I spent fifteen years watching creative partnerships produce the best work I've ever seen. I also spent fifteen years watching creative partnerships produce the most forgettable, compromised, beige work imaginable. The difference between those two outcomes is one of the most important things I've learned about taste, and it's something I think about every time I sit down to build something now.
The advertising industry runs on creative tension. The classic pairing is the art director and the copywriter. One thinks in images, the other thinks in words. They sit across from each other, argue, push, disagree, sketch, reject, rethink, and eventually arrive at something that neither of them would have produced alone. That's the magic. That's the bit that makes agencies worth the money.
But there's also the strategist and the creative director. The account team and the creative team. The client and the agency. At every level of the process, you have people with different instincts, different references, different ideas about what good looks like. And the question is always the same: is this tension making the work better, or is it filing down the edges until nothing interesting remains?
The productive disagreement
The best creative partnerships I've been part of had a specific quality: both people were willing to be wrong, but neither was willing to be boring. The disagreement wasn't about ego. It was about standards. You're pushing for something because you genuinely believe it's better, not because you need to win.
I remember a campaign where the creative team wanted to go dark and provocative. The strategy was pointing towards warmth and relatability. Those felt like opposite directions. In most agencies, you'd have a meeting, someone would present both options, the senior person would pick one, and you'd move on. But instead, the team spent two days in a room pushing each other. What came out was something warm in tone but structurally provocative — it felt approachable but made you think. It was better than either starting point.
That's productive tension. Two strong perspectives colliding and creating something new in the process. It requires trust, it requires both parties having genuine taste (not just opinions), and it requires a willingness to let go of your original idea if the collision produces something superior.
The committee problem
Now here's where it goes wrong. And it goes wrong a lot. The committee problem isn't about having too many people — it's about having too many people with veto power and not enough people with conviction. When everyone in the room can say no but nobody is willing to fight for yes, you get work that satisfies everyone and excites nobody.
I've sat in rooms where a brilliant idea was killed not because anyone thought it was bad, but because someone thought it was risky. And in the absence of someone willing to champion it, the safe option won by default. That's not collaboration. That's erosion.
The tell-tale sign is the language. "Can we soften this?" "What if we made it more accessible?" "I love it, but could we also add..." These aren't creative contributions. They're sandpaper. They smooth everything down until the surface is perfectly uniform and completely forgettable.
Design-by-committee produces things that look like they were designed by a committee. You can feel it in the product. Every decision has been negotiated. Every edge has been rounded. The result is technically competent and spiritually empty.
The test that matters
So how do you know which one you're in — productive tension or destructive compromise? I've developed a simple test over the years. After the disagreement, ask yourself: did we arrive somewhere new, or did we arrive somewhere in the middle?
Somewhere new is exciting. It means the collision of perspectives opened up a direction that didn't exist before. The work has energy. It has conviction. Both people can point to it and say "I wouldn't have got there alone."
Somewhere in the middle is defeat dressed up as diplomacy. It means both people gave up their strongest positions and met on neutral ground. Neutral ground is where boring work lives. Nobody hates it. Nobody loves it. Nobody remembers it.
The solo builder's advantage
One of the most unexpected things about building products alone — which is what I do now, just me and Claude Code — is how clean the decisions are. There's no committee. There's no compromise. Every choice reflects a single, coherent point of view.
That sounds arrogant, and maybe it is. But the products I've built in the last year have a consistency that I rarely achieved in collaborative environments. Modern Retro looks and feels like one person's vision because it is. The pub guide, the culture aggregator, even the kid's activity directory — they all have a coherent aesthetic sensibility because there was nobody in the room asking to make the logo bigger.
The downside, of course, is that I don't have anyone pushing me to places I wouldn't go myself. Nobody's challenging my instincts. Nobody's bringing references I'd never have found. The work is coherent but it might be narrower than it needs to be.
Finding the right kind of friction
The ideal situation isn't total agreement or constant battle. It's two people with strong taste who respect each other enough to disagree honestly. The ratio matters too. In my experience, the best partnerships are about 70% alignment and 30% tension. You need enough shared ground to build on and enough difference to prevent complacency.
I think about this when I imagine what my projects would look like if I had a creative partner. Someone with different references, different instincts, but the same standards. Not someone who'd round my edges, but someone who'd show me edges I couldn't see.
The greatest creative duos — Lennon and McCartney, the Coen Brothers, Charles and Ray Eames — didn't succeed despite their differences. They succeeded because of them. But critically, they were differences in approach, not differences in ambition. They all wanted the same thing: to make something great. They just had very different ideas about what great looked like.
That's the distinction. Two people with strong taste fighting to make something great will produce extraordinary work. Two people with weak taste trying not to offend each other will produce something you've already forgotten.
Right now, I build alone. And that's working. But I'm not naive enough to think that one perspective is always sufficient. The best work I've ever been part of came from productive collision. The trick is knowing the difference between collision and erosion — and having the courage to walk away from the room when it's the latter.
