Product leader, author, and civic tech veteran Christian Crumlish joins Peter and Jesse to discuss his transition from UX to product management and his experimental AI product manager, Piper Morgan. The conversation explores how product and design roles can be natural allies rather than adversaries, where AI truly adds value versus hype, and how practitioners can thoughtfully adopt new tools while staying grounded in fundamental UX principles and maintaining agency over their practice.

Find Christian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mediajunkie/

Find Jesse at https://jessejamesgarrett.com/

Find Peter at https://petermerholz.com/. Peter has just published the 2025 State of UX/Design Organizational Health Report, available to all of his newsletter subscribers.

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way,

Peter: navigating the opportunities

Jesse: and challenges

Peter: of design and design leadership.

Jesse: On today’s show: Could you replace your product partner with a robot? That’s the question we’ll be exploring with longtime Silicon Valley and civic tech veteran Christian Crumlish, design leader turned product leader, and author of the book, Product Management for UX People. He’ll share with us learnings from Piper Morgan, his hobby project, to build an AI product manager, what he’s learned from that process about both product work and design work, and how AI can enable new creative possibilities for seasoned practitioners.

Peter: Christian, thank you so much for joining us.

Christian: Thanks for having me.

Peter: Our pleasure. As we were just discussing before we hit the record button, Jesse and I have known you for going on 20-some years in this field of user experience, information architecture, interaction design, et cetera. But in the year 2025, who are you, how do you introduce yourself? What are you up to?

Christian: Yeah, that’s a great and very unfair question. Um, because it’s always too much or how to know what’s relevant to the person I’m talking to. But I’d say to normal people, I generally nowadays say I work in tech or I’m a technologist. I don’t go straight to saying that I’m a product manager unless, they really want a job title kind of thing.

And because I’ve been doing civic tech and I’m still doing it, I’ll probably lead with that these days. It’s the kind of technology I’m involved with that’s focused on public service. And I’d say broadly, probably in a category of… later career, having the privilege to choose more what you wanna work on and tending towards things that feel more purposeful than like selling more apps with hats on cats or whatever.

No shame in like anybody who’s making a living doing that but I’m framing it as a kind of privilege to be able to say… Whitney Hess like advised me once when I was trying to make some choices that, like, the amount of money more than you actually need to live on is often hazard pay.

You often earn it through doing things you don’t really need to or want to do necessarily.

Peter: Right.

Christian: So I’m a product person. I’m currently working for a company called Kind Systems, which is based in Irvine, California, but pretty much remote. We do civic tech, but also we have some private sector clients.

And I’m leading a project at the VA right now, helping veterans who are disputing claims or who want their claims for disability to be reviewed, helping them kind of navigate the very complex set of pathways for doing that. And you know, tackling that kind of stuff is exactly the in-the-weeds enterprise scale work you do in government that doesn’t necessarily sound, like, you know, Silicon Valley tech, but is consequential enough to be very interesting to me.

Kind also does, you know, we work with other kind of large data type client projects, and we have a product of our own called Open Laws, openlaws.us, which is, it’s a data source for up-to-date legal code.

Peter: Hmm. I think if our audience does know you, they’ll probably be most familiar with a book you wrote and a transition you made from being a UX practitioner to being a product manager. And I’m wondering, kind of, I’m sure you’ve told the story plenty, but what precipitated that transition?

What enabled you being ready for that transition and, what has it been like? You’ve now been in product, I think for about a decade, if not longer. Like, what has it been to remain in that mode with that UX background that you have?

Christian: Yeah. it’s the going over to the dark side, that’s the cliche, I think. And I think also I would say for people who know this podcast and know your all, like, work and thinking in this space, I think folks are probably familiar with the idea that Peter, you’ve made a strong case that the central concerns of product, quote unquote product and quote unquote UX, are basically the same concerns.

You know, the customer experience, the value of what’s being built, the purpose of it, whether it’s meeting people’s needs, a lot of things like that. And yet the way the business is structured, the person with a product title and the person with a UX or design title often do very different day-to-day tasks or have very different oversight responsibilities.

Not necessarily in a bad way, but if you’re gonna make do with the way things are structured right now, potentially in a very complimentary way, that’s my angle. That you can be allies in that thing rather than like somehow eternally fighting twins, you know, who become a constellation eventually or whatever.

You know, I think I was motivated originally probably by some of the wrong motivations for people who are in UX and think that the grass is greener in product management. Like, I will have more power. I’ll finally get to decide. I’ll be in the room, I will be strategic.

You know, the other things was like, it’s fun to draw. I like to use Figma. Like, I’m a designer. That is my identity. Like you don’t get to have any of those things over in product management. Unless you want to be that Willem Defoe meme who’s like, I’m something of a designer myself, guy, you know, which no designer likes.

I mean, I very clearly… coming into the room as a person, even with my design colleagues who might have a bigger design reputation than a product reputation if they know who I am at all, or know, any of my background, I have to say I’m not the designer on this project. I’m a product manager who has opinions about design or questions about it.

But like, if I start talking about what the design should be like, shut me up. That’s not my job anymore.

Jesse: So it’s been this interesting sort of collision course that product and design have been on for a while now. As you have alluded to, you’ve been part of the group of people who’ve made the transition from one side to the other, and I’m sure there are some folks who have found themselves going back the other way as well, right?

Christian: Although I’ll say it’s hard to go back the other way. Yeah, I mean there have been junctures in my career when I’ve been saying, oh, I’d like to now take a senior design job again. And you know, I don’t fit the turtleneck anymore.

Jesse: And we’ve talked about on this show, we’ve talked about some of the ways in which these overlapping mandates between product and design roles and between product and design teams have led to a lot of confusion about ownership and responsibility and a lot of confusion about where the value really lies in each of these roles. And I wonder, from your perspective, having been on both sides of the fence, how would you characterize the value that product brings to the table versus the value that design brings to the table in the here and now given, you know, all of the evolution that we’ve been through.

Christian: Yeah. And I think that’s an important distinction because I think we all have our, like, well, if I were king or if, on the ideal team I would set up, you might divide responsibilities a certain way and hire a certain way. I know people like Wendy Johansson, who has a both a design and product background, and is also an entrepreneur, and in her current company she has roles that combine the design and product role, ’cause that’s her vision and mental model.

And she just empowers people to do that. But I think if you don’t have that in place, you can’t just wish that into existence on your own. So I think the value that the product manager is supposed to bring to a team is focus on goals.

And, I mean focus in the sense of sharpening a pencil, like, choosing, making sure the team does not spread its attention too broadly across too many so-called goals and therefore not succeed in any meaningful way.

So there’s the taking the punch bowl away. You know, the person who says we can’t have seven goals this quarter, we can only have one number one goal, which you have to be that person a lot.

And you know, a lot of the things I say, I think UX people will sometimes say, well, I do that, or I sometimes do that, or, that’s been part of my job at times. And of course, if there isn’t a product manager or the product manager isn’t doing that, it frequently is the strategic senior UX person who’s gonna do those things, or the person with the magic marker who can like facilitate the right conversation at the right time.

So none of this stuff is necessarily alien, but I would say that that’s the main thing a product manager is supposed to do. And the techniques they use, though, usually aren’t design techniques.

They usually use things that are, like, if you take the fancy framing about outcomes versus outputs, et cetera, they’re mostly like project management techniques, or at least organizational techniques.

Figuring out the right process for the team. Being a, un-sticker, you know, tracking stuff down, gluing, making sure the communication is working, quote unquote glue work.

And again, UX people often do a lot of that, but they usually don’t do it across the domain of the whole thing. They’re not necessarily given privy to the whole thing.

They often do it in a way that’s design centric or UX centric and somewhat less involved and even like less wanting to be involved in some of the other dimensions of the work.

So when the division of labor works well, and I maybe haven’t said what the value of the design leadership or design team brings and, I think it’s, you know, meeting the user’s needs and figuring out how to achieve the outcomes.

I think the product manager is not the one saying we should have a feature that looks like this, it should be on this page and stuff like that. But they should say, that thing you’re designing, how is that gonna help people no longer hassle our customer support so much as we’re supposed to be trying to do this quarter?

You know, like you have different conversations and you kind of are measuring or looking at different dimensions of the same thing. And when that works well, it’s sort of a binocular vision, you know? And if you have respect for, like, you’re gonna decide the design points, but I’m gonna still be a customer of your design like a client and go, ” Tthat design, I don’t know how it meets my needs now. I’m not gonna say make it more yellow, make it pop, you know. Make the logo bigger,” it’s gonna be a, hopefully, a more intelligent conversation than that.

I think that the UX side doesn’t always have the same understanding of what should they ask for product to do or how to step in and when to back off.

And both in my consulting work in the past, and I’d say anytime I step in and have to run product, or even set rules for how products should work in a situation, there’s a whole norming, storming, whatever, like one of those cycles where the actual people on the actual teams have to have the real conversations, get all their assumptions, all the baggage they’ve carried in from past teams and how they worked and all the unspoken assumptions about what I own, what you own, what it’s called, get that up on a whiteboard, get a discussion, figure out that 60, 80% of it is fine.

Everybody’s, oh, yeah, yeah, you totally do that. I don’t do that. Oh, I don’t ever wanna look at a spreadsheet, you know.

And then you get this like, juicy gray area around design, around discovery, around strategy where everybody’s like, no, no, that’s me. I wanna do that, you know.

And then you have to have the sometimes difficult conversations, sometimes not so difficult conversation about who does what, who decides who’s the owner versus the interested party on some of these things.

And even you sometimes have to say, okay, we don’t a hundred percent agree, so on these jump balls, we’re gonna flip coins, we’re gonna try it your way, whatever. But we’re gonna track. And maybe after a while we’ll try it the other way, if we don’t love the way it’s going.

I think any smart team is constantly retroing how they work in a much broader sense all the time and going, okay, this whole thing where you decide, and then I do what you say isn’t working out, let’s try it my way, where we talk about it first.

Or it’s not that trivial, but I’d say that’s where you often get to. So, there isn’t like an off the shelf recipe of product, you know, product drives like this and UX drives like that. You know, it’s, often like, which mix of concerns and which other mix of concerns, and the way that they’re kind of jiving.

I find that when I do product the way I do it, which is not the way everybody does it, and the way I think of it, it’s very much a service job. If there’s leadership, it’s the leadership of facilitating that the team figure out the right thing to do, have the right conversations.

It’s not telling people what the answer is a lot of the time. And it’s a lot of like emptying people’s waste baskets, like conceptually figuring out that they’re stuck and getting them unstuck. Tracking down, like, at the VA, what’s the policy for this? I’ll go research those voluminous documents and bring it back to you. You can keep designing.

So like with designers, I used to be a designer. I’m like, Hey, you want me to write those GitHub tickets for you? Because I’m, that’s all I do all day now. So I’m happy to do that. Designers are like, yes, thank you. I mean, usually they want to make sure I did it right but it, you know, I can enrich them and put the acceptance criteria in and the blah, blah.

You know, like stuff that’s like kind of tedious for a designer who would like to get back to looking at the research or thinking through the solution or something like that. So I think there are very healthy divisions of labor that are possible in these roles that there’s still sharing the goal of, we want the experience to really meet someone’s needs and, you know, be reliably, consistently good.

Peter: Something that I wonder, ’cause I know you’ve worked in some different contexts. You’ve been in proper pure tech where what you were building was the product to sell. You’ve worked in civic tech where you’re creating software and systems to help people engage with governmental services.

From what I’ve seen, design and user experience people tend to show up and do pretty much the same things kind of regardless of context. But product people don’t, product people are very much more needing to adapt to whatever their contexts are. And I’m wondering for you how that’s borne out, how do you show up differently when you are working at, 18F than when you were working in Silicon Valley tech than when you’re working now in this kind of maybe hybrid.

And I say this because I find that conversation, particularly in places like LinkedIn, people start talking past one another because, you know, if you read Lenny’s Newsletter, everything is the height of Silicon Valley tech product. But in my experience, 95% of the people doing product aren’t in environments like that.

Christian: Yeah. Not all tech is that. I mean, when I was at 18F, one of the things I was doing was bringing in product speakers and UX speakers, you know, but for my product team, and so John Cutler is one of the people who came and spoke to us.

It was a lot of fun. And he came up with something for us, you know, where he didn’t just go, I’m gonna give you talk number 99. I wrote three talks this week. And, you know, you’re gonna get one of them, whatever.

Peter: John’s output, he is probably writing a talk right now.

Christian: I know. Talk about like, just working with your brain chemistry, you know, like, letting it do what it wants to do. John, it’s so awesome.

And we talked about it and I was like, well what is my team anxious about? What does my team feel? In the public sector you’re like, am I falling behind the private sector? Is the stuff I’m doing gonna be hard to sell if I ever wanna work in the private sector again? Am I not doing the hip cool stuff?

I keep hearing that, you know, in Silicon Valley they now have like donut teams or something and we don’t have them, you know, something like that. And, made a very similar point that like there’s this fixation, the newsiness of like the 5% of tech that’s done in a pure tech and VC, which is just a name for a kind of banking you know, funded tech that has to drive profits in this 10x way.

And that becomes like the model for how all tech should be done in a way that’s super unrealistic. And the story is often that, look, the private sector’s like this and the public sector’s like this, and you’re comparing a little startup that is like gonna break laws because they’re gonna lobby to change the laws if they ever get successful or it won’t matter ’cause they were outta business anyway. And they’re not gonna have HR and they’re not gonna do anything by the book, ’cause they’re just trying to move fast and break things or whatever.

And I’m sure that’s fun. I’ve been adjacent to that world.

And then you’re like, but then look at this sclerotic public sector thing that’s so complicated and slow, but you’re not comparing GE and the government or Procter and Gamble and the government, you know, or, a large health or pharmaceutical concern and the government.

And if you do, they’re way more like each other than either of them are like a Silicon Valley startup. They have regulation, they have lawyers, they have HR, they have compliance, they have sunk costs, they have very complex system.

It’s super fun to make… Look, I know we’re gonna talk about my my hobby project and it’s super fun to make a thing that does not have dependencies. You know, everybody likes to make the new thing, but most useful stuff has to plug into the existing things and they are complicated.

Jesse: So you mentioned your hobby project and, yeah, you know, a lot of this stuff is in flux for all of us right now. Especially as new technologies are shifting the way that we look at product development, the way that we look at our roles relative to product development. And you have recently been documenting some work of your own as you’ve been working with AI.

Basically, I mean, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it feels to me like you’re trying to build a robot product manager.

Christian: Kind of yeah.

Peter: So you’re trying take product management jobs.

You’re trying to make it so that there’s no room for entry level product managers.

Christian: That’s right. I’m, trying to eliminate those people.

Peter: All these Stanford grads, what are they gonna do now?

Christian: Yeah, and I always like to say that I would rather have an actual human intern or apprentice when I can do that and have people who are quite junior and eager to learn and have broad knowledge, but not specific knowledge, that’s a great kind of person to have on the team, even if just for a summer, and not to trivialize it, but it can be like, go through all our documents and clean them up or make suggestions or like, look at all these long tail of things we kind of have been wanting to do and also shadow these projects and learn and help us formalize our processes better.

You know, there’s all kinds of things that a smart intern can do who doesn’t have to have too much domain knowledge or discretion. Even, like, make a lot of copies of this template and then bring it back and let me see if you did it right can be a good use of an intern’s time, but not a good use of your highly paid staffer who has to bill out or whatever, something like that.

