Good tools are essential to good design but only work when the design decisions they’re used to document are sound. Design principles are a framework that can help teams make better decisions.

Too often, principles are created by design teams without buy-in from their partners in the rest of the business, leading to the same old disagreements about what good solutions look like, what the bar for MVPs are, or when and how to prioritize accessibility and inclusion.

Sometimes, cross-functional teams agree to principles in the abstract but never find ways to put them into practice.

At Stitch Fix, Product Design has led the effort to create a set of experience principles that articulate shared standards for products as well as our commitment to creating inclusive experiences. They’re currently being adopted by teams across all of our customer-facing and internal products and are beginning to inform collaborative work with other functions like Marketing.

This talk would share learnings from that process so designers in other organizations can use experience principles to drive organizational change and conversations about inclusion.