I’m passionate about product design and strategy, building products and teams from the ground up.
 I help teams and peers make decisions and progress toward a goal, and I love branding and how the product speaks to the customer.

The first step in every project is to listen carefully to users, subject matter experts and to your own instinct and training. Empathise with people and their context of use and needs that arise from it.
In my experience, most teams disregard design best practices even before they deprioritise user research. Start from first principles and note your assumptions down. Be the one that asks the stupid question in the room.

Everything is a prototype, including conversations. The job of the designer is to build models - briefs, problem descriptions, lists of needs, user journeys, service blueprints and of course UI prototypes at different level of fidelity. Understand what your team needs, and provide the right model to advance the understanding of the problem of the whole team. I'd say, at least write down what you and the team knows in a document like this:
Project Starter

Progression over perfection. The job is to deliver value, not fulfil our need for self expression. Some fundamental learnings can be experienced only through building a feature for real, release, and follow up. More often than not, grappling on perfection is an excuse to not follow up and iterate! And yes, typography and proper spacing needs to be 99% right from the start. Sloppiness is not agility.