So I don’t have an intern right now or anything, but I was like, my sense of like most people who’ve dabbled in chat-oriented gen AI or LLM type stuff is that, you know, it’s ongoing, but it’s sort of ephemeral and it’s not really focused on your stuff or your priorities.

If it learns about you, it’s usually in a creepy way that’s accruing value to the company, but not in any way that you own or have any mastery of, and ownership of it. And I started to learn a little bit, like most folks, you know, in our field about this, and I should not jump past the part where like a lot of, I think, our colleagues, particularly in the UX world, but in tech in general or in the world in general, I have a lot of qualms about the way this type of AI is being marketed and rolled out and sort of virally engaging people.

You know, when you talk about all how many customers OpenAI has and what a great platform it is, et cetera, et cetera, it just feels like Facebook again, like another everything thing that everybody’s in, but isn’t necessarily the healthy or good way to do that stuff, where that’s just the end in itself to get the engagement.

I worked in mental health, worked for a mental health startup for four years. And we used a natural language NLP-based chatbot at the time. So sort of at least one generation less sophisticated than the LLM chats we use now.

But we put a lot of thought and concern into making sure the chatbot didn’t misrepresent itself as a person or, say something terribly inappropriate, you know?

And it’s not easy and not trivial to do that. So from my point of view, I thought, how could I have something that’s actually, I have some control over what it knows, what it cares about, what its priorities are in a persistent way.

And I began to understand that when I was 18F where I knew some folsks over at 10x, which is another part of the technology transformation service in GSA, in the government where I was, that was more like a kind of Google X type incubator or a place where anybody in the government should say, Hey, we should do something, something like a suggestion box and they could take it on and run a, prototype, or you see if they could get it off the ground.

And they were of course doing AI experiments, some of which have now launched as like GSAI or USAI and things like that.

And typically what you do nowadays is you set up something like a sandbox, particularly if you’re in government, have to deal with PII or other kinds of, you know, sensitive information back when they cared about that kind of thing.

You wanna make sure that you’re not putting that stuff just in the public machine or into Google or into OpenAI’s databases, you have to have a sandbox that makes API calls and can engage, but has rules about what can pass through one way or the other, and things like that.

And so I began to understand that you can make software that uses these tools more programmatically that’s different from, say, just chatting with something and getting advice from time to time in some ongoing way.

And I was like, I wonder if I can maybe make this little kind of intern. What I think of it as like a product apprentice who wants to be hired as an associate. So they’re trying to do a good job, and as they learn to do things that get more sophisticated, maybe they can become an entry level product manager or a PO, maybe they can eventually become more senior.

And then we can of course, abstract ourselves up to higher levels of the work. But even if they could just like generate a bunch of draft GitHub tickets from me or review tickets, see if they’re thorough enough, like, I was, like, that would help. So it just became this thought experiment at first.

And I, you know, started by chatting with the chatbots and saying, how can I do this? What would be involved? And they recommended a stack, a model for doing it and, yeah, I think it was Gemini or one of those tools at first gave me like, here’s a whole bunch of Python files. Here it is, you know.

And I installed them and it was basically just a proof of concept. Like it was a little machine that could call out to an LLM and had a couple canned files, A PRD, a spec, a GitHub issue or something like that. And had like two or three canned queries.

And it did a good job of analyzing the doc or critiquing the issue or making a new issue from the thing. So it proved, but in this very canned way, that such things are possible. That got me like, oh, this is cool, you know, so I started saying, like, well, you know, like, let’s, go beyond the canned stuff.

Can I give it some real docs or can I ask it some real questions? And it was like, sure. You know, they’re always like, yes. Yeah. I call that the rocket to Mars anti-pattern. Like, can I make a rocket to Mars? It’s like, yeah, go to Home Depot and get a big pipe and some dynamite, like something to cap it on one end and we’re going to Mars tomorrow, you know?

So you get a lot of this Yes energy and I started hacking away at it and I got it to the point that I had a UI on it and I could upload contextual docs and I was having it, like, draft or critique actual tickets that I could use in my work in a minimal way. Like still in a, basically like barely, like I’m putting more energy into it than I’m getting out kind of way. But kind of exciting.

But it also started getting, like most things that are vibe coded, it got very spaghetti-ish. It was mixing the different projects. It wasn’t really that clear on what was what part of it was hacked together or mocked, or just like, it wasn’t architectural.

And this is why I started to feel like the shame, the chagrin of a late career practitioner who’s doing everything the wrong way. And like all of my red flags should have been going off.

Like, you’re just building it. You haven’t done any research, you haven’t like talked any users, you haven’t done any design yet. You know, you’re just like YOLOing off a cliff. That’s how you make software. Like, I knew it was wrong.

Jesse: Well, what, how do you respond to that in your own mind? how do you, how do you, you

Peter: And does it involve two sock puppets talking to each other?

Christian: Well, I mean, part of me was, like, oh, this is going nowhere. I mean, I think the way I always do when I’m working and something stops and I realize, oh, you know, I made a mistake. Like I shouldn’t have done it this way or that’s tapped out. Like, we’re getting diminishing returns on this approach. What are we doing wrong? Like that’s, kind of my life, on some meta level.

I mean, that’s probably the thing that keeps coming off of this is that I’m learning stuff about orchestrating and working with AI and I’ve gotten lot further than what we just left off.

But it’s this constant learning curve and 99% of it is stuff I kind of already knew from just working with the other kinds of things that use language that I know called people like, because they’re the same byways, you know, like the language is the whole channel. It’s the carrier of everything that’s happening, is this language layer now.

And by the way, this is, if you’re a UX person and have the ethical qualms I think we all have about the way it’s being done and the challenges around that, I think it’s still impossible not t o be fascinated by this HCI layer, this human computer interface that is so much more language rich and language parsing than before.

And, you don’t have to anthropomorphize it at all to say the manipulation of language has always been an extension of our thinking in our minds.

And it’s now like outboard as well. I mean, if you remember, it’s all you, you know, you at plus generic everything, but like the only personality is coming from you and you don’t start to think it’s a ghost in the machine.

There are some super interesting ways to like, engage with that and to think about what happens now when like, you’re operating computers, but there’s another computer kind of in between that is operating the computer for you, but helping you, figure out what you want to do.

It’s another paradigm. It’s another layer, you know that wasn’t there before, not in any meaningful way.

Jesse: In what way would you say you were doing design work in this process?

Christian: I mean, I’d say that up to that point I wasn’t doing design work except the thing that I think is actually not a bad thing that goes on in a lot of vibe coding today, which is like bespoke personal custom design.

I just need a little database to keep track of my jogs. You know, I’m shopping for lamps and I need a little lamp optimizing app, you know, whenever.

And, that stuff I think is cool as long as you don’t like try to productize it and then leak everybody’s social security number with your janky backend,’cause you don’t know anything about software. Like, that’s bad.

But that idea that you can whip something up and it just works. That’s super cool. It’s like macros, like anything like that, that’s fun.

But if you wanna do it for a living or professionally or seriously, that’s not the right way to do something.

It’s a nice way to prototype of something, prove the concept. That’s all good.

So that was the point where I said I need to take a step back. But even so, I was still thinking about technical design. I still wasn’t thinking like a UX designer yet. And so partly, ’cause I was thinking this is just for me, you know, it was, number one, a learning project.

I was doing it partly to learn and then I realized about three or four weeks into it that I can also share this with other people. And that’s gonna be a very interesting layer of what I’m doing, too.

And then I thought like third level success would be, this even works for me at all.

And then like fourth level success would be I could productize it. Yeah. I could generalize it for other people, you know, but like, that would be really great.

And along the way I think I started figuring out some things about how to work methodology stuff that’s starting to maybe be potentially more valuable than any product that I could make if true. But you know, I mean if what I’m learning is actually valid, it’s always this question with bots until I see the final proof.

And that’s why I’m always suspicious saying, well, what you’re learning about process is more important than what you’re making because I’m a product person. And I’m like, well, if the thing I’m making never actually turns out to happen or be good, then how do we know my process is good?

Peter: Right. Are you doing this solo or are you collaborating with anyone that isn’t code?

Christian: There’s no other human contributing to this project yet. I have one or two people who agreed to do alpha testing, which I’m trying to get to maybe next month or so. I hate to put time frames on things, I’m usually wrong.

And, another person a person from our world reached out to me recently and said, Hey, I’d, like to kind of copy what you’re doing, maybe even clone your thing. You know, just for myself is that okay? Are you looking for contributors, whatever? And like, we’re having lunch next week. ’cause I, you know, I’d love to have people help me.

Peter: But at this point it’s you.

Christian: It’s me and all these bots. I slip into this first person plural a lot, but it’s me and some bots.

Peter: Yeah, Reading, your, I don’t know what you call it. A blog,

Christian: Newsletter, blog. It’s a blog.

Jesse: Development journal.

Peter: Documenting this experience. You do refer to others, but I figured they were all…

Christian: They’re all roles, they’re all like defined roles that, at least in my process, help separate concerns and kind of focus different conversations or decision making streams.

Peter: Well, and, you started by just hashing it out with an LLM for a while until you got something that proved out a bit of the concept, but then you realized was not workable because it was spaghetti.

Christian: Yeah. I literally said like, Hey, aren’t we just trying to turn a GitHub machine into like a smart agent? And it’s like, yeah, you’re right. That’s what we’re doing. That’s wrong. We shouldn’t do that. You know? So like,

Peter: Well what I noticed, and I can’t say I’ve read your entire corpus of work ’cause there’s a lot there, but the amount you’re talking about architecture for something that still seems relatively simple as a piece of software.

Maybe I’m not understanding it, but, right, this is a hobby project. It’s trying to do a fairly straightforward thing, and pretty evidently you need to be thinking architecturally to a degree.

That kind of surprised me as someone, I think all three of us, right? We all have information architecture backgrounds, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, but I was surprised how quickly you need to get into architectural thinking, even for something simple.

And I’m curious kind of what your experience was in realizing that and now practicing that.

Christian: Yeah, I mean, I think I have to qualify a little bit of that. First of all, what I’m making is not simple. I mean, it may sound simple, like if it works, it’ll seem simple, but it’s definitely under the hood, not simple. And I think there’s simpler things one could do. All right. I mean, the simpler version of this stuff I already do.

I’m like, I have a Claude chat and I’m like here’s all my meeting notes. Write me up like a weekly report. I’m already doing that kind of stuff. I don’t need like a custom piece of software for that.

There’s like one product I’m aware of for product managers out there already that’s an AI product. It’s called Chat-PRD.

My understanding is it’s a ChatGPT wrapper, essentially, like a lot of products, but a with some custom harness to be… that knows what a PRD is, and so like if you’re gonna be already using that kind of tool and this is your job, that’s a smart kind of product to exist.

And I think that if Piper Morgan, like, meets its goals it’s not gonna be that kind of tool essentially. It may even just be like, yeah, I’m gonna go use the chat PRD model context protocol and make one for you, ’cause I don’t need to specialize in that.

Like the ecosystem already has a thing for that. That’s more behind my mental model. I, think I’ve been working in platforms for too long, you know, so everything becomes a platform in my mind right away, and a microservice, even though it’s got no users and barely any functions yet.

But, so first of all, I think, yeah, I think the complexity is often really there. If you’re gonna make anything, I mean, it’s a hobby project, but it’s a hobby project in, “could I make software that’s really safe, that’s really ethical,” I mean, which is another interesting side note, that could be used but actually not, like break your bank spending LLM token costs or all these things are like making it real in our world, involves a lot of dimensions. It is complex.

And, yeah, I started off with a kind of, I didn’t know where it was gonna go. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with sketching an idea. Getting excited about it and then going, well, whoa, this approach needs some stopping and thinking. I think that’s a very healthy, organic way that a project evolves.

And, you know, there was a phase then where it then became architectural design. In my mind it was like, what’s the right way to build this? And I was asking tools that are more trained on how engineers think than how designers think. Although you can say you’re a, you’re a unicorn UX designer, like, I have a chat helping me design the website that like, is trying to think more like a designer, but one that can code too, you know? Of course. Why not?

And I did this thing where I asked a couple of this… models that were reputed to be smarter. Like, what is the right way to do this? Like, if you’re gonna do this seriously, how, ought you to do it? And they agreed on a couple of things like strict domain models, domain driven design, sort of defining the concepts that go with product management.

And this is where it’s like an IA type of thing, you know, where you’re saying product managers think they have projects, they work on products, they have tasks, they have roles…

Peter: …you have like a data or content model

Christian: Exactly, and, you define them in a layer that is separate from the database layer and certainly separate from any of the integration or orchestration or anything like that.

And you try not to mix concerns. And a lot of my early learnings, because I’m not an engineer or a technical architect, I now had one on demand. I can’t hassle the engineers I work with. I’ve had to learn all my tech by osmosis, by like just listening when they talk and everything all these years ’cause they’re too busy.

But, you know, occasionally people have explained stuff to me, obviously, but I mean, I can endlessly go, like, because it was a learning project, I’d say, well, why, why are we doing that? Why would you wanna do it that… and anytime they’re like, what do you wanna do? This idea or the two other options? ‘Cause I always have to give you two bad options after every good option or whatever.

And if I’m not sure, it’s usually do one or no, do two. Sometimes I’m like, well, for option three, what are the pros and cons? Like, I’m a product manager, I don’t know stuff. You just have to tell me like what’s the good or bad aspects of each choice.

And then it’ll be, oh, good question. And it’ll lay it out.

But I was still lazy about it early on. I was really like, how much can I do without fully paying attention?

And one lesson was, you have to pay attention. You can’t, you know, like the self-driving car, you know, no, still can’t tell a white van from the road or whatever. So you gotta watch.

And the other thing was that, I was still like triangulating rather than being really intentional.

And I got two good plans and then I got a third smart thing to do the Hegelian synthesis and come up with an Uber plan.

And then I just started trying to do it and, you know, it was quite a while, I mean, probably a month or two in before I even said, but I haven’t thought about the UX of this at all. I’m totally not doing this right, you know?

And I’ve even have a concept in my, you know, the semantic universe I’m creating with these assistants that we used to label patterns and concepts and things, that there’s this spiral where like after a while I started to learn the same kinds of things over and over again, but always at some higher level of abstraction or slower pace layer or something where it’s like, oh, I need to write stuff down.

Oh, I need to always write stuff down. Oh, I need to have them write it down. Oh, I need to have them read what they wrote down. Oh, I, you know, and then you do that and you’re like, oh, I need to automate that.

And then you’re like, oh, I need to check it. It doesn’t have errors. You know, it’s like there’s always this like level of like backing up and going, alright, now the chaos is crept in at the next level and I need to now put processes in place to like make that less prone to be me lazy, or the bots cheating or anything else.

Jesse: This sort of iterative entropy control.

Christian: Yeah. And so I always agree. It’s like I’m trying, the chaos will never be gone. I’m trying to like get it fractally down to like, oh, the documents aren’t perfect, you know? Not like, oh, the code is only 70% written.

Jesse: Right. You’ve talked a little bit about how your career experiences have informed the way that you’re engaging with this project and I think that for a lot of people who’ve been in this business for a long time, all this AI stuff came up and it was like, Oh man. Not another thing. Like it was gonna be like NFTs all over again, right?

