There’s a seductive danger present whenever you see someone else outline their way of working, however. It’s easy to take their process as a rigid, universal truth. The trouble is, you and your team aren’t like everyone else—you have different strengths and weaknesses.

Imagine this scenario. You’re hired to design a product that has a guaranteed audience of 50,000 users, right out of the gate. Your clients have a dedicated support staff with a completely predictable technology stack. Best of all, your work directly improves the quality of your users’ lives.

Every product has a personality—whether it was deliberately designed to or not. Reddit is quirky, hyperactive, and sometimes sarcastic. Amazon is like a salesperson with an eidetic memory and amazing talent for statistics.

As many of us move away from designing pages toward designing systems, one concept keeps cropping up: modularity. We often hear about the benefits of a modular approach; modules are scalable, replaceable, reusable, easy to test, quick to put together—“They’re just like LEGO!”