Field Notes

By topic

The five notes group into three discipline clusters. Pick by what you are actively dealing with.

Suggested reading order

If you are reviewing this portfolio for a senior product design role, here are three reading paths sorted by how much time you have:

1. 8 min Start with Reading AWStats Like a Product Manager — the meta-discipline note. Shows how I read analytics on my own site with product-manager rigor. Read this first if you want to know whether I think like a senior PD before reading the client work.
2. 25 min Pair the funnel note with one regulatory note that matches your stack. Buy-side PMs: read MiFID II Best-Execution. Cross-border retail brokers: read ASIC RG 268. Onboarding and compliance teams: read KYC EDD. Institutional execution desks: read FIX 4.4 Latency.
3. 90 min Read all five. They cover the breadth — regulatory translation, institutional execution, onboarding conversion, and portfolio engineering as a discipline. Then read Compliance Approach and Data Verification for the methodology pages they reference. That's the full body of practitioner writing on edwson.com.

Why field notes

Case studies do one job — they prove a body of work exists and it shipped. They are the wrong shape for a different job: showing how a practitioner thinks through a specific regulatory or execution problem when it is actively on the desk. Field notes are that shape. One problem, 800–2,200 words, with the pattern I landed on and the ones I rejected.

Most of the notes are about client work — FIX latency, MiFID II best-ex, ASIC disclosure, KYC EDD. One is different: it is about this portfolio itself, and how I read AWStats on my own site the way I would read a product analytics dashboard. Hiring managers reviewing portfolios see two kinds of designers: designers who shipped product, and designers who can articulate why and how they shipped product. Showing the meta-work — funnel analysis, JSON-LD discipline, surgical fixes — is part of articulating the second.

The audience is other practitioners — hiring managers, design directors, and engineers at institutional finance firms who want to know whether the person writing understands the domain deeply enough to argue about it in a review.

What is on the desk next

Three note topics in active drafting. Order will depend on which is most useful at the moment a recruiter asks.

• Methodology Design-as-Governance — A Working Definition A direct statement of what "design-as-governance" actually means in practice — beyond a slogan. The disclosure render event, the audit trail, the precondition gate; what shipped at ACY versus the methodology document. Roughly 2,000 words.
• Methodology Reading a Regulator's Notice — Extracting Design Requirements from Legal Text The actual skill that makes a designer's voice carry weight in compliance reviews. Picking apart an ASIC notice, an ESMA consultation, or a MAS circular. How to spot the operative clause versus the framing.
• Institutional craft Tabular Numerals + Density — Typography for Trader Surfaces Why monospace digits, why tabular figures, why 9.5px micro-text is OK at a Bloomberg-class density, why most trader UIs ignore this and pay the cost. Concrete OpenType feature flags and the design tokens.

Subscribe

Three ways to follow as new notes ship:

• Atom feed Add https://edwson.com/feed.xml to any RSS reader (Feedly, NetNewsWire, Reeder, Inoreader, Mastodon, etc.). New notes appear automatically — typically within hours of publish.
• LinkedIn Follow ed-chen-saas on LinkedIn. Each note ships as a long-form post excerpt with the link to the full version here.
• Email Send a one-line message to ed@edwson.com with the subject "Subscribe to Field Notes" — I will email a link when each new one ships. No newsletter platform, no tracking pixels.

About the author

Where to go next

• All case studies — the shipped work behind the notes.
• Compliance approach — how I treat regulatory obligations as a product surface rather than a legal artefact.
• Data verification — how I source, cite, and audit the quantitative claims in financial UI.
• Design system showcase — the page whose funnel I rebuilt; see the live result.
• About Ed — four years at ACY Securities, institutional finance design across 40+ jurisdictions.
• For recruiters & hiring teams — role-fit context, regulatory coverage matrix, and target companies.