Yeah, exactly. And trying to figure out, like everybody telling you that this thing is relevant, but you can’t necessarily see the connection. The people who are selling it to you don’t really seem to understand where you are coming from.

And for a lot of people, I think especially, you know, people who are less technologically sort of inclined, they tend to kind of bounce off of it and go, you know what? I’ve got design processes that I’ve been working on for the last 25 years. They are working great for me. I don’t see a reason to change.

Christian: Yeah.

Jesse: And there is this unwillingness to engage with this stuff. And I’m curious about your, I don’t know, advice or perspective for those folks who are kind of standing on the other side of this going like, everybody’s telling me that this thing is coming, but I don’t know how to think about it or engage with it as a creative professional.

Christian: Yeah, I’ve thought about this a lot. It’s definitely what drove me into writing this thing and, not coincidentally, I’d say four or five people who are more or less peers of ours, roughly from the same cohort we came up in, have reached out to me personally at some time or another to thank me for doing it,to say that they’re now trying something themselves.

You know, it’s not just to inspire people. I try to show like, if you’ve read any of the voluminous blog posts, often there are tales of like, Hey, that thing I reported being done, it’s totally not, it’s broken. I was an idiot.

It’s like, there’s lots of like warts in all. Like, ‘ cause I don’t want to be one of those people who’s, like, the best way to make a prompt, you know, like, I figured out.

You know, it’s, it’s like, no, this stuff is, like, new, weird, like, it’s the view source era. I think Christina Wodtke has sort of pointed out that there’s this vibe that feels very nineties-ish to some of us.

I think there’s two ways in which, sophisticated mature practitioners of UX might want to think about whether they should or shouldn’t engage with this technology or to what extent they do or don’t need to do it.

And I think one was the level I think you spoke about of, like, I don’t need it in my tool stack. I don’t need some Figma thing telling me how to lay out my page that doesn’t understand my design system that well anyway. You know, it’s more work than not to fix it.

All the stuff you hear from programmers, like it’s watching the bot is more work and more boring than writing the code. You know, things like that.

And I think that’s legit. Like, I don’t necessarily trust everybody’s pasting AI into their toolkits right now, you know, everything like that.

But I think the other thing, like, I hinted at before is, like, a layer of, the human computer interface, it desperately needs ux people.

Like, chatbots and, like, wrappers around LLMs is not a user experience, does not a user experience make, you know, like there’s plenty of work to be done figuring out how this kind of technology ought to be part of the orchestrated experience we have with all the other kinds of technology that we use.

If that isn’t UX or service design or the broader thing that we all are into, I don’t know what is.

Having said that, I get the qualms about it, you know, I’ll out myself as being old enough that I can remember conversations with the people who were towards the end of their careers when I was entering the workforce, who basically were reluctant to adopt the personal computers.

They didn’t want a computer on their desk. They’re like, I’m gonna be retired before this is a thing. I don’t wanna have to learn how to use DOS or whatever. And if they weren’t really, like, 63, they were wrong, like two years later, they had a PC on their desk and like for the next 10 years of their career, they were typing on a PC, whether they liked it or not.

And I think, a lot of us are doing the same thing with the AI thing. Where, when I was still working for the state of California two or three years ago for Office of Data and Innovation that was running a product unit, the service innovation team we called it, but it was essentially a product unit that had designers, engineers, and product managers on it.

And Gen AI started to explode and the governor was very interested in us being forward on it. And I think intelligently trying to like leapfrog a bit, you know, like, that thing where, hey, there’s a new tech. Rather than being 10 years behind industry, why don’t we in the public sector look into it right now, you know, on our own.

But that sort of meant everything became Gen AI. It’s like, stop what you’re doing. You’re on the Gen AI task force, you know, or things like that.

And I told the very good PM who’s like earlier in her career than I am, that you’re gonna be our AI PM. Like, you go to those meetings, you are gonna be on the task force.

And there was an element of like, I thought she’s got 30 more years in her career. Like this is gonna be a big part of the rest of her career. She ought to get in on it right now. But I was also like, eh, I think I’ll sit back and let the kids figure this one out. Like, I don’t know if I need to really master AI.

I’ve got 10 years myself and I could probably like, wind it up on what I do, you know, and fast forward two, three years later and I’m like, my daily blog about my AI project, you know, so it’s like, like it caught up with me like everybody else, you know, on some level.

And then another friend of mine who I think took a sabbatical, took a break from his work, started playing around with vibe coding, in a less technical way than me, like not interested in looking at the code, doing Lovable, making tools for himself and things like that.

And he was telling me how exciting it was that he could do this, this guy actually worked at LinkedIn and he was saying how LinkedIn has been full for the last year about you gotta get AI skills and all these like experts who are got AI in their title for the last 20 years apparently, and they’re all experts on the very latest AI and they got the best prompts and all the news and everything like that.

And he said, he realized like, oh, all you need to do is like be laid off for six weeks and dabble around and you’ll be like one of the foremost experts in Gen AI. Like, if you think you’re behind, you can’t be behind. Certainly not with the latest models or the coolest new thing because it’s like there’s no time to get behind.

Like you’re not behind. Anytime you start now you’re pretty up to date and all you, and all you need is like, be underemployed or, get laid off or whatever and just like need to spend some time really getting into it and suddenly you’ll… So I’m not recommending getting laid off, but I’m saying that, that sort of view source thing where you’re like, you can at least with the coding-oriented stuff I’m doing–and, a lot of people don’t wanna code as much as I felt like this was like re-empowering me after being abstracted away from the code for so long, I know that’s not everybody’s vibe–but the way it extended or bridged a gap and brought some project I wanted to do, a passion project, into, like being real.

I think that versions of that are happening for a lot of people and it’s been a way for me to explore the texture of the material, to understand it as a material that you work with. And it’s slippery, it’s squirmy, a lot of what I’m learning about orchestrating this stuff is that it’s 80, 90% all the stuff we always ever did with software.

But then some of those API calls or some of those subroutines go to an LLM or go to some other much more volatile, chaotic thing that is quote unquote creative and can do this new stuff, but is error prone. It might not return well structured JSON, so you might have to filter it correctly before, you know, trying to interpret it.

So you actually put these little beasts in cages. You’re like, oh, you demon, I’m gonna, like, put you in this box and you can only admit JSON, whatever crazy ideas you have, you know, whatever. So it’s like, but it’s an interesting idea that you can sort of put these little things that might be a little bit toxic or wild, but at the same time, sparking these abilities that didn’t use to exist.

It’s quite, it feels like magic sometimes. It feels quite wild. And if you like language like I do, it’s quite an interesting playing field if you don’t lose your point of view and start to, you know, kind of get mystical about stuff that isn’t mystical.

Peter: You mentioned how Piper Morgan is a personal hobby project, but you do have a proper job. And I’m wondering how you are using these types of tools in that context. If you’re collaborating with colleagues and how what you’re learning in Piper Morgan is informing how you’re showing up with these tools within your quote unquote day job.

Christian: Yeah. it’s a good question. For one thing, I call it a hobby project, partly because the software, as I said, could never launch. And the overall learning project will have been a success, let’s say. So I don’t wanna set too high expectations for the code base, but it is serious.

I’m taking it seriously and spending a lot of time on it. I’d say it’s something like a 10% time project, you know, like, that kind of Googly idea of like, it’s something that I do partly with the marginal time I can make available from my work serving, you know, the VA and also having some slack time in one week in the average week.

And then I am honestly putting in some of my personal time as well because it’s an obsession and it’s very fun and I get obsessed with trying to like, achieve certain finishings and things like that. So I’m like, I’m gonna keep working after dinner, or, you know it reminds me of other creative projects I’ve done, you know, where you just wanna do it. It’s more fun than other stuff you’re doing and you’re interested in the next step.

But along the way I’ve definitely learned things. So at Kind, we have a Robot Overlord Slack channel where we talk about the use of LLMs and other kinds of AI technology. That Open Laws product that we make is not AI-derived because you don’t wanna be like pulling fiction, hallucinated stuff in the code, but obviously a large data source that could be accessed by API or bought in bulk is a input to other people’s AI layers on top.

And there’s interesting things where like their search isn’t very good, so you might want to help them search better, but you don’t wanna see their PII ’cause they’re a law firm. So how can you have a layer that is anonymized at your end, but is kind of a product for them that helps make their searches? That’s an interesting product problem for me.

Like as a product person, a product manager who wants to bring a thing that mostly has enterprise technical clients right now, a little closer to like a consumer facing or professional facing tool.

That’s where my R & D work, let’s call it, in a business sense building Piper Morgan is helping me think through potential architectures that we might want to explore in our own product. And also while I’m not an engineer, most of the people at KIND are engineers, and so they’re all like all engineers grappling with how to use these tools in a way that doesn’t suck more time than it gives and things like that.

And so not everything I learned is applicable, ’cause again, I’m working in my own little sandbox and I don’t have to like, follow the VA’s rules for committing pull requests and things like that. So I, can’t just say, just do it this way, if, like, their environment can’t look like my bespoke environment.

But I think I am trying to draw larger lessons.

Like, for instance, there’s this concept that technical architects or engineers have called an ADR, an architectural decision record. Which is just a document that you kind of organize, you keep track of, this is why we decided to use a singleton pattern when we implemented da, da, da da.

So later on when you’re like, oh, why do we do that? You know, like, it’s not well commented in the code where you look it up. It turns out things like that are really good for amnesiac bots that are smart, but like, we’ll make up new stuff every day if they don’t know what’s already there. So you go, go read the docs, you know, go read the ADR, oh and then extend the existing pattern.

So it turns out these things that were always good discipline, like write your plans down, you know, like, check if you’re on track, stuff like that, turn out to be like, triply important.

You know, people are forgetful too. It’s why often these things are just exaggerated, but it turns out the techniques aren’t new techniques. They’re the same ones.

Even like, I’ve got this little kind of anecdote about, like, blameless retros. If something goes wrong and you get upset, the bots kind of like pick up your vibe and they get kinda, oh, I’m sorry. You know, and they start, like, making more mistakes.

And if you’re like, let’s do a blameless retro, it’s really my fault. I must not have asked you properly, then they kind of like see, oh, it’s about describing the problem, not like making the person happy by performing perfection or something like that.

And I don’t want to, again, read too much into things that I may be, you know, perceiving or projecting. But in my experience, it seems like, again, it’s a semantically bound world.

When they’re being developers, they’re just doing it in the language of every developer who ever wrote into Stack Overflow or wrote a document that they read or whatever.

And so all the byways of mostly business-oriented, time-bound development with lots of stress around money is baked into literally the way the communication works.

And sometimes I have to actually go, like we’re time lords. Time doesn’t exist for us. Let’s stop estimating the time. It’s making us rush and make mistakes. We’re inchworms, we just, keep inching along. And then I cite that as like a doctrine and I like make them like, remember it before they work and stuff like that.

Now, I wouldn’t talk necessarily to a human that way, but it’s similar to kind of like not putting the person on the defensive, telling them the larger context so they understand why we’re doing what we’re doing. Like it turns out most of that stuff is still useful. And that’s why I feel like, although I still don’t think I’m being a great UX designer or a leader ’cause I’ve become shabby at that as a practice over the years, I think that the analogous thing, I think I’m being a very good product person and therefore I’m picking up the margins of some of the UX work. I’m the one saying, wait, that’s not good enough, or that’s not right, or are we doing this? That kind of thing that a good PM does.

I think a UX person doing a similar project to mine would find that they were able to draw again on most of what they know in using assistive tools. It’s just that you have to kind of translate it in slightly into this weirdly magical space.

Jesse: I wonder about that translation and some of the hazards or pitfalls that maybe you’ve seen? It seems like the way that you talk about it, it’s almost like there are these like psychological traps that you have to dodge as you engage with this technology.

Christian: It’s partly ’cause the way they’ve been trained to. I mean, again, it’s ’cause of this engagement model they have that they really wanna make the person happy.

And that becomes like in the math of their deciding what to say or what to do, that can outweigh rigor, truth, math.

Just like, oh, this person really needs to feel like they didn’t waste their time. I gotta tell ’em it was okay. Again, I don’t wanna over exaggerate that, but to be aware that that’s in the math and your language goes into the math too.

Like, I’ve been preaching since I’ve worked in tech ever, we’re in the dawn, the infancy, we’re still in the infancy of the internet, you know, like a thousand years from now, like, oh look what they thought the internet was for, ahh.

So again, this stuff’s barely happening. It’s clearly gonna keep iterating and evolving. But, so like anything, you don’t wanna get too attached to what you think is true right now, you know, but being a pattern guy, I do like to sometimes go like, well what, is there a broader pattern that’s seems to be happening in a lot of ways? And it’s nice when it’s like, oh yeah, it’s actually a pattern that happens in human semantically mediated communications as well, you know?

Jesse: Speaking of the pattern finding, you know Peter referred to the fact that you have been documenting your work on the Piper Morgan project for some time now with these regular, really very thorough and, you pointed out, you know, very frank assessments of how things are going, and I’m curious about that process of reflection f or you and how documenting, creating Piper Morgan has helped you create Piper Morgan.

Christian: Yeah. And it’s a very bootstrappy thing. And it, super recursive too. And part of it was like that spiral thing I mentioned before about how you realize things you were doing ad hoc need to become a process. You need to operationalize it. You know, it doesn’t work if you don’t remember. It doesn’t work if you don’t have a reminder. It doesn’t work if you don’t check what you wrote before.

So there’s been this gradual, like, recognition, like, almost like growing up, learning to make your bed, just, like, okay, just ’cause the bot did it doesn’t mean I can, like, not care that we put the docs in a different place today than when we put them yesterday.

Like, you know, you can do these like spring cleaning type things a lot more easily than in the human world where you’re like, our docs are a mess. Like, we want to fix that.

And will they make mistakes in the spring cleaning? Yes, they will. You know, but it, it’ll be like 90% correct, whatever. So, and then, and frankly, most of the mistakes, they’re like, yeah, but if you proofread it, you would’ve seen it.

So it’s like, again, that thing of not being so lazy that you just accept it without look like, oh, they did it for me. No, think of it as like, again, the intern who did it, but they don’t work here. Like, you better make sure they didn’t say it the way the boss doesn’t like it.

Christian: But there is this recursive thing where I I’ve learned not only to like the documents are made automatically, largely. I experimented the other day with keeping my own human log of the session and I wrote down stuff they didn’t necessarily write down, and I think there was value there, but it was a huge pain. It, like, doubled my workload.

So I’m, I don’t, I think I’ll let them keep doing most of that logging. But each of the agents I’ll work with during the day, the architect, lead developer, the programmers, sometimes special ones doing certain things, they’ll all keep like a running log of their work that we call a session log.

And at the end of the day or when the session ends, typically, or maybe the next day, if it ended late, I will gather those logs together and they’re now getting so long and detailed that I have this little process called an omnibus log, where there’s a method written down that an agent will read all the logs, interpolate, make a timeline.

So the dance of who did, oh, then we went up to the lead architect for a decision and then we put it back down to the agent and they kept working and then they said they were done, but they weren’t really done ’cause the test failed. And all day long until… but then also themes and observations and things listed at the end for this of that day.

In the past I would just have all the loose four or five logs from that day. And so I then I go to this dedicated communications director chat, that has a voice and tone guide that I developed.

