Hi Jake, thanks for taking the time out of your schedule to do an AMA. I've participated in a couple sprints now and struggle with one aspect of the process which is why I've decided to ask the pro ;)

My question has to do with the scope of proposed solutions throughout the design sprint process. Having stakeholders present from different departments leads to many great ideas. Some ideas more feasible than others. Who is responsible for bringing the sprint back to reality? For instance, it is very easy to design something in Sketch or Keynote that would be extremely difficult to develop. Is it the engineers responsibility to chime in when they think something is impracticable? If so, how do you keep these people from impeding the progress of the sprint? If they keep shutting down ideas, it can be hard to get on a roll. Also, do you take into consideration team size, budget, etc before you begin the sprint or is it really about coming up with the "dreamy" solution?

Thanks in advance Jake!

Hi Andrew,

First of all, I find it amazing that you have answered nearly every question on here. Bravo.

My question for you is the number one cliche of all. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Why do I ask? Not too long ago you wrote a blog post about the possibility of being in another ‘tech bubble’. Also not too long ago, you appointed Adam Wood as the new CEO of MetaLab and announced that Flow and MetaLab were to be treated as two separate entities. By listening to and reading some of your interviews, I can’t help notice that you keep indicating the importance of having time to do the things that make you most happy in life. With agency acquisitions such as Adaptive Path, it truly feels like a sellers market at the moment.

So, I ask, where do you see yourself in 5 years? Is it continuing to build products of your own such as Flow? Working on the agency? Sailing around the world? What would make you most happy :)

From a fellow islander — Lee.

Laurens, thank you for the thoughtful feedback. I checked out Elementary OS. Very cool. Contributing to an OS and Designer News are two very radical comparisons. A community for a large project such as Elementary has many benefits. Performance, abstraction, legibility, all start to add up on a project of that scale. Not to mention a community to QA the whole application. For something the size of Designer News, there are many overhead costs with very little benefit. The reality is that a few CSS changes are not going to dramatically affect the amount of traffic to DN. In many circumstances writing the CSS yourself is actually easier than dealing with PR's and merge conflicts. Especially when the changes are trivial. Lastly, the DN team has done a great job of fielding questions. If anybody has some magical design improvement worth sharing i'm sure the DN team would listen to you.

No Here's why.

• Design is more subjective than code Yes, there are many ways to write code and define architecture but at the end of the day the arguments are concrete. Decisions can be made based on performance and facts. If all of the designers had to upload usability results and scientific evidence with their pull requests, it might make sense. But, that would never happen. It would ultimately turn into a big debate about who thinks the headings should be sans-serif or serif, which leads me to my next point.

• There needs to be an owner Somebody needs to own the project and in this case it's Andrew and his team. Be thankful that there's a kick-ass crew behind this community and use your egos to solve different problems. If this were open source, would you like to be the designer who reviewed pull requests all day? Would you want somebody else telling you how to design? Like any good product, their needs to be an owner who leads the direction.

• This isn't a reusable piece of software Typically open source projects work because they are reusable pieces of software. People's main motivation to contribute to a project is generally because they are using that piece of software for a project of their own. We know this all to well at Medeo as we have been working with WebRTC for the past 2 years. There is nothing complicated about setting up a forum/community (whatever you want to call it). Half of the Rails tutorials out there will show you how to set one up in less than a day.

• Learn from LayerVault Let's not go full circle here guys. LayerVault basically was GitHub for designers and it proved that we are a different breed.

Ok, it's time to enjoy some of this north west sunshine. I am all for a community of sharing and learning from one another. I really hate what has happened to Dribbble in the past years. Keep inspiring one another guys.

Your pal, Lee.

I agree with many of Micheal's points. I've uploaded a Skitch to share some of my own opinions. Hope you find the advice helpful.

Imgur