The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Back to feedPost
Ask your engineering lead what's blocking the sprint and you'll get a list of tickets. Ask what those tickets are actually waiting on, and a good share of them are waiting on you.
Usually not on a decision that needs your judgment. On a two-minute answer that only you can give, because you're the one who sat in the customer call, and you're booked solid until Thursday.
This is the part of being the accidental PM that never shows up in a retro. Your team's throughput is capped by the open slots in your calendar. An engineer can be fully staffed and still stalled by Wednesday because the person who knows what should happen when a payment fails halfway through checkout is in a fundraising meeting. They'll go work on something else in the meantime, and it won't be the thing you needed shipped.
The tell is in your DMs. Six threads, each one a small question with a reasonable person waiting at the other end, and you answering them between calls with less context than you'd like to have.
What I do about this is unglamorous. I sit in the middle of that queue. Questions come to me, I answer most of them from context I picked up in the onboarding week and the stakeholder interviews, and what's genuinely yours to decide reaches you batched, once, with the options written out and a recommendation attached.
Founders rarely notice the interruptions until they stop. What they notice is that the sprint stopped ending with carryover.
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Trending
retrofuturism
Share your favorite designs from the past exploring the distant future. Or your own take on the aesthetic 🚀
halftone
Dots. Texture. Grain. Let's see your designs using the halftone technique.
Midjourney
Creatives are showing off what they're making with Midjourney.
colorgrade
Video editors sound off: How do you enhance the mood of your video in color grading?
Related posts
Maqtorah is a two-sided marketplace for moving livestock, equipment, furniture basically anything bulky across Saudi Arabia. Customer posts a shipment, transporters bid on it, delivery gets tracked live. We worked with Ali Aldughairi on both apps: the customer side and the driver side.
A major part of the project involved building RTL support into the user interface. Not just flipping the layout, the actual hard part was mixed-direction content. Order IDs, IBANs, phone numbers, SAR amounts these are Latin strings sitting inside Arabic sentences, and RTL doesn't have a clean answer for that out of the box. We had to work out a rule that held up on a chat screen, a checkout screen, a tracking screen, all differently, and make sure none of them broke when the numbers got longer or the names got longer.
Then there was the density challenge. A single freight request has cargo type, route, receiver info, timing, vehicle needs a lot to carry on a 375px screen. A transporter scanning bids needs to decide in a few seconds whether something's worth their time, and a customer comparing five offers needs to trust the price without having to think too hard about it. Getting that hierarchy right took a few passes.
The two apps also needed to feel like they were built for completely different people. Customer app leans on trust profiles, vehicle photos, ETA, that kind of thing, all visible before you commit. Driver app is the opposite: stripped down for someone driving, checking their phone for two seconds at a time. We ended up with something we called Road Mode, where geofencing picks up most of the status changes automatically and the driver's really just tapping Loaded and Delivered.
By the end we had a full Figma design system for both apps, onboarding through payout, built so it can stretch to new cargo types or new regions later without starting over.
One thing I'm still chewing on: how much should a driver app automate away versus leave in the driver's hands? Curious where others land on that.
Less distraction always works best. Great project Yurii🔥
Headline: Fueling the Grind: A Visual Journey of Ambition and Resilience ⚡Dedication isn't just about hard work; it's about the mindset to keep moving forward no matter the obstacles. I created this piece to capture that exact drive, resilience, and the relentless pursuit of growth. Every element in this design reflects the energy needed to turn big goals into reality. Excited to share this creative milestone on Contra! 🚀
This turned out beautifully!
I’d go with 2. The cinematic image makes the brand feel more established.