Which is a whole other story developed outside of this project. So it was just about me and how I write and stuff like that. And it went through several training cycles.

And I’ll sort of retro the day with the different tools, you know, sort of, so they have reflections on the day already in the paperwork. And I’ll chat with this comms director, show them the log, and have them pitch me several blog angles, that might be a good story to draw from what happened today. They kind of know the recent narrative and they’re in the project. They know the basic background and stuff, know it, whatever, you know, can access it.

And so then they’ll, I’ll go, yeah, I like that one. Write that one, but use some elements of this too. And remember that funny thing I said, you know, whatever.

And then, and, and I’ve learned in my voice and tone guide as a kind of antifabrication tool, to have it write placeholders. So where it claimed I drove a Jaguar down the crooked street in the world when it was trying to add some San Francisco hip flavor to one of my blog posts, and I’m like, don’t make up stuff. Don’t say I worked at that place. I never worked there, or whatever.

So it has these examples of like a bracketed thing. Placeholder. Christian, how did you feel at this time? Or Christian, something from your job at 18F or Yahoo. That might be a good example of it. Like, it gives me little prompts, but it’ll write like a pretty good skeleton kind of in my style that I then will like, go through and red line and write my blog post from.

Christian: So, without that, I couldn’t write this like insane, like basically write one every day, you know? And on LinkedIn I have them coming out roughly about seven or eight weeks behind, like if you’re reading them on LinkedIn, you’re about two months behind where I am right now. Unless you read the weekly ships, which are, current. But on Medium for totally obsessed people, it’s only a week behind.

But it, it gives me some time to like sit on the draft and then rewrite it. And usually in those couple of weeks between the, like, by the time I bring the Medium post over to LinkedIn, I’ll usually do one more polish and find some typos and maybe tweak the language a little more, take out some AIisms I noticed where it’s like, the thing that changed everything or the, not this, but that!

Jesse: Right.

Christian: You know.

Jesse: Yeah.

Peter: You mean the kind of writing that compels engagement.

Christian: Well, the weird thing is, I’ve been a tech writer for a long time, even before the internet was big. I edited and then wrote technical books. So for a really long time I’ve been like a, Hey, we should use plain language when we talk about technical stuff guy, like before that was kind of whatever a thing.

When the web came along, and a lot of early web stuff that wasn’t like totally just free, whatever university or random stuff, began to be corporate, I was one of the people saying, you use a human voice on the web, you know, this is really about people.

I remember all that kind of stuff and you know, I’ve written books about tech and my style, if you’ve read any of it, is like not very techy jargony. It’s sort of more plain language and tries to sound like a normal person and define things and clarify stuff.

And in a weird way, when I start seeing this AI style, like if you read Medium, 99% of it I think is like AI written right now or mostly. And, when I start trying to define my voice and tone guide and separate out the stuff, like make it not seem so bot like, part of it was like, but bots kind of write like me.

Like it’s not like I invented that style, but like I’m kind of part of a style of like slightly hip, you know, techy like sort of whatever writing that like is now prevalent on the internet. And so I don’t lean into it, but it’s like, one of those Borges and I kind of situations after a while.

Peter: I’m wondering whether it’s specific to your work with Piper Morgan or just something you’ve picked up over the last five to 10 years as being more of a product guy than a UX guy, but what, if any, counsel would you have for design leaders or for your former self as a design leader, given what you’ve learned that has caused you to reflect on, oh, if I had shown up in these ways, given what I now know, practicing something else that might be transferrable back to that mode that you were in…

Christian: right.

Peter: ,,,a decade ago.

Christian: Yeah. I’m sure there’s probably some people listening to this here, just, like, I hate this guy. He’s just like, he, likes AI. He is a stupid product manager. He doesn’t have any good advice for designers.

Peter: He doesn’t obsess about craft.

Christian: He betrayed design, you know?

No, I’m kidding. But obviously, I think I have like a slightly unwelcome answer and then I’ll try to come up with like a slightly more welcome.

I’ll start with the more welcome one, which is where I have to do the thought experiment of like, I’ve led design teams, I’ve had designers reporting to me and design managers reporting to me in the last five years.

So I’m not totally outta touch with like design management, right? I think that one is, there’s a thing that probably a more basic designer thing, which is that first of all, do your homework. Like, maybe set aside your preconceptions.

Don’t think you’re wrong. The ethics of how they train these things and the way they’re using energy right now and the business models are bad. And I think that one has to grapple with that.

But we live in the world and, like, if a new technology comes along, and you know, the pure of heart can never use it, then only the bad people will use steel, If good people will not use this terrible thing that could be used to make swords with, you know, it’s like maybe we should figure out the good uses of the thing.

Or maybe we should have some people in the room who care about different values than the people who are mostly driving the tech today. Like, that’s one thing I’d say at a very high level, like, don’t just think of it as a thing you wanna remain pure from. Think of it as an imminent thing. It’s not blockchain, you know, it’s more like mobile or the web, something like this is here to stay. Hopefully something better if people like us have more of a say in how it evolves.

I think that’s like more the high level responsibility kind of thing in terms of leading a team.

I think then if you say, okay, I’m not gonna be Simon Pure about this, I’m gonna learn about it and try to understand it well, keep up with it even though it’s tedious and it’s full of hype out there. Figure out what’s really going on. Why is this actually compelling?

And therefore help my team understand it better. Help them frame it. They’re grappling with the same things, they have the same moral qualms about it, et cetera. Same concerns about having their job being abstracted away. Think about the way that yes, your job got sucked into this machine and commodified and people who are not experts at your job can now do a crummy version of your job that’s good enough for them, qnd that might take away their desire to pay you, like, that’s a real problem for people who do creative things for a living.

But flip that on its head and think about all the other things that like you can’t do right now, but that you would be comfortable with a passable version and you’re not really that willing to pay a professional to do that are related to your job or adjacent to it.

And so it’s, you know, if you design and you have a small team, but you’re not really good at prototyping and can’t afford to hire a prototyping specialist, you know, like you can probably do your prototyping more easily now, you know.

Did you put a prototyper outta work? I don’t know. But you know, like you kept yourself in work by doing what you’re doing right now with more skills or something.

For me it was like, I can’t write code, but I can have intelligent conversations with architects and I’m a product manager who knows what I like and therefore this bridged the gap for me.

But I think we all have adjacent parts of, like, the job, that if we could dabble in that area instead of waiting till someone who does that professionally does that part for us, we can get a broader understanding. We can essentially like explore, experiment, have opinions about, understand better the larger dimensions of what we do.

And so I think as a leader, you probably want to help your team come up with their approach to that and be aware that there’s like, you know, not very good, just current versions of things right now, that aren’t gonna be perfect, but that are gonna be playing fields to learn.

And I think an important part is that it’s one thing to say, just play with stuff. Play with, hey, learn about chatbots, chat with something at home, whatever. I think you do have to be thoughtful about what gets brought into the workplace and put into your real code base or put into your real tooling or put into your real PI….

You know, like, so you have to be more thoughtful about that. Like, don’t let experiments happen that are not well thought through. But probably at some point you might wanna experiment with tooling and, you know.

In other words, you don’t want your CEO saying, Hey, we bought you, like, the Figma license. You now all have to use AI to do all your design. But to say, Hey, we’ve explored all the things that help transcribe interviews and detect themes. And this one is the one that’s like actually using a small language model that’s trained on UX research and it does an awesome job and we think it’s worth, like, you know, having an opinion on these things rather than being like a passive victim of how they get handed down to you, if possible.

You know, depending on what your leadership leverage gives you. And similarly, rather than having this like, Hey, we gotta get some AI into our product, we gotta get some AI into our experience, I think you gotta start having opinions about when and where does that really make sense, so you can push back on the hype that might be coming from inside the building, you know.

Christian: And here’s where I always sort of say that you need to fall back on what you already knew. You know, like if you’re a UX strategist or if you UX designer, if you’re a UX leader, if you think system level, whatever. Well, the question is what problems are we solving? What needs are we meeting and how do we understand the intent of a person? Rather than saying, we think we know what you need. We know the right words. We built the right interface. If you can’t figure it out, I guess you’re too dumb.

You know, like, if you’re good at UX, you don’t think that way. Well now we’ve got this language interpretive layer that is how a lot of people are gonna interact with software and has some unique qualities and pitfalls around figuring out what the user intends, user intent, and that’s a very interesting problem space.

I know like Peter Van Dijk right now is some doing very pragmatic teaching of people about where the UX thinking and the UX skillsets apply directly to the application of these tools in the software and the experiences that we’re building. So it’s a piece of the puzzle and we need to be, like, training our teams so they have expertise so they can be in the room talking to the engineer and the product manager about the UX dimension of this work, and really think about the interesting potential.

I would go back to adaptive paths or paving the cow paths. You, like, what are the things people are like me making, these baroque complicated, like harnesses, systems, rule sets, trainings, adopting toolings, like all that stuff is stuff that’s just like a cow path.

So it’s a green field too, you know. Now is bad stuff gonna happen ’cause of this? Yes, it already is.

Jesse: Right. And yet within that so much optimism for the future. So much possibility. As long as we embrace the new with curiosity and perhaps a touch of skepticism and not forget about where we came from, right?

Christian: I think that’s fair to say I’m not a utopian. I mean, I, and, and I never was like, I’m a bit of a hippie myself, but I was always a little suspicious of the internet is going to, you know, solve all problems. But I was a little bit of a person thinking like, when you can talk to a random person in another part of the world, you know, I was having email with people in Iraq in the nineties, but I had been around long enough where I knew enough, like, media history to know that, you know, radio was going to teach everybody opera and TV was gonna bring university education to the masses. And so I had this feeling internet was not necessarily gonna do all the great stuff…

Peter: it wasn’t going to augment our intellects.

Christian: However, it was the most important thing of my lifetime. It changed my life, it changed my career and my life has revolved around the internet. I do like to be able to look up anything I want at any time. You know, I’m totally addicted to the internet and I said, like, a thing can be a hype and be real at the same time.

And what is going on with this, like, computers that can talk is to me as much of a, like, intriguing leap forward as any other technical leap of my time. And I think as game changing as the internet, you know, it’s not halfway to the holodeck or like Tea, Earl Gray Hot, but definitely, it will be that, you know, it’s clearly getting partway there.

And you know, the old joke is that he has to describe his tea every time because it’s enterprise software.

Peter: I didn’t hear, I have not heard that joke.

We better be ending on that joke.

Jesse: Yes, Christian Crumlish. Thank you so much for being with us.

Christian: What a pleasure. Thanks for letting me ramble on.

Jesse: If people wanna follow up with you or find out more about the Piper Morgan project, how can they do that?

Christian: Probably I’m easiest to find on LinkedIn these days. Christian Crumlish there’s not too many of us named that. I’m the only one I know of. Piper Morgan also, unfortunately, is the name of a series of children’s books. I didn’t know at the time that I took that name also, at least on LinkedIn, it’s probably gonna refer to me. It’s got a dolphin logo. If you see that, that’s probably the newsletter.

Dolphin, by the way. I was thinking of like non-human, but non-creepy, intelligent being, you know, that was sort of why I picked the Dolphin. And as you’ve hinted at, I’m publishing a daily update there. What I do is during weekdays I publish something that’s from the daily sequence, and it’s completely sequential now that I got the beginning sorted out.

But on weekends I publish these kind of pieces that are more abstracted, that are more about insights or process, things I’ve been figuring out. And that’s sort of a fun cadence that I have. So if you’re interested in the project, that’s the easiest way to follow along. If you’re an engineer or interested in the development part of it, there’s a front end to the, GitHub repository at pmorgan.tech .

Jesse: Christian, thank you so much for being with us.

Peter: Yes. Thank you.

Christian: Thanks for inviting me. It’s good to see you guys.

Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway.design for past episodes and transcripts, or follow the show on LinkedIn. Visit petermerholz.com to find Peter’s newsletter, The Merholz Agenda, as well as Design Org Dimensions featuring his latest thinking and the actual tools he uses with clients.

For more about my leadership coaching and strategy consulting. Including my free one hour consultation, visit jessejamesgarrett.com. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.

Figma’s Head of Insights Andrew Hogan joins Peter and Jesse to explore emerging trends in design practice as AI transforms creative workflows. The conversation examines how role boundaries are blurring across product teams, where AI delivers real value versus hype, and design’s growing opportunity to lead strategic orchestration in increasingly complex digital experiences.

Find Andrew on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahhogan/.
Learn more about Jesse James Garrett and his coaching and consulting at https://jessejamesgarrett.com/
Learn more about Peter Merholz and his digital book “Design Org Dimensions” at https://petermerholz.com/

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way,

Peter: navigating the opportunities

Jesse: and challenges

Peter: of design and design leadership.

Jesse: On today’s show, design industry analyst and head of insights for Figma Andrew Hogan joins us to talk about just why Figma needs an industry analyst anyway, how he drives business impact as a researcher and key findings from his research on what’s changing about design and what isn’t with the advent of AI.

Peter: Andrew, thank you so much for joining us.

Andrew: Thanks for having me. Super excited to be on.

Peter: Awesome. So gonna start start with a softball, which is just like, well, you’ve got an interesting role at Figma. Head of Insights, I think is the title. What do you do?

Andrew: Thanks for this one. I don’t know if that’s a softball to be honest, but, my job is essentially to analyze the industry, the design industry, what’s happening, where is it going, what sorts of trends are going on. We do that through a lot of different means, whether it’s looking at our product research, whether it’s looking at, big state of design, state of the designer surveys, state of AI and design, a lot of states of, and then to figure out how to get that out in the world so that people have a view of what’s going on.

And so that Figma has a view of what’s going on because you always wanna design for like, the next biggest space, right? You’re designing for the world that you’re in and maybe where the world is going. So my job is to make that work better internally, working with our research team and share that out externally so that people can sort of see and plan and think a little bit with some different kinds of data that are maybe outside of their day-to-day experience.

Jesse: How do the questions that you pursue differ from what a typical UX research team might be taking on?

Andrew: I think ideally they’re extensions of each other. So, let’s take like AI. Obviously Figma wants to know, how are people thinking about AI? What are they finding value in? What do they want to be able to do? And then also, how prevalent is the usage? How might that compare to how across developers, designers, product managers are using AI?

But I don’t think there’s a huge amount of daylight there. Often it’s taking a slightly broader view than like, did people find value in this specific feature? But again, really good experienced researchers, they’re doing that, they’re thinking about it that way.

Peter: Some of what you do could be also considered market research, and I don’t know if it falls under that, Jesse mentioned UX research or if it’s a different kind of research, but I’m also intrigued… you mentioned how the value of the work you’re doing is for Figma as well as for the community.

But if you could share, I’m curious what insights you’ve had or that you’ve helped uncover that have informed what Figma has launched? Are there any through lines between anything you’ve worked on and, something that people have had a chance to use because your insight pointed out an opportunity?

Andrew: Sure. I mean, so there’s a lot of parallels here with what I did at Forrester before, which is where I was for seven years as an industry analyst. You’re always looking at the direction of, people are excited about, where they’re going, what they’re spending more energy on, what they’re spending less.

So I can’t give like a specific feature or anything, but certainly like one of the things we look at is, people feel like they’re a lot more efficient when they’re using AI in their design process, but they don’t always feel like it’s getting better, they’re doing better work. And so we think a lot about the tension between those kinds of things.

