On leadership, AI, and what we're not talking about.
The AI interaction pattern right now is a search box that texts you back. I wanted to push past that — to find what happens when you let users into the reasoning.
Most of what we build with AI is convergent. I wanted to see what happens when you invert that — ask it to sustain a disagreement instead of resolving one.
The way you respond to internal requests is how the rest of the org learns what design is for. Every interaction is either building trust or eroding it.
AI selects for one cognitive style — fast, focused, output-driven. But resilient teams need cognitive diversity. What happens when the whole jungle becomes a sprint?
If systems operate on short horizons by design, why do we still ask individuals to organize their lives around long-term loyalty?
We’ve learned how to collaborate with machines faster than we’ve learned how to collaborate with each other. What if we brought that generosity back to human systems?
Design is ahead, product is ahead, engineering is ahead. But if we don’t bring discernment, “ahead” just means “faster toward somewhere.”
We didn’t go wrong by embracing speed or technology. We went wrong by confusing progress with acceleration.
AI can generate layouts in seconds. Copilot writes production-ready code. But as the making part gets easier, the thinking part becomes the bottleneck.
Product teams love features. But progress without context rarely sticks. Every product team has its pizza oven story.
Without a clear brand and strategy, speed becomes chaos, alignment becomes luck, and your team pays the price.
Maybe the invitation was never to bring your whole self to work. Maybe it was always to bring your real self.
AI forced us to get serious about observability and evaluation. Humans need both too.
The paradox emerges when organizations accelerate AI adoption and inadvertently create more inefficiency than value.
Years 3–5 is when design leaders fly solo — navigating the bridge from Director to VP, trading tactical tools for strategic ones.
AI has fractured the way teams work. What used to be a single process has splintered into three parallel workstreams.
Every week there’s a new AI tool promising to deliver your product in record time. But every tool still relies on human direction.
You made it through Year 1. Year 2 requires self-reflection, decision making, and balance — including choosing your career topology.
The first of a 3-part series on navigating your first few years as a design leader — role clarity, team assessment, and organizational politics.
Content resists surface solutions because it resides at the core of your offering. Covering over content problems keeps the poison in your system.
When you take the time to watch how someone else performs product design & UX, the spectator in you extracts process details and connects dots.
The best conversations start with a messy question, not a polished brief.