Natalie Padilla

a roadmap that was kind of set out for all of 2025 and over the course of 2025 these things like kept evolving and changing so you're absolutely right we were also working with you we had these monthly consultation sessions and we were working on a playbook idea y'all already had this playbook idea and you had really good setups for what that should contain and we were kind of coming in every month and talking about our progress

And I think what really happened is that playbook as a sports metaphor sort of worked until it didn't.

So I think what made it not work for us at a certain point in the year is we realized that playbooks are a secret.

It's like the team and the coaches get to see that, but you keep it from the other team because it's an advantage.

So for us, we needed a metaphor, like a framework to think about this stuff where it was both for ourselves and also at the right level for our audiences.

So like stakeholders and partners, especially.

So food became a really good way to frame that.

And the more we pressure tested these food analogies, the more we're like, yeah, this is like helpful.

So just to run that down quick for you, it's like recipes for the cooks.

and menu listings for the diners.

So they both describe a dish, but one tells you how to make it, and then the other tells the diner what they're getting and what the cost to them is.

Additionally, that analogy led us later to the idea of like tasting menus or meal plans, which are helpful to both sides of the scenario.

A tasting menu lets cooks know what each course needs to be and in what order.

And then it lets the diners know what to expect for the whole experience.

So as we started leaning into that,

It was working, and what we ended up building is these sort of flashcard-esque components in Figma, which we think of as menu items, recipes, and meal plans.

And the set of them was about creating tools to speak to those two different audiences, the cooks, or the doers, the designers and researchers in UX, and then the diners, who are our stakeholders and our partners on these projects.

And so just to kind of like finish the analogy or what that looks like when you take it out of the analogy and you make it real, these cards that we have in the cookbook describe specific research methods primarily.

So for example, we have a recipe card for usability tests, and that tells the UX team everything they need to socialize and plan and execute.

And the menu version of that card, so the version we would show to stakeholders and partners, is actually the same component in Figma, but we use variants to turn on and off details.