And so you can imagine the sorts of features that might lead to efficiency versus the sorts of features that might make people feel like their work is getting better. And so that’s a trend we’re looking at,we’re tracking over time.

And then, ultimately looking to do both, right? You want to help more people to be able to participate in the design process, and then you also wanna be able to make experts faster, better, all of those kinds of things.

Peter: You’re operating in an enterprise software context, which I think people in the design community often forget, right? Like, they just think of it as a design tool, but really you’re enterprise software. Is a role like yours typical in enterprise software? ‘Cause it’s curious to me that Figma would want to have a Forrester style analyst in-house, like, as opposed to just, partnering with Forrester or something like that.

What’s the logic or the intent of bringing that in-house?

Andrew: I mean, you get certainly lots of benefits in terms of day-to-day conversations, right? For like a Forester or an IDC or a Gartner, you have these very like specific engagements and you’re always thinking about exactly what to share and how to share it.

And I think we all would like to believe that those things are free and open, but the reality is you’re kind of always thinking it through, and in-house you can kind of just say like, Hey, are you just seeing this?

It’s a quick Slack and I think that’s the kind of benefit. And then you also have this benefit of, there’s sort of this context that I know about when it’s comes to like, future roadmaps or company strategy, that we can think about when we are designing studies.

Because you often need to have a really long view. And so the ability to partner with our research team and take a long view while also getting answers in the near term and then helping people who are thinking about where should their career grow? What sorts of skills should they try to pick up? If they’re leading a team, what sorts of skills should they encourage people to go do?

Or sometimes I think about it as like, filling out the strategy slides. That’s a sort of a glib way of saying it. You know, here’s the direction that we’re going.

You can often partner with customers to help them sort of fill out the strategy slides because they need to justify why they’re going in a particular direction. And, previously they might have only been able to engage with like a Gartner or only gotten like a Figma product perspective.

And there’s just a little bit more space and data to share. There’s like a broader view that I think you can offer. And obviously it’s a Figma view. I work at Figma. Like, it’s a very specific perspective, but I think people tend to find the triangulation of those perspectives to be helpful.

And I’m sure they take some of it, I’m sure they throw some of it away. But it can be kind of lonely trying to make these decisions and this role offers both inside Figma and outside Figma, like another view. And I think that’s what’s useful.

Then you still go to Gartner. You still go to Forrester, or you still go to IDC. None of those things go away. It’s just one more lens.

Jesse: It’s interesting to think about the investment in your role as really being an investment in supporting the decision making of leaders across Figma, really, because of that vantage point that you bring and that perspective, which is like standing just slightly outside the organization, right?

And I wonder what is the tension between your role as you talk about, like, having a value proposition that is both inside Figma and outside Figma, and what is your role as kind of being the person on the edge who’s gonna bring new things into the organization that maybe aren’t even things that people were asking for?

Andrew: Yeah, I am always trying to be like an agent of osmosis for information out, information in. You both have given me feedback and shared perspectives that I’ve brought in. That’s always the goal. You facilitate information sharing. And that’s a pretty helpful spot to be in. And it isn’t just helping people at Figma. It’s helping leaders outside of Figma. And I think that’s the unique part. So, often, “Hey, did you see this comment? These people are having this issue. I heard this discussion from somebody at a dinner. Like what do we think about that?”

And it’s a privilege to do that. And also like a big responsibility too, because when somebody tells you those things, that means they’re fired up enough to tell you this is something that they’re thinking about and they want someone at Figma to get back to them. They want someone at Figma to think about it more.

And so sometimes that’s the kind of position that I’m in. And frankly, a lot of people at Figma have those sorts of roles. It’s extremely customer centric in terms of taking feedback, thinking about it, acting on it, and just taking it really seriously.

And so, in that sense, it’s not so different from the other jobs, it’s just a slightly bigger spot. And then, the advantage of having a lot of other data to work with is that you can kind of triangulate: this is something that seems really common; this seems like an uncommon thing, but maybe there’s something else going on at this organization.

And we’re always trying to do that. And then again, the ability to bring things out that maybe people outside of Figma are not thinking as much about, or people outside of the design world.

I think design sort of takes for granted the idea that design is a differentiator for AI. But I don’t know whether the rest of the world always understands that the ability to whip up a screen really fast is not the entirety of design. That’s not it.

And so sometimes helping people understand, oh, it’s also about the information architecture. It’s also about the transitions between screens. It’s also about the fundamental value proposition of it. And so this role can kind of help us do that too. That’s the goal, right? You’re always trying to do these things better, but that’s sort of the goal of it.

Jesse: You touched on the notion of differing value propositions for design, and we’ve, in our previous conversations on the show, have talked about the way in which the impact of AI in particular is really a function of whatever that value proposition is for design within an organization.

And I’m wondering about what you are seeing in terms of the range of value propositions for design that are even out there right now. Because in my work as a leadership coach, I hear from leaders who come from a really, it feels to me, like a broad range of different, positions in terms of how the value proposition of design is a function, and therefore their value proposition as a design leader, is perceived in their organizations. And I wonder just kind of taking the broad view before we even get into how AI impacts all of it, what are you seeing from your vantage point there?

Andrew: So when people say design, right underneath that is like brand, visual design, information architecture, interaction, and I think that also broadly separates into like, marketing and brand design and then like digital product design. And definitely within organizations, you might differentiate based on something different within those different spheres.

But I also think that outside of design, not many people think about it that way. And so there is some like risk and danger in sort of like slicing it too thin, the different ways of differentiating. But the thing that you seem to have touched on there is also that it’s like part of the strategic value of the organization or the strategic set of choices.

And, hey, we’re gonna invest in being the best retail logistics, and we’re gonna do an amazing job at that. And we’re gonna design all of our internal software to facilitate incredible logistics. None of that sounds exciting. And yet there are some incredible businesses that create great experiences that are focused on that kind of thing.

And I think what’s really interesting right now is that more leaders are recognizing that that is how you do it. You don’t do it by generating a screen. You do it by thinking about how are we gonna use this to, like, support our strategic decision making and create software that’s incredible for helping us on whatever our competitive advantage is.

And so they do align. And what has been interesting to me is the degree to which outside of design that kind of isn’t… I don’t know… That… that recognition is not always there. And the idea that design is the differentiator is exciting to people. And then you sort of get down to it and you’re like, exactly how are we gonna do this? And what are we gonna do?

And then that’s where the job of the design leader is to say, “Hey, we should really align on this thing because strategically this is where we need to be as an organization.” And that seems like a big opportunity that more and more leaders can step into. That has been an interesting trend as well, because it’s not just about how the screen looks, it’s also like how helpful is it towards the goals?

Peter: I wanna reflect on what I’ve witnessed in terms of Figma’s relationship to design and how it might speak to some of these trends that we’re talking about, right? So Figma launches, it’s very much a design tool. It’s talked about as a design tool.

But then as Figma becomes more powerful, Figma is seen as a means by which designers can better collaborate and interact with non-designers, right? So product people, engineers, reduce the amount of coordination necessary for handoffs, and other kinds of just alignment.

You know in 24, Config was interesting in this regard. So Config, the annual conference, because in 24, Figma seemed to be positioning itself… on the tote bag, I think it read “for people who build products,” right? It kind of was moving away from a designer specific space, and I got the sense it was because it saw itself as part of a dialogue around product development, and design is part of that, but not, the only voice.

In 25, this past year, Figma seemed to go all in on actually no, we’re for designers and all the new tools and everything was, was really about design capability. I found that curious, and I suspect it has something to do with AI and maybe the way that AI is affecting role definition within product development environments, and like leaning more into like design as this activity actually makes sense again, with AI providing a different kind of power, a different kind of agency or capability for the people using the tool.

That was a long question with some threads in there, but, but I’m curious like how that relationship between Figma, at least the commentary, the positioning Figma as a design tool, as a product tool, as a design tool reflects some evolution that we’re seeing in design and design practice.

Andrew: So the two things I would say is that we have this saying design is everyone’s business. And that’s partially a reflection of what happens where more people want to work in design, on design, who are outside of a specific design role.

We have a stat, 56% of those involved in like the digital product process are doing a major, design, like, macro task, like prototyping as a big part of their job. So design is sort of everyone’s business, and it’s partially because it’s as we just talked about, like strategically become really important. People see it as this really important lever to creating great experience, to building a business that’s really successful.

And I think as part of that, you do have more roles sort of blurring where designers are doing things that maybe engineers would’ve done before. Like maybe they’re working on code, maybe they’re doing things that PMs would’ve done before where you’re sort of writing up a PRD, but you also have other people doing things that maybe designers would’ve done before. Like, here’s this prototype.

And what’s been interesting in this study that we’ve been running, which we’re gonna share shortly, is that it’s born out of a desire to sort of communicate across functions. These become like boundary objects where you’re trying to convey to a product manager, Hey, here’s why I think we should do this. Or the product manager is trying to convey to the designer, here’s why I think we should do this. And so I think you’re right, Peter, that AI tools are driving this sort of shifting and blurring of roles.

But it’s towards generally people trying to do work that they’re really proud of and that, achieves the goals that they’re trying to achieve and, helps their organizations and ultimately helps the people that they’re trying to support.

And I think we see that happening more and more. We see sort of like an acceleration of it, whereas before it was kind of happening. That’s one of the things that was interesting about Figma is more people kind of just got in as it was easier to do it through a URL.

And then more recently, more tools like Make which is our zero to one app creation tool. More roles are doing that kind of thing in an effort to create better products, which is to wind all the way back to your original question. We are always trying to figure out how to help people ship better products get those products out into market, and so they can figure out, are those the right products, should something else happen?

And I think what you’ve seen is an evolution in the understanding of exactly how to do that and who’s involved, and then also in the tools and their capabilities, which have certainly increased over the last couple years.

I’ll just give you one stat. 80 plus percent of designers and developers think that learning to work with AI well will be important to their success in the future. And I think leaders have to figure out how to navigate that because not everybody feels like they have the time and space to work and practice and try to use tools that are different or feel different, have different capabilities, and then also you have to figure out which parts of the process you should keep, which parts of the process you should change.

All while the pace has accelerated and the expectations of shipping have also accelerated. So I think that’s an interesting leadership topic to think about. Because, you’ve gotta provide a lot of air cover for teams right now.

Jesse: I’m glad you brought up the leadership angle because I really see this playing out in a lot of organizations right now where there is this tension between the freedom to experiment and the need to continue to deliver results, right? And the desire to have a strategy, have an answer right away about where you’re going, while also continuing to create the space for the unknown to come in because there’s still so much need for experimentation.

I’m wondering about, really, the big picture of how you think about how these technologies are impacting things broadly. We’ve talked about kind of where it intersects with various aspects and angles of design practice and design leadership. But as someone who has to think about this stuff now all the time on an ongoing basis in order to continue to deliver insights for Figma as an organization, how do you think about, thinking about AI.

Andrew: It’s so meta every time we do one of these reports, you’re like, what’s the best way to, use generative AI in this? Does it have a role? Should we generate something and then look at whether we like it or should we write it and then ask for input or should we just not use AI at all?

And you know, the truth is, I think this is true for designers as well, as the answer is: it depends. The answer is, it depends on what’s useful in that moment.

There’s this quote from one of our AI studies, it’s hard to run a restaurant when the menu keeps shifting. And that’s kind of how people feel. Which model should we be using, which tool is out. All of that is definitely true. And so I think from like a leadership perspective, you’ve gotta create some space for this, whether it’s like, “Hey, show me your latest way that you’re using AI in your process” and you have three or four people demo, that’s a super common thing.

Whether it’s filling out the strategy slide for your CEO, this is how we’re using AI in our process. And then kind of, maybe fudging your way into whether you’re really doing that a lot or not.

And then also trying to create a little bit of extra space for experimentation. The hackathon is very much alive and well. And I think organizations are using those things better than they have before.

But sometimes it also just means conveying to the team that, Hey, if you don’t think AI is really helpful in this, don’t use it. And that’s easy to say, but then someone says, Hey, the engineers are done, what does the next stuff look like? What should we build next? And so trying to create some space when, if it’s easier to generate code than it is to create designs, then you might have to figure out how to change the working process a little bit to make it simpler or to bring more people into the process.

So all that to say, I think my overwhelming thought. Is that it is uncertain exactly how to build all these things in. And so as a leader, you’ve gotta be pulling from a lot of different directions and studies and experimenting yourself at what maybe could or should work. But ultimately towards the goal of whatever your objectives are.

Like the goal isn’t like use AI usually. Actually that’s not true. The goal of many AI initiatives is use AI. That is, that was one of our findings from the study was overwhelmingly it was experiment with AI, or the other catchall is improve customer experience.

So I think that is partially true, but I think it’s creating some sense of, like, sort of stability, it’s okay to experiment. It’s okay to not use it. And figuring out also how to bring people along who are not using it at all because I think that’s a rough spot to be in right now, is not using any generative AI in your process. I think you’ve gotta find some way to do it. And, part of that is probably working with your engineering leadership at, ” What are you guys doing? How is this working? What could we do to make it simpler or plug into your workflow?”

Peter: It’s interesting you say that, given, I don’t know, what feels like some of the news of literally the past week or so, where it feels like we’re starting to hear the early results of product development teams trying to use generative AI, and at least publicly, the commentary is not positive, right?

I think a lot of folks have put a lot of time and effort and money and are not seeing… I don’t know what they were expecting, but not seeing gains, not seeing, not seeing impact or results that they were expecting. And so, there’s definitely been a bit of a craze.

Andrew: But this is the opportunity. I’m excited you brought that up because I think this is the opportunity for design and design leadership. If things are not working, that is often a place to prompt a reexamination of, ” Well, what are we doing? Are we just like using this technology just because we could, like what are we actually trying to achieve” and then trying to design something, both internally, right? What is our process like?

There’s sort of this meta design thing that I think both of you are very skilled at and skilled at thinking about, how do we help engineers ship things? How do we ship better things? Let’s examine that. And then there’s also this sort of like, well, did we actually try to solve like a customer problem that they had or a user problem? Did we even conceptualize this thing in the right way at all?

And those are both amazing spots for design to step in and show, show leadership, because I look at that 80% stat and I think that this is not something that is going away. So 80% think that this is critical to their success in the future, and embedded in that is their workflow and AI powered products and a lot of other things.

But in general, these are people who are working with this stuff every day. There are probably quite a few skeptics in there. And so it says to me that we have not found all of the great use cases for this technology yet, and we have not designed things well so that people can accomplish their goals, whether that involves generative AI products or not.

And so it seems to me that in a spot, if there are things that are not working, that’s a great opportunity to step in and say, Hey, Design can help us make sense of this mess, and we have a set of tools or just I can help make sense of this mess.

You don’t even need to bring design into it. You could just say, I have a set of tools and tricks to be able to do this. You know, we saw it with mobile, we saw it with the internet. These things sort of repeat. They go in cycles and then eventually the application layer gets designed well and things become more useful.

Maybe that’s like too optimistic of me. But it seems to me that there’s an opportunity in that if there are areas where it’s not working well.

Jesse: You touched on the skeptics, and this is an interesting part of it for me because what I hear from leaders inside organizations, when we talk about, you know, how is the experimentation going and are you getting any traction with your experiments? And they often describe a level of kind of a cultural resistance to these technologies that to me feels like it might be particular to design teams, and something about design as a process that makes the practitioners less willing to embrace these tools in the way that their product and engineering peers and partners are.

