I wanted to emphasize that designers should still push back on designing ‘small things’ if the only justification given is “it’s just a small thing.” Small things take time too. It’s well known in the product development world that ‘Nothing comes for free’.

Time and attention spent on small things could instead be spent on experimenting to validate riskier assumptions for the company. It’s not to say that we won’t be able to learn from the small experiments. But it’s likely that we won’t learn the most important and urgent thing we should be learning about now.

If we work for a big company that can afford multiple streams of experiments running concurrently, then it might make sense to parallelize efforts and do the small things in certain situations. However, imagine the scenario of designing for a startup while not being in the ‘Growth/scaling’ phase. If we are still trying to figure out the ‘problem/solution fit’ or ‘product/market fit’ then spending effort on experimenting on ‘small things’ could go to waste if we invalidate a higher level assumption down the line.

It becomes our responsibility to understand the underlying reasons for designing any experiment, small or large. It’s also our responsibility to ensure that we create team alignment around experimenting to validate the riskiest assumptions. Sometimes that can be done by conducting small experiments.