The Kind of Design Team We’ve Built at Tatheer

Since the founding of the company, we've had four core rules:

1. Don't solve the problem. Understand it first.

For the first one, there is this famous quote that I really love, which is, "There is nothing more frustrating than coming up with the right answer to the wrong question." I believe that a good designer would never take a problem and immediately start solving it. They would dig deeper, ask more questions, question the question itself, and try to understand every part of the problem before jumping straight to the solution.

I feel like we've been conditioned mainly through the structure of classrooms and lectures that the smartest person in the room is whoever can come up with the answer the fastest. But being fast doesn't mean being right. Many times we have to pause and ponder a question, dig deeper into it. This is not new knowledge; a lot of people mentioned this before. One of them was Einstein. He said that he would spend 59 minutes thinking and understanding a problem and spend one minute solving it.

So, as designers, we should practice our skills of questioning and inquiry. There is this famous story about asking the question "why?" (which is the Washington Monument and the pigeon pigeon feces brackets insert story about the Washington Monument design thinking story). And generally speaking, I believe that intelligence is in the phrasing of the question, not the answer itself. Just like with generative AI, prompting is the beauty, not the answer. Answers are cheap.

2. Design is not how it looks. It's how it works.

We've all seen Apple's iOS 26 with their beautiful liquid glass; such an eye candy. But let's be real, sometimes it's not very practical.

On the other hand, we have this famous website in Saudi Arabia. It's called Haraj. It's just like Craigslist. People can list their used items. Its design is not very beautiful, but it works really well, looking like a forum from the 2010s, but it's so upset that has millions of users.

3. Dummies admire complexity. Geniuses admire simplicity.

You know how in code, sometimes we have this assumption, especially for beginner coders, that longer code is better. But reality is that efficient code has less lines, and you can't achieve that unless you deeply understand the problem. You have to go to the core of the problem and know all the factors surrounding it just to come up with a very simple solution.

If you want to tap into that, you have to go deep. You can't be in the surface level of the problem and expect to solve all the symptoms of the problem and see that as being smart. This is actually being complex. Complexity does not equal cleverness.

We can see that with Apple's design philosophy of producing as many unnecessary elements as possible.

4. Design is a collection of failed experiments.

I'm a heavy believer of quantity over quality. The more you iterate, the better the result that you get. A famous story for that is the pot artist. [insert story about the two classes and the pot experiment]. Of course, experimenting is luxury. It requires lots of time and resources, and sometimes teams can’t afford that. That’s why we have to build a skill of finding cheap experiments and we also have to build a skill of being fast. Unfortunately, we've been conditioned that as designers we have to come up with a perfect solution just from the first time, but that's not correct.