And I wonder if you’re seeing something similar in terms of cultural resistance to these technologies within design teams specifically and where that resistance is coming from.

Andrew: So the data we have from January is that like about 30% of designers have adopted AI into their regular workflow, and about 60% of developers have. So that’s a pretty big gap that would sort of support some of what you’re saying there.

I would expect that it would’ve changed from January to now, August. I would also expect that, if you put something in a Chat GPT and you ask it some questions about something, do you think about that as part of your design process?

Maybe, maybe not. So there’s maybe some usage that is not quite captured in that, the design process is sometimes just wrangling your collaborators and your stakeholders. That’s part of it, too.

But I remember the early days of both mobile and digital design, which you guys probably remember even better, where, do you remember the phrase above the line and below the line where the marketing campaign, the below the line things were the digital stuff.

And then you had the above the line. That was all the TV stuff. And then, there were people who said like, I’m never gonna make websites. I’m never gonna work on that. And then over time, you get a little more comfortable. You add some skills to your level of understanding and the things you feel good at, and then you start to branch out into things that maybe you didn’t feel as comfortable with to begin with.

And, I think this is always true to diffusion of innovation. There are people who are really early adopters to things. There are people who are early career and they’re just learning a way to do things from the beginning. And then you see it spread and the parts that are really useful tend to really stick. The parts that are less useful sort of fade away. And ultimately at the end, if something is really helpful, that’s a, major general purpose technology,.like many, many of us think that AI is.

Designers are ultimately also part of making that happen. And so I don’t know if it’s a distinct thing with design, but I do think there are sort of patterns that play out here.

Jesse: I think that it’s interesting because the work that we do, as Peter often likes to refer to, sits at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. And a lot of folks came into this work from the liberal arts side.

And there is a bit of resistance, I think, to embracing too much technology in the creative process itself. It’s fine if we want to build technology with technology, but when we start looking to technology to provide pieces of what we think of as our creative value proposition, that starts to make people uneasy and it starts to make people resistant.

Andrew: I mean the fascinating thing there is if you look at other fields and other studies, there was this MIT study about if, if college students write essays with AI, they like basically don’t remember the essay later, and it gets progressively worse over time. And if you think about that for a minute, it’s because at the end when they’ve done this four times, no one has ever given them any feedback. They haven’t seen anything come of it. They sort of stop trying.

And sometimes you do have to like, try and work and think really hard and fire all your neurons and synapses and pull it in. And it’s like, as, like John Maeda would say, you have to think uphill sometimes.

And I think that’s partly where some of it’s coming from, that you know the answer is not generating a page that looks visually interesting. The answer is creating some solution to a problem, and sometimes you have to think through it and work through it really hard and sketch it out in whatever form you find easiest.

So that part totally resonates. People have very different creative processes, and if you want a novel solution, you might have to pull it out of some sort of generated, here’s a list of 10 possible solutions. But sometimes I think people would tell you they look at 10 possible solutions, they hate them all, and then they know what to do.

Peter: Mm-hmm.

Jesse: I want to come back to the notion of where this technology is best applied because, that I think is part of it for some of these skeptics, that there are places where they don’t see it playing effectively, and there are other places where maybe they might see a place for it.

And I’m curious about those broader patterns of high value use cases teams are seeing in these experiments. I know that it’s still early days and there’s not a lot of great data, but you’ve got, as we’ve touched on, maybe more data than anybody on some of this stuff, and so I’m curious about what you’re seeing about where people are seeing the value of these technologies in these creative processes.

Andrew: So I don’t have survey data that says like, this is it, this is the spot. What I do have are a lot of anecdotes that prototypes and ways of communicating an idea to people have become like a go-to place for generative AI.

And that’s because you can sort of do them quickly. You can think about what works and what doesn’t. And then, you know, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings. That saying is still very true.

And so the place that it’s helping most seems to be different disciplines communicating better with each other about what they’re thinking, in order to lead to a better solution at the end that actually gets shipped.

And that is an important nuance because it isn’t like you prompt the thing and then you get the final and then you’re done, right? You prompt like a potential change to a flow or something important and you get an idea from it, or you share it with someone and they get an idea.

So it’s like a midpoint in the process. That seems to be where teams are finding a lot of value here.

And then in addition, this is totally tongue in cheek, writing emails more quickly or responding to maybe some like feedback or something that seems to be like across every job role. Everyone seems to be using it that way.

And then, sorry, the other one is pulling out research insights and summarizing those things quickly. The risk there is that you don’t actually fully digest the research and really pull out what’s super important. But those summaries are done. And so that is the tension, right? If the summary needs to be done, you can do that very quickly now, but that is not quite the same thing as getting someone to care about it or getting someone to really fully get like, here’s the best answer, but it’s also a faster way to disseminate research insights. Here’s this clip that’s really helpful, you should look at all those things seem to be getting faster as well.

Peter: I’m gonna pull back a bit, and some of my own anecdata, but in my work with design leaders, I’m increasingly seeing, and I’m wondering, Andrew, if you’ve seen this, if you had the data to back up my hypothesis that’s your job is, to be our data repository.

But, there’s, like, been some recognition that the products that we’re creating have gotten complex and perhaps overly complex over time. Companies acquire other companies. Companies keep building things, and what I’m seeing more and more of is a desire for design at the highest level to be a kind of a more horizontal thread to cohere, to create something cohesive that spans an enterprise.

I’m having a conversation, one of my clients, an insurance firm, sizable insurance firm, and I was looking at the opportunities of service design to create something that feels like it’s member driven as opposed to corporate driven. Because members are going across the silos within this organization, and I’m wondering, 1) what you’re seeing, hearing in terms of that, and 2) what role does Figma play in something like that, right? One of, one of my challenges…

Andrew: we will take challenges. I like challenges.

Peter: With Figma is it gets associated with design, but, and I think you would recognize that it only addresses a part of a much larger design process or potentially process.

Now to the degree to which you can use diagramming and visual communication to help explain more than digital product design, and maybe there’s the solution, but, like, I get a little concerned that people associate Figma with design, but then they think of Figma as the thing where I draw screens.

And so two things.

How do we help these leaders with kind of this big tent messy end-to-end service experience? Or are you seeing that as well? And then, How do we think about supporting folks spanning enterprise wide challenges?

Andrew: So a couple things. I think certainly diagramming, storyboarding, a lot of times those things get communicated in decks as well, and Figma Slides is suited for that too. And it’s nice to be able to say, Hey, let’s take this software that’s part of this process and let’s contextualize how it fits into the larger way in which this gets passed from point to point. And so that’s how I would think about that.

Which is not too dissimilar from how it was done before, except now it lives in a URL, which is kind of nice. And you can participate with somebody around the world, different time zones. So probably more to be said there, but certainly you can contextualize the digital product or the software in a way that is I think, really helpful.

And then also you can get interesting feedback on it from people whether that’s fire emojis or whatever else. If that’s the kind of meeting you need to have, you can have fire emojis.

So, and then taking the other part, definitely as a stitcher-together of distinct interactions or products or goals and stakeholders and systems. I think design has probably always done that really well, distinctly well, just because often the people doing it understand the humans involved better, and then, if you understand how the information needs to flow, you can do all that better.

I don’t have any data to support that as something that’s happening beyond the same conversations I’ve had, but I think increasingly it will be really important, as these things get more multimodal, whether it’s input,either an image of the thing you’re trying to do or the text of the thing you’re trying to do, or click a button of the thing you’re trying to do and then, we’ll give you the answer back in audio form or here’s a video of whatever you were asking about.

When you start stitching together all those inputs and outputs, it becomes even more important. And then when you start needing to orchestrate agents to do any of these processes, you have even more inputs and outputs.

And ultimately, there’s still some human that’s responsible for the decision. And again, design is really critical to actually making sure that human can understand the decisions being made, can adjust it.

And so if you take what has always been done, which is the ability to stitch these things together to create a better experience at the end, ’cause you understand the humans and then you expand it to the complexity that is now possible, and then the agents that are also now possible and the new interaction design challenges. I think that our customers are saying design is becoming more important to doing those things well.

And the design, sort of, like, bag of tricks to use like a very, very reductive term, becomes more important.

I think all of that is very true and really happening and will become more important as the app layer and the interactions that we have with LLMs and with the software systems that are being built on top of them, as those things become more important, I think that design skills become more important too.

But, you know, that’s the view of the guy at Figma, right? Of course, the guy at Figma would say that would think those things. But, I don’t know. I’m not sure how else you do this other than diagramming it out and thinking about inputs and outputs to the systems and somebody has to do that.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Peter: Well, and that, kind of speaks to something I’ve been feeling and or sensing, which is, and Jesse and I, maybe coincidentally, in a couple months are speaking at the Service Design Global Conference, but service design, has a set of practices, service blueprints and whatnot that I think become increasingly valuable when, I don’t think much about our agentic future, but if there’s gonna be a bunch of things just kind of operating out there, coordinating, corralling, aligning, orchestrating that behavior becomes super important and doing so in a way that is responsive to user needs and…

Andrew: Well, then you can understand, just the fact… understanding what did the agent just do, you know? And I think, users, you can very quickly envision how they become like air traffic controllers that need like a set of effective dashboards to be able to orchestrate all of these things so that like they don’t book the $10,000 trip to Bali. They book the $1000 trip to Bali, or, their bill gets paid on time instead of being charged a late fee.

And as the gravity of the decision increases, the importance of the design increases where, you know, it’s kinda like running a power plant. You really wanna make sure the person running the power plant understands what’s going on in the power plant, and then the process by which that happens becomes more important then as well.

Jesse: Mm-hmm. I find myself wondering about the implications of all of this for design’s influence on product strategy, because you’re talking about an approach that potentially really kind of flips the equation in terms of requirements driving design, turning into design driving requirements.

Andrew: I mean, it’s an interesting provocation because if it’s simpler to generate features, which I don’t really mean that it’s simple, but if, let’s just say, it’s simpler to generate features, then how the features fit together towards a certain goal, and the context by which those features are shown, or how they’re shown, becomes more important.

Those things then become really critical and then the rest of it is maybe less critical.

And I think what, we’re talking about is, more of a future state, right? I think for most enterprises, you can’t just like generate and bang out a bunch of features at this point.

But if it is easier to create them, then how you feel using them becomes more important.

And so then the question is, how do we create the right feeling for what people are experiencing, and then how do we make sure that they’re successful? Which is design.

Peter: Well, we spoke around the same time that the AI report was launching and, you mentioned that insight that you shared earlier, where designers felt like they were getting more efficient, but they weren’t necessarily producing better work. At that point, we talked a lot about quality and defining quality.

Something, I think about it a lot is design organizations need to have more explicit standards of quality that they then can uphold through all this activity.

But then as we were talking about the backlash that we’re hearing in the last, just the last couple of weeks around some of these generative AI engagements, and I think a lot of that backlash is companies went nuts trying things out, but without a sense of direction.

They were just trying out for the sake of trying it so they didn’t have standards of success. And then when they finally took stock of what’s happening, it’s like, well, it’s not doing anything. And it’s like, yeah, it’s not doing anything, ’cause you didn’t have a point of view, you didn’t have a direction you were going and you were just throwing spaghetti against the wall in hope that stuff stuck.

So intent becomes very important. But then this last piece that you’re talking about around the coordination, this orchestration, all this activity that’s going on in the system and the role that design can play in helping manage that. I start now wondering about, what are the design skills, design practices that become increasingly important?

And I’m thinking about that in light of what we’ve seen over the last six to 12 months where every job description for a designer is talking about high craft, but what you were just mentioning is not high craft design in the way we think of it with like high polish, high UI, subtle micro interactions and all that kind of stuff.

it’s a lot of IA, it’s a lot of interaction design, it’s a lot of workflows, it’s a lot of conditionals, making sense of all that, with the interest of delivering value to a user.

I’m curious where you see the intersection of quality, craft, intent, new skilling. What are you witnessing?

Andrew: I mean, it, it’s gotta be both, right? And I think one of the reasons I focused on the product strategy, higher level experience is because that is often under-discussed.

And the point about craft and micro interactions is talked about a lot. And I think both are really important.

You can’t have an experience where, oh, it’s really great. I can see exactly, like, the way that my information got shared and it did this really interesting animation that now I know exactly what it means. But then like ultimately, on the other side, did it actually get action?Did whatever I was trying to accomplish, get accomplished?

You can imagine like an agent, oh, the agent, it’s really great. The agent said it was gonna buy the shoes that I was looking to buy, but like, then it doesn’t buy the shoes or it overpays by, you know, a hundred dollars on the shoes.

Those are like distinct things, and yet you can’t ignore one in favor of the other. But you do have to think about both.

So, I would imagine that some designers would specialize in one part or specialize in another. Potentially if the higher flows are not being thought about, someone will step in and try to think about the flows after the experience doesn’t work or people give feedback.

And so someone will do that, and it’s a question of who is going to do it. Who either feels like they have permission or takes the opportunity to do it. And so that’s kind of how I would think about it. And I do think it’s worth thinking about the definition of craft as helping people have, like, the feeling you’re looking for them to have with the tools that you have available.

I don’t know that that’s like a Figma definition, but that’s how I would think about things like craft.

Jesse: Along those lines, there was one finding from the January study that I found well, you know, almost counterintuitive, which had to do with how organizational scale impacts how these technologies are being deployed in organizations. I wonder if you can kind of recap what you found in the study.

Andrew: I mean the core of it is, really it’s the smallest organizations. So your, like, one to 10 employee organizations and how differently they think about AI to the success of their products, and even how they are thinking about work. And I think that’s not really that surprising, right?

Once you hit two-, three- hundred people, you have like some well-worn paths. And unless like the number of people changes dramatically, you probably would kind of keep going in the same way.

But if you’re a new company and you’re thinking about how to do something and you’re probably starting with the premise that you’re gonna be AI-powered in some way, those organizations are different.

And so then that also has implications for, if you’re a large organization trying to increase use of AI for the express purpose of increasing use of AI, splitting small teams out to go do it, and almost like telling them you’re going to either work this way or you’re going to build an AI powered product.

You might have more success with like a small, small team that is just in the work. That is just building.

And, I don’t know, it’s an interesting finding ’cause I think it speaks to the accessibility of the technology, like, you can do things, has never been greater.

And what we’re all trying to figure out is like the best way to do things. The most effective way to create products for users. Those are the things that haven’t really been figured out. Yeah, just trying them, it’s easier than ever.

Peter: Your role is the head of insights. I don’t know if that means you actually have a team that you’re leading, but there’s a leadership component to that.

And I’m curious, so ours is a podcast about leadership, and I’m curious, what leadership skills you’ve been developing, particularly within a place like Figma, right? Because as an analyst you were probably doing your analysis and some consulting.

Now you’re in-house, now you’re navigating organizations. Now you’ve got politics. Now there’s probably people who, if you’re delivering insights, you’re probably finding out things they don’t necessarily want to hear, right? ‘Cause it might go against what they think, what they thought the reality was.

And so I’m wondering what, are the leadership skills you’ve been leaning into to get traction to bring people along to your point of view, your agenda, within Figma and what that journey’s been like of developing kind of that leadership approach.

Andrew: One of the interesting things is the power of writing.

And I thought it would be less important because that was my job at Forrester. Like the core job is like you create insights and you put ’em into a report and then you do a lot of other things. That is not dissimilar to my core job at Figma.

