We had a problem. A service getting hammered with duplicate events from three upstream producers — we needed to figure out where in the pipeline to deduplicate. Six engineers on a video call. Someone shared their screen and opened Figma. Twenty minutes in, we still hadn't agreed on anything.
I stood up, picked up a marker, and started drawing on the wall. Three minutes later we had it.
Not because I'm smarter standing up — though I do think that helps — but because drawing makes you decide things. You can't be vague on a whiteboard. You draw the box. You write the label. Every one of those is a small commitment, and it's those small commitments that actually move problems forward.
I've tried to explain this to people and it always sounds mystical when I say it out loud. It isn't. It's just that every tool we use for thinking digitally is also a tool for deferring thinking. A Notion doc can hold an unresolved contradiction forever. A whiteboard cannot. The marker runs out. The surface fills up. You have to make a call.
My team knows which office is mine because the walls are covered. Glass board behind the monitor, painted whiteboard wall to the left, mobile easel for when I need more room. People walk in and see systems and timelines and half-finished diagrams. My skip-level called it "a war room." I take that as a compliment.
The diagrams stay up for weeks. I walk past them twenty times a day and each time I notice something I hadn't before. That's the thing about keeping ideas on a physical surface — they keep working on you. A diagram in Figma does not work on you. You have to go find it.
Here's the thing about erasing that I think people miss: it's not a loss. When something lives in a document it picks up institutional weight. Nobody deletes it — they just stop looking at it. On a whiteboard you erase constantly and none of it feels like a loss. You're just done with it. That's healthy.
I've shipped features to hundreds of millions of people by drawing boxes on a wall, arguing about them, erasing them, and drawing better boxes. The board is for thinking. The moment you start using it to store things, you've broken it.