Hey, Miranda here 👋
Nobody warns you that the more senior you get, the vaguer the briefs get.
The Leads I coach don’t get handed clean tickets. They get “make an AI vision.” “Redesign the whole sales flow for how it should look three years from now.” “Make onboarding better.” No real target, no definition of done, sometimes three teams who each think they own it.
That’s the tax on seniority. The work stops arriving pre-defined, and defining it becomes the job.
A lot of designers spin out on that for one reason: they can’t tell ambiguity from chaos.
They feel identical but they need opposite responses.
In this article:
A 30-second diagnostic: are you in ambiguity, or chaos?
Four moves that turn “I don’t know where to start” into work that reads as senior+
The exact sentences to say in the room, so you’re not improvising under pressure
One challenge to run on your messiest project this week
Ambiguity = the goal is real, the path isn’t. Your job: draw the map. This is the good kind. It’s where senior-level work gets made, because whoever draws the map gets remembered as the one who led.
Chaos = the goal itself keeps moving. Your job: stop designing and force a decision. No amount of good design survives a target that won’t hold still.
Mix them up and you’ll burn weeks and yourself. You use the ambiguity response on a chaos problem, then wonder why nothing you build sticks.
Ask me how I know…
That “make a vision” brief? I’ve spent weeks designing my way around it (more than once). Building screens, hoping the direction would reveal itself.
It didn’t. It was chaos in an ambiguity costume, a moved-on exec’s after thought with no stable definition of what he wanted “a vision” to change. It’s trying to draw a map for a destination in complete darkness.
So before anything else, work out which room you’re in.
Run your messiest current project through this:
You’re in AMBIGUITY if…
✔ You could write the goal in one sentence and most people would get it
✔ The disagreement is about how, not what
✔ When you propose a direction, people react to it, they don’t rewrite the premise
✔ The same definition of success has held more than a couple of weeks
You’re in CHAOS if…
✘ “What does success look like” gets a different answer depending who’s in the room
✘ The definition of done has changed more than once this month
✘ Two or more people each think they own the final call
✘ You’re designing against a moving target and you’ve started to feel a little crazy about it
Mostly top four? The moves below are for you.
Mostly bottom four? Skip to “Move 4”. Your job right now isn’t to design.
Knowing the difference alone will save you weeks. I wish someone had handed it to me before that vision mess ate weeks out of my life, for nothing.
The instinct with a vague brief is to go heads down and start working, so you look capable.
But, it reads as the opposite and makes you look like you didn’t notice the brief was vague.
Address it head on instead:
“Before I start building, I want to make sure I’m solving the right problem. Right now I’m reading the goal as ___. Is that how everyone else is reading it?”
That surfaces the ambiguity, shows you already have a view, and makes you the one shaping the definition.
When you’re unsure, the tempting question is “what do you want me to do?”
It feels safe but it keeps you junior. You’ve handed the thinking back to someone who was hoping you’d figure it out.
Flip it. Bring a frame, invite correction:
✘ “What direction do you want here?”
✔ “Here’s how I’m proposing we frame this: ___. I think it gets us to the goal fastest. Thoughts?”
Being confidently corrected beats waiting for direction. Even a half-right proposal gives the room something to react to, and reacting is easier than inventing.
You did the hard part. They’ll remember that.
A quick aside, because these moves are a big skillset that doesn’t surface overnight…
Everything here sits under one competency: facilitation. Walking into an undefined room and leaving it with a shared direction.
It’s the highest-leverage skill for senior designers, and it’s what I built the Strategic Facilitator’s Handbook around, the exact scripts and agendas I use to turn a fuzzy, three-owner, nobody-agrees kickoff into a room that leaves aligned. Including the full version of the frame move above, and the chaos-escalation script below.
Grab the Strategic Facilitator’s Handbook →
(Want your whole team facilitating like this? Team licences come with a significant discount.)
Ambiguity tempts you to wait for full clarity before committing to anything.
Full clarity isn’t coming. Waiting for it is how projects rot.
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