How to Actually Ship Big Ideas, with Edwin Morris

This one's for anyone who's ever wondered what it actually takes to get a self-initiated idea across the finish line. Catt catches up with Edwin Morris — a designer she met on a New York City design community panel back in 2023 — to hear what happened since they last talked. Edwin spent his final year at Datadog shipping a cross-team project he had pitched himself, nurtured through months of internal resistance, and finally launched on the main stage at Dash. Now he's a year into a completely new chapter at Jane Street, building internal tools in a totally different sector. • ─── ୨୧ ─── • ℹ️ In this episode How Edwin pitched a cross-team project with no metrics to back it up and got it built anyway Why the harshest feedback he got ended up saving the project What "leading without authority" actually looks like week to week Why less than 20% of his contribution to shipping the feature was designing the feature How AI has changed the way Edwin prototypes and communicates ideas • ─── ୨୧ ─── • 📖 Resources mentioned Edwin's blog post on the Jane Street blog: https://blog.janestreet.com/i-design-with-claude-code-more-than-figma-now-index Part 1 of Edwin's project at Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/incidents-ai-workbench-status-page Part 2 of Edwin's project at Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/engineering/steganography-at-scale/ The Staff Designer book (Rosenfeld Media): https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/the-staff-designer The Staff Designer course on Maven: https://maven.com/catt-small/staff-designer • ─── ୨୧ ─── • 🌐 Find Edwin on the internet Website: https://ehmorris.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ehmorris