The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you're optimizing.

Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.

The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.

Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.

Successful software always gets changed.

A scientist builds in order to learn; an engineer learns in order to build.

Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.