I’ve been thinking about this a lot while working on product development.

In UX, some rules are non-negotiable, like loading speed or accessibility…Break those, and you hurt the product.

Others are just defaults: useful frameworks, until they become limits.

Then there’s the third kind. The ones we follow without question: Legacy patterns dressed up as best practices.

It’s easy to assume every rule exists for a good reason. But in practice, many just go unchallenged…

I think creativity is not about rejecting structure. It’s about knowing which constraints matter, and which are just leftovers from an old playbook.

The best teams I’ve worked with know the difference. They treat rules as tools, not truths.

When we stop asking, “What’s allowed?” and start asking, “What actually matters?”. That’s when things get interesting.

Rules should support great products, not limit them.

Anyway, that is where my head’s been lately. Time to refill my coffee.