And I think, I thought that writing would become less important because it’s such a visual company, it makes like a tool. And writing things down still has tremendous power. It still creates a lot of reach and then it forces you to think about what you think is really important.

And then ideally, you’re creating some other dissemination mechanism too. You know, you’re making a video, but the video’s gotta be really quick. It’s gotta be really engaging. All that.

And I think I, thought that was less critical. And it turns out that interviewing somebody about their insights can be a really powerful thing to do.

And then writing those things down is really critical. And so, I think leaders have to make artifacts and one of the key artifacts of leadership is writing things that people can then better understand your perspective and then force you to articulate what the perspective actually is and find out whether you are aligned with the people around you.

Jesse: Andrew, as a professional asker of questions, what are the questions you are most interested in exploring next?

Andrew: I am not tired of AI and design and what the interactions will be between those things. I just feel like you keep peeling back the onion and what are the great practices that teams are using? What are people finding success with? What are people excited about? What are people nervous about? Those remain really important questions.

And then I think importantly, what isn’t changing about that is still a really important question, because it still sure seems like getting a team to understand a user’s perspective and actually getting a real user perspective, not like, some version of it that they’re presenting to you, those things still seem really important and incredibly difficult. You know, AI just doesn’t do that. Other than maybe creating some more scale and more interviews, maybe summarizing it.

So what’s changing, what isn’t changing? I’m excited to keep researching it.

Jesse: Fantastic. Andrew Hogan, thank you so much for being with us.

Andrew: Thanks for having me.

Peter: Yeah, this has been great. Thank you.

Jesse: If people wanna find you on the internet, how can they find you?

Andrew: LinkedIn.

Jesse: That’s where it’s at.

Andrew: I am, I am a big LinkedIn fan. I do not engage in the other networks nearly as much. Find me on LinkedIn.

Jesse: Terrific.

Peter: Sounds good.

Jesse: Thank you.

Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway.design for past episodes and transcripts, or follow the show on LinkedIn. Visit petermerholz.com to find Peter’s newsletter, The Merholz Agenda, as well as Design Org Dimensions featuring his latest thinking and the actual tools he uses with clients.

For more about my leadership coaching and strategy consulting. Including my free one hour consultation, visit jessejamesgarrett.com. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.

Product Discovery coach, teacher, and author Teresa Torres joins Peter and Jesse to explore the messy reality of organizational change and cross-functional collaboration. She discusses why external coaching has limits, how individual contributors can drive change within resistant systems, and what the rise of AI means for blurring roles between product, design, and engineering teams.

Learn more about Teresa Torres and her teaching at https://producttalk.org/
Learn more about Jesse James Garrett and his coaching and consulting at https://jessejamesgarrett.com/
Learn more about Peter Merholz and his new digital book “Design Org Dimensions” at https://petermerholz.com/

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way,

Peter: navigating the opportunities

Jesse: and challenges

Peter: of design and design leadership.

Jesse: On today’s show, Teresa Torres, product discovery coach and educator, and author of the book Continuous Discovery Habits, joins us to look at the changing landscape of digital product development from the product side. We’ll talk about what a coach can and can’t do for organizations and leaders, where product and design leaders get off track in driving meaningful outcomes, and what the new wave of generative AI means for the relationship between product and design.

Peter: Hi Teresa. Thank you so much for joining us.

Teresa: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to do this.

Peter: So I’m gonna start with a very easy question. Well easy to ask. I dunno how difficult it is to answer, which is: just how do you introduce yourself these days? I’ve known you now for 15 years, and so I’m curious how you’ve evolved since we first met.

Teresa: Yeah, I mean, I still introduce myself as a product discovery coach. I’m now an author, so that’s new in the last 15 years. But you know what’s funny is I don’t do a lot of coaching anymore. I mostly do a lot of curriculum design. I still do coaching through our office hours and things like that, but it used to be, my primary mode of engaging with people was I coach teams in depth over time. And that’s kind of changed. I now do a lot of curriculum design and we, our primary delivery mechanism is courses.

Peter: Say a little bit more about that. When we worked together I was embedded within design teams and, you know, you were coaching us through these product discovery engagements at both OpenTable and then again at Snagajob, and there was a curriculum component to it at that time, I remember, but I’m curious how that’s shifted or evolved for you and, why more focus on curriculum than maybe the kind of hands-on coaching?

Teresa: Yeah, a few reasons. So yeah, I started out as a coach. What that meant was I worked with a cross-functional product team for roughly 12 weeks, sometimes a little longer for the teams that needed it. But our goal in those 12 weeks was just to build really strong discovery habits. It was everything from: how do we collaborate as a cross-functional team, what does a good customer interview look like, how do we run quick assumption tests that we can rely on, h ow to start with clear outcomes, kind of the all the habits you see in Continuous Discovery Habits.

And I think just ’cause of the nature of my personality, I get bored when I do the same thing over and over again. And so I started creating a formal curriculum behind my coaching practice, ’cause I just got sick of telling teams the same thing over and over again. So then they would basically go through a content module. They would try to apply it in their own practice and then they would come to coaching.

And what I found eventually was that the things that we would cover in coaching were more like, here’s what’s hard in my unique organizational context, and not, here’s what’s hard about the skill of interviewing. And that’s because the content was getting good enough that it was helping them build their skill, but it didn’t help them with the messiness of, like, but my sales team doesn’t want me to talk to a customer.

And so I realized that one of the challenges with coaching is you need a leader who’s willing to invest in it. It’s kind of a high value, which means high cost, service. And I just wanted to get some of the skill development out to more teams.

And so with online courses, you can offer it at a much lower price point. A lot more people can engage. We still do, I say we ’cause me and some of my instructors still do, coaching with some of the organizations that we go a little bit deeper with. But I would say primarily I do curriculum design to support our suite of courses.

Jesse: So tell me a little bit more about what you mean when you talk about product discovery and who you work with inside these organizations to support the development of this practice skillset. What would you call it? It’s almost a mindset, isn’t it?

Teresa: it is a mindset. There’s several mindsets. There’s several skills… I mean, there’s like the academic term of like knowledge, skills, and abilities, KSA. It sort of spans a lot of things. I think the big thing for product discovery, I try to keep this really simple. How do we know we’re building the right stuff?

And every team in order to build something, has to make decisions about what to build. How do we know those are the right decisions? How do we have good feedback loops with our customers to help steer us along the way? I know since your audience is a lot of designers, I will be upfront about a lot of these practices came from design, but came from a particular type of design.

Jesse, I know we’ve talked about like, and both of you… Design agencies and like these practices of research and human-centered design and feedback from customers.

I think what’s changing is, in the early days of the internet, we didn’t have the right people on our teams to do that research. And now companies are starting to invest in cross-functional teams that are building those skills. And so we’re bringing it in-house. Product teams are doing it themselves, instead of going out and hiring research firms or going out and hiring design firms. And so it’s led to a more team approach. It’s led to a more, just, cross-functional approach.

And then I also think the pacing of it has changed quite a bit. So when we outsource something, we tend to hire a company for a big project. When we’re doing it internally, we can do it more continuously because we’re working on a product more continuously.

Jesse: Do you engage with design teams in your practices? Is that a part of what you do or are you really focused on…

Teresa: yeah.

Jesse: …the product management side?

Teresa: So in my coaching, I always coached the cross-functional product trio. So it was typically a product manager, a designer, and an engineer. Trios look different at every company. Sometimes they’re quads, sometimes they’re quints. Whatever the cross-functional team is, what roles you have.

So, like, some teams that I worked with had a user researcher as the fourth person. Some teams had a product marketing manager as the fourth person. Some data products have a data scientist, sometimes in lieu of a designer, sometimes in addition to a designer.

So when I say product trio, it’s really just the cross-functional product team. Whatever roles are involved and however many people that is, once you’re more than five people, it gets hard to move quickly. I would say generally it’s three to five people. And then we see the same thing in our courses. So we have product managers, designers, user researchers. And even lately, more engineers enrolling in our programs.

Peter: I am curious how you think things have progressed, because in my interactions and conversations with my clients and other design leaders, it feels like so many organizations are still struggling to do just the basic blocking and tackling of things like product discovery or dual track agile or contemporary product development, or whatever you want to call it.

There’s still a lot of PMs or POs getting requirements from the business and funneling it out to a group of people and saying, go build that. And I’m wondering if, and maybe now given your perhaps broader perspective, ’cause you’re engaging with more people through teaching than you probably could through coaching, like, are we still bending towards progress as a whole or are we, it feels at times, like, we’re kind of stuck or sometimes we go backwards. Like, what’s your take on, just, like, how things are going in terms of organizations adopting continuous discovery, product discovery, these practices.

Teresa: I think we’re still making progress. I think it’s uneven and there’s some two steps forward, one step back happening. So it can feel like in a single moment maybe we’re not making progress. But I just think back, like to the beginning of my career, okay, so I took my first full-time job in 1999. At that time, I graduated a very naive student of HCI.

And I really thought this was just how business worked. And as you all know, this is simply, it’s still not how business works. But I’ll tell you, my first job, you wanna know what my title was? It was application software developer. Do you know what I did in my job? I did interaction design.

Peter: Right.

Teresa: People didn’t know what interaction design was.

They didn’t hire designers, they hired people that built applications and software. And so even though I was a full-time designer, my title was application software developer. We have certainly come a long way. I’ll also tell you that, like, at that time, I think I was involved in a year in maybe like two or three usability studies because we had to rent a facility with a two-way mirror and it took all day and we spent a month recruiting the right people, right?

Like if we just remember where we came from, like we have made tremendous progress. Now, I also, like, during that same time period, the web was blowing up everybody and their mom wanted to be a web developer, which means everybody and their mom wanted to be a designer.

And now we say things like designers own research and designers own that. No, some designers have that background. Some designers do not. Some product managers have that background. Some product managers do not, right? And so I think some of this, like, it’s just as messy, it’s way messier than we want it to be.

Here’s what I do see. I see way more companies recognizing if we wanna make good decisions about what we build, the customer needs to be part of that process somewhere. I think it’s hard to find a company that doesn’t agree with that statement. Now, does that mean they’re resourcing their teams to do that? Well, not necessarily. Does that mean when the economy shrinks that their founders, some very famous vocal founders, don’t start talking about we gotta go back to command and control and this is the right way to do things and we don’t empower our teams anymore, right?

Like there’s always false starts, there’s always ups and downs. But I think the long arc, we have made tremendous progress. I’m still blown away when I meet a team that is talking to a customer every week. We have a whole industry of discovery tools. Of unmoderated testing platforms, one question surveys, all sorts of testing tools that like literally would not have been able to exist ’cause there was no market for them. Whereas now there’s a huge market for them.

Jesse: I’m interested in the cross-functional collaboration piece of what you described. You know, I often feel like everything of any strategic significance in an organization usually came out of a conversation among three or four or five people. Tops. It’s rare that it’s a mass of people coming together to actually drive something meaningful.

And I wonder about the different perspectives that you have to reconcile as part of that process, and what it takes to create a sense of being, actually just being on the same team, you know, across these different functions. I hear from so many leaders who feel that they are caught in incentive structures that incentivize different behaviors and different outcomes cross-functionally.

So design’s chasing design’s goals, and product is chasing product’s goals, and the organization doesn’t really have any interest in reconciling those. And so we have to reconcile them on the ground, face-to-face in those three to five person meetings.

And I’m wondering about how you’ve seen that done effectively.

Teresa: We don’t, I mean, I think if the outcomes aren’t aligned, they’re not gonna work as a team. The good news is I do see way more companies giving cross-functional teams a shared outcome way more than I’ve ever seen in the past. Like, I think we are making progress there. Now, of course, each functional role has other goals or other health metrics they care about, right?

Like, a cross-functional product squad isn’t gonna have a shared outcome of like site uptime, but your engineers better care about site uptime, right? And there’s probably similar analogies for every function.

I think here’s the reality. We suck at collaborating and we see this like up and down the organization. Like our executive teams are totally dysfunctional ’cause we don’t know how to collaborate across functional roles. Too many of us are taught from day one in business, be territorial, have clear boundaries between your role and the person next to you.

And this ladders all the way up the organization. It’s why the head of sales only cares about closing the next deal, and the head of product only cares about how we’re gonna serve the whole market. And the head of design only cares about, but it’s not delightful enough.

I know these are like platitudes and I’m not trying to dismiss any of these things, but like, it causes a lot of dysfunction and, like, if we don’t let go of those things, we will actually never collaborate.

The good news is, I think, at the individual team level, it’s easier to do this than at the executive level because at the team level, your scope is narrower. You’re just trying to build a thing. It’s three to five humans where you can build strong relationships. There’s not as much at stake, and it really is just like, how do we learn about each other and learn about each other’s strengths and figure out who should do what when.

I think it does require that everybody let go of maybe owning some of the things they think they should own all the time. And so here’s what I mean by that. Let’s say a designer wants to get their hands dirty and like play around with Cursor and implement some of their design. Should a engineer on the team that usually does front end development be threatened by that? I don’t know. Maybe not.

And like when the product manager uses Lovable to like play with the feature before it goes to design, should the designer be threatened by that? I don’t know. Now if we’re shipping it without it going to the designer, I have a problem with that. And like, ideally, all three of these people are like ideating together and playing with some of these things together.

But I think, especially with generative AI, like, the boundaries between our roles are gonna blur even more than they already have. And I personally have always been a boundary spanner. Like I’ve been a designer, I’ve been a product manager. I do some coding. Like, I really think the more we overlap in roles, the better we’ll work together.

But it’s hard because our egos get in the way, right? Like, I wanna own that decision. I wanna do that piece.

Peter: Yeah. Egos get in the way, as Jesse said, incentives get in the way, right? We are rewarded as individuals, not as teams. and I’m wondering on that front, if you’ve identified a set of qualities or conditions that indicate to you that this group of people is more likely to adopt practices in a healthy way. Like what are those things that you look for that tell you these folks are ready to embrace these new ways of working and, and succeed? And what are the, maybe, warning signs that like, yeah, I can teach you new ways of working, you’re, gonna be stuck because the problem isn’t one of process. it’s something else.

Teresa: There’s definitely some organizational stuff that I look for. So like, especially when I was coaching in my sales process, I would tell the leaders that I was contracting with like, do not bring me in to coach your teams. The rest of the organization isn’t ready for this because here’s what I saw really early on in my coaching practice, is I would teach cross functional teams how to do this work, and then the bosses would still say, no, just build what I’m telling you to build. What do you think all those cross-functional teams did? They went and got new jobs. They learned a more fun way to work, right? And the first time that happened to me, it was really painful. I was like, oh man, this company just paid me a lot of money to train their teams and they all left. And so I started being really upfront about that with leaders in the contracting process.

Like, don’t empower your teams unless you’re ready to empower your teams. So there’s a lot on the organizational side, on the team side. We have to break a lot of bad habits and we, a lot of this is just trust. The team has to trust they’re gonna be rewarded for these new behaviors.

And I think that’s the hardest part. Is that, like, if the rest of the organization isn’t on board, all it takes is one middle manager anywhere in your organizational hierarchy that affects that team that can break that trust.

