughter to a children's book author event at her school. It was billed as a book signing, but what the author actually did was something far more interesting. He drew his book live, in front of the audience, camera facing down on sheets of paper, narrating as he worked — jumping between the story itself and the thinking behind it. The audience, a roomful of fidgety kids and half-distracted parents, was rapt. There were “Oohs” and “Aahs”, and nobody looked at their phones.
Watching him, I had a moment of recognition. This is exactly what I do as a designer and encourage everyone on my team to do as well. He wasn't performing finished work. He was performing his thinking. And that turned out to be the most compelling thing in the room.
There is a persistent myth in design culture that the designer is a kind of mystic — someone who retreats into solitude, wrestles with invisible creative muses, and eventually emerges bearing “The Solution.” The reveal is the point, but the process is proprietary. While this myth is flattering to designers I find it catastrophic for teams.
The reality is that design is not a solo act concluded by a grand unveiling. It is a conversation, conducted continuously in the open. And the designer's job is not to protect that process but to make it visible.
Working in public is the most practical way I know to do this — and it costs next to nothing. All it requires is a willingness to share work before it's ready. Not messy or thoughtless work, but work that is demonstrably in progress: rough enough to invite reaction, resolved enough to show intent. The bar is lower than most people think. You don't need a polished prototype (far from it!). You need a sketch with enough thinking present to give people something to respond to.
The benefits of this practice compound, and they tend to surprise people at first.
The most immediate one is alignment — or more accurately, the replacement of assumed box-checking alignment with real-alignment. Teams spend lots of energy deciding who needs to be informed, chasing sign-offs, writing someone's name in a spreadsheet with a chip labeled "aligned." Working in public renders most of this unnecessary. When your thinking is visible and ongoing, people stay current without being formally briefed. By the time you do need a meeting, everyone has already seen the latest — and you spend that time actually making decisions together.
There is a subtler benefit too, one that takes longer to name but matters just as much.
Sharing early work builds a narrative of progress. A team that can look back and see how an idea evolved — the dead ends, the pivots, the moment a rough sketch clarified everything — develops a shared memory of how good work gets made. That memory becomes culture.
And there is something important in what it signals about the designer's relationship to their collaborators. Sharing early assumes that other people have useful things to contribute. It makes room for that contribution. The designer who only reveals finished work is — consciously or not — closing a door. The designer who shares a sketch and says "I want to know what you think" is opening one. That difference, practiced consistently, dramatically changes team dynamics.
There is a design principle buried in all of this that is worth naming directly: fidelity controls the quality of feedback. The fidelity of what you share is a decision about what kind of thinking you want to invite. Work that looks polished invites reactions about the polish. Work that looks unfinished invites reactions about the idea. This is not an accident of human psychology you have to work around — it is a tool you can deliberately use.
The way I actually do this has settled into a set of practices that I'd describe less as a methodology and more as a series of habits.
I share early — often within a day or two of kicking off a project, while momentum is still high and the thinking is still loose enough to bend. When I share, I set expectations explicitly: I tell people I'm about to show half-baked work designed specifically to elicit their thoughts. This framing matters. It gives people permission to react honestly rather than politely.
I ask directly for responses. Not "let me know if you have thoughts" — that is an invitation that will go unanswered. I ask specific questions: Does this direction feel right? Am I solving the right problem here? What am I missing? (That’s my favorite one) The more specific the ask, the more useful the reply. And I tell people after they share their thinking when the next round will come. Working in public is not a single gesture — it is a cadence. When people know that there will be another share soon, they engage differently with the one in front of them. They know this is a conversation, not a verdict.
None of this is technically difficult. The only real obstacle is the discomfort of showing unfinished work — the fear that someone will see a sketch and conclude that this is your best work. That fear is understandable, especially if you are earlier in your career and don’t have past successes to demonstrate capability.
But this part of the process is short lived. And eventually you will flex your design chops when it comes time to deliver shippable design work.
That children's book author understood something about narrative and bringing your audience with you. We were not there to be impressed by his finished book — most had already read it. We were there because watching someone think, watching the messy movement from blank page to something meaningful, is genuinely compelling.
And for a designer working in public is a pretty honest version of practicing the craft.