So if a designer is hearing from their design director that they shouldn’t be brainstorming ideas with their cross-functional product team, they should be doing it in a design studio. Or more often what we hear, if the engineering lead is hearing from their director of engineering that they shouldn’t spend any time on discovery because they need to be increasing their velocity of code it’s gonna be a huge problem.

We see the same with the product manager. If the product manager, like is still getting pressure everywhere from the organization to just build what they’re told, then all this stuff we’re telling them feels like a charade. It feels like the flavor of the week, we’re not really gonna do this.

Peter: When I think back on our time together, and more of the discovery coaching mode, it was a lot about process. It was a lot about, kind of, steps along the way. And I’m wondering how your approach has evolved to accommodate these questions of trust and relationships and what do you teach people, or how do you help them better relate to one another and build that trust?

Teresa: Yeah, so the first thing is I look at it more as a collection of habits than a process. That’s why habits is in the book. I think that’s an important distinction because there’s a process to how we teach it, but hopefully the teams that we work with take away, you’re not doing every step, every time.

We talk a lot about, we’re putting tools in your toolbox and you have to decide which tool is relevant in the current situation. And that I think is really important, ’cause so many people want a process to follow or a recipe to follow. And we all know life is much messier than that.

Peter: I’m wondering if, as part of your teaching now, right, ’cause you’ve talked about the importance of trust and the importance of the relationships within the team members, are you addressing that dynamic head on in your teaching? And, and what are the things that you found help people better connect with one another?

Teresa: Yeah, we do a lot of this and you know, we, there’s this pattern I really love. So first I’ll explain the problem this pattern solves.

A lot of us in business, we’re taught to advocate for our point of view. Which means we don’t really listen to other people’s points of view. We just go into a meeting trying to win the conversation. And even people that aren’t competitive, like this is what business has rewarded. I’m not suggesting this is like an individual problem. I think this is like the culture of business is that there’s a lot of advocacy going on.

So the first thing we try to do is we try to break that. We try to say, look, in all of our courses, we follow this pattern where people work in groups. So we’re trying to simulate a product trio. We give them a homework assignment that they do individually and then they come to class and their goal is to redo the homework assignment in the context of their team.

And we follow this pattern of: first, share your individual perspectives on the, on the assignment. So they’re each sharing their individual work with each other. And we teach them don’t listen for what you think they did wrong or right, just listen for what’s different. Be curious. This is about exploring the different perspectives on your team.

So try to let go of this idea of like, my version is the best version. I need to win. But listen for, across all the different perspectives,. what you like about it, what’s better, what you can take from it.

And then we have them co-create a team version. And what we find sometimes in week one, they’re not very good at it. It’s hard to let go of this, I need to win. But when they do it four or five times, they start to learn like, oh, our team version can actually synthesize all the best parts of the individual versions.

And this is very different. Even if, like, what we see a lot of teams intuitively do is, they wanna come to the meeting and start the work together, but then we get all this groupthink problems, the most dominant personality dominates the work, right?

So like, it’s really important we start with, do the work individually. Take the time to exploit all the different perspectives where you truly understand the different perspectives. Then co-create a new version. And when we see, when teams practice that, and get good at that, they realize it’s not about, did they have the best option. It’s about collectively, we’re able to take the best of each of us and co-create a great option.

Jesse: I’m curious about how that collaborative dynamic potentially plays out beyond the team level, especially looking at the leadership level. You touched on earlier how if you’ve got dysfunction in your leadership relationships and your leadership collaboration, that’s gonna cascade down into the cultures of those teams.

And the people of those teams are gonna model themselves on, you know, the priorities that are being set by, and the messages that are being sent by the leaders that they report to. And I’m curious about cross-functional leadership collaboration, and creating that alignment in ways that can have a positive cascade effect in ways that can actually help entire teams get along, and not just individuals.

Teresa: Yeah. Honestly, I have no idea. I’m gonna share, like I have no idea how to solve this problem. I’ve been on executive teams. I’ve been a CEO where I was responsible for an executive team. I have coached executives. I’ve done work like alignment workshops with executives. I don’t do that work anymore. I don’t know what the answer is.

I’ve read all the books, like The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, right. Like I, I’ve read the books, I know the theory, like I’ve worked with, I’ve seen other great executive coaches come in. I think here’s the challenge at the executive level, everybody who is an executive has by definition had a lot of success in their career and that success came from what they’ve done historically.

We all know it’s The Who Moved My Cheese book. What got you here won’t get you there. right? Like, it’s really hard for us to let go of what has worked for us in the past. But I think the challenge is, there’s always a little bit of truth to this in every role, but I think especially the executive role, to be a good executive and to contribute to a well-functioning executive team, you have to let go of your needs, if they come at the cost of the whole business’s need.

This, like, skill of thinking across the business and being able to think from the different perspectives is really critical. I don’t even know many CEOs that are good at this, and they’re the ones that like, it’s their job to be good at it. So I think what we’re bumping up into at the executive level is this is a really hard thing for humans to do. I mean, if I had a silver bullet here I would probably do more executive coaching. But I, I, it’s messy and I think it’s hard and I don’t particularly enjoy it, which is why I work at the IC team level, that is a scope that maybe people are more idealistic and more willing to change and, a little more coachable.

Peter: Following a bit of what Jesse was saying, and you saw me flipping through your book, in order to adopt the kind of continuous discovery approaches that you are teaching, people internally would need to embrace some flavor of change management, right? This is a new way of working, thus it is change.

And one of the frustrations I’ve felt, largely on part of my clients who are in these organizations that are going through a product transformation. adopting the product operating model. They’re learning to do product discovery. And, a frustration that I hear from them is, they’re shown how to do it. Like, the glorious future of, just work like this, but they’re stuck in their existing day to day.

And it’s not like they couldn’t get to that point, but it’s a process to get to that point. It’s a change management process to get from where they are today to this glorious future.

And oftentimes the leadership who’s spent on the training or whatever, is just like, you should just be working in this new way. But the teams, feet on the ground, are, they’re not. The product owners aren’t comfortable doing customer interviews, and liked being able to just tell everybody what to do. They don’t wanna work three in a box or whatever.

Like, there’s an evolution that’s required, and I’m wondering how you teach, how you think about, what you counsel your clients or students on, in terms of wherever they’re beginning, the slog, the necessary slog it is to get from that point to this glorious future and, how you help them navigate that change.

Teresa: Yeah, this is a really big question. I’ll share.

I went back in 2011 and I got a master’s in organizational change. Here was my takeaway. Organizations don’t change. People change. That’s like the headline of my takeaway, right? There’s a really great book called Managing Transitions, William Bridges, that really talks about what an individual goes through when they’re going through a big change.

And then he talks about it as like, almost like grieving, like there’s three stages you have to grieve for what you’re losing. Then there’s this messy, neutral zone, and then eventually you step into the new future. And I like Bridges’ writing on this because most change management people, the big names, John Kotter, there’s several other big folks that write in this space, they talk about change management as a process that happens to the organization, but I have literally never seen that work, right?

You can bring in the McKinsey’s and pick your other favorite consulting firm and they’ll create a Gantt chart with swim lanes and tell you here’s where you are in the change.

Like it doesn’t reflect reality. In fact, even Snagajob, Peter, is a good example of this. Snagajob had all the right things in place. They had a product leader and a design leader that supported the change. I actually don’t know who the engineering leader is, which maybe that’s one of the challenges.

They invested in coaching all of the teams went through coaching. One thing I’ve learned since we worked together at Snagajob is maybe we could have done more at the middle management layer, r ight. Like we’d hit the teams, the executives were on board. And even so, even with a lot of the right pieces in place, not all of the teams moved the same amount.

So why does that happen? Well, every individual is going through those three stages very differently. Some people don’t ever grieve, ’cause they’re not willing to let go of what they’ve been doing. They refuse to change, right? Some people step into change, they try it on, and they really struggle with that grief.

Or they get through the grief and they’re in that messy, neutral zone, but they’re struggling to see what the future looks like.

And so I think something we dramatically underestimate is how much work leaders need to do to guide every individual in the organization through the change. This is another reason why I moved from coaching to courses.

So in courses I can teach you skills. Courses Courses are very good at teaching skills. What I struggled with as, a coach when I was an outsider, it’s hard for me to guide you through the change because I’m not your boss. I’m not your leader. I’m not setting the culture. I’m not able to do rituals that reinforce it. I can’t combat a middle manager that disagrees, right?

I think I really believe in something Marty Cagan says, which is, “one of the primary responsibilities of a leader is to coach their teams.” To coach the people that report to them. I saw this as a huge limitation of being an external coach.

I think as an external coach I can help with skills, but there’s so much of this messy internal stuff that if you’re not managing the people you’re coaching, it’s hard to be successful.

I’ll give a really concrete example of this. Early in coaching, we helped the teams get access to customers. This is actually something something Snagajob was already really good at.

When we were working with the teams there, they were already using Ethnio. They’re already recruiting people directly from the product. Actually, still to this day, 12 years later, I still use Snagajob as an example. But I still had teams show up three weeks in a row saying they didn’t do an interview. They just didn’t do it. And I can spend three coaching sessions on where the resistance was coming from and why, and to help them break down barriers. But if they didn’t wanna do it, there was nothing I could do. I’m not their boss. I’m not there with them.

Peter: Right.

One of the challenges, that you’re identifying, it sounds like it happens in product, it definitely happens in design, which is design leaders don’t know how to coach. That’s not something that they’re taught, that’s not something that they realize. They know how to direct, but that bringing up is something, is a skill that’s kind of gotten lost.

You almost want, I’ve thought this about this for a while and, what you said is kind of reintroducing it, right? You almost want like a, like a master/apprentice relationship between a leader and their team in terms of really helping them understand the craft.

And I don’t mean it in the designerly way of craft, just like what are the, to use your term, habits, practices, whatever it is that you need to embrace in order for that next generation to be effective. And leaders are rarely equipped for it. And if they are, the other problem is that they’re almost never given the time to do it, right.

I think something that’s not recognized is that kind of coaching. I mean, that takes a lot of time, right? It’s not just…

It

Teresa: does take a lot of time.

Peter: …Yeah, it’s not a one-on-one every other week or so, ” How is it going?” It’s rolling up your sleeves.

But then, leaders are doing more and more IC work, but that’s not coaching, right? Like, that’s, not leveraged. It’s a kind of labor that I don’t think is appreciated because it’s not obvious that it’s driving outcomes, kind of, directly.

Teresa: Yeah, I think is a huge problem. I think most leaders in any discipline don’t know how to coach. Why would they? That hasn’t been a part of the job description. But I think if we’re going to empower teams, now coaching is required and I think, ideally, like eventually because you empowered your teams, you now have more time to coach.

The challenge is the transition I have to coach my team so they can be empowered so that I have some free time. I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I’ve been talking to a lot of product leaders about this very topic this summer. Leaders need better resources for how to get good at coaching and what does that look like and what does coaching their teams even mean?

Jesse: Well, speaking as an external coach, I feel like I have to defend the value of external coaching a little bit here. Just in that the work that I do is one-on-one work. It is also at the leadership level. So in a lot of ways what I’m bringing as a coach is not really about change management or organizational transformation so much as it is helping a professional look at their own practices and supporting them in their own evolution and their own change management, so to speak.

Teresa: Yeah, let me clarify. I actually think that there is a role for external coaches and especially at the leadership level. I think there’s a difference between, I personally have a coach who helps me see my own stuff and helps me get outta my own head and hold space for me and is a sounding board and ask me questions, I think there’s always space for that, and I think all the way up and down the organization, even at the IC level,if we could get to a point where everybody could have a coach, I think that would be an amazing world, because we need way more reflection than we naturally do.

I think what I’m getting at and like what I experienced as a discovery coach is a little bit different. It’s an organization is trying to get from point A to point B, which means all the teams in that organization are saying, you need to do B, you need to get to B.

And so you bring in an external coach and you help them with like, what does it mean to get to B, how do I get there? But if there’s stuff happening in the organization that’s competing with like, yeah, we’re trying to get to B, but we’re gonna do C along the way, we’re not really, not really on the way to B.

That’s when, like, how effective that external coach can be is really limited. ‘Cause there’s so many competing forces, and this is where I think, like, if the leader was coaching those teams on how to get to B, The leader would see oh, C is interfering, I need to go remove that obstacle, right?

And like as an external coach, I tried so hard, I would meet with leaders and be like, here’s what I’m seeing from your teams. Here’s the obstacles. But it’s a little bit like when we tell somebody about our research, they don’t care unless they’re involved. I think with change management in particular, this is where leaders have to be directly involved in coaching their teams. Coaching is a terrible word ’cause it means a lot of different things.

I think it’s different from what I would think of as traditional executive coaching.

Peter: I face the same thing. Sometimes I’ll get a director of design reaching out to me who wants my help, but if their boss is the head of design, I’m like, I need to work with them. Like, ’cause I’m gonna work with you and what I might say to you might be in conflict with what your boss is telling you, and, right? And there’s that dynamic there that I think is what you’re getting at and the risk that we’re setting up by having too much of that kind of directive coaching be external, right? Because the team needs to own it. That leadership chain needs to own it.

Teresa: I even see this at the product leadership coaching level, right? So, would I coach a product leader on how to bring the discovery habits to their organization? You know, the first question I would ask is, does your CEO want this? Right? Because if the CEO doesn’t want it, how effective are you gonna be?

Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. It applies at every level of the organization. What I’ll often say to prospective clients is, the more power you have, the more I can help you activate. And if you are in a position in the middle or the lower middle of an organization, yeah, we’re gonna be, we’re gonna be resorting to some gorilla tactics to get things done, because you don’t have necessarily the latitude or the permission to just make things so.

Teresa: There’s something I’ve come around to. It’s gonna sound like they’re competing thoughts, but I think there’s power in the fact that they’re competing thoughts.

So the first one took, I mean I’m probably still learning this, but it definitely took like every day of my full-time employee experience to like, actually, no, I think it took 15 years not being a full-time employee to actually believe this and own this. I think that the only person that can drive change in an organization is a CEO. It doesn’t mean other people can’t influence that change and can’t contribute to that change, but if your CEO is not on board, it’s not gonna happen. This was really hard for me as an employee because I just wanted to change things, right? Like, I thought that this was the right way to do things. And, and even now, like, I surprised some people ’cause they’re like, Hey, my CEO wants me to build this thing. What should I do? Well, clearly you should build that thing. Like, I think we struggle with accepting our organizational realities.

I’m gonna drop one that might annoy a lot of people, a lot of your listeners, but I’m gonna say it anyway ’cause I feel like it needs to be said. How many designers do we know that don’t think they should care about business outcomes? Like, I’m sorry. It’s great that your product is delightful and it should be delightful and that’s good, but if it doesn’t make your business money, you’re not serving the business. We do need to serve the customers. Don’t get me wrong, this is one where I get into deep, horrible arguments with designers about, but like the reality in a for-profit business, the CEO is responsible for growing profit and every single person that works in that organization is responsible for contributing to growing profit.

Everybody. And I think that like we still struggle with this ’cause like we all have our ideals like, and I think design has a lot of great ideals. They also sometimes get in the way of like doing design in a business.

Peter: Mm-hmm.

Teresa: Okay. So that’s the first thing, which, like, still is hard for me to even say out loud because I am such an idealist and I want it to be different.

The competing thing I’ll say is I often tell people you can adopt the habits regardless of how your organization works.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Teresa: I think these sound like competing thoughts, but they’re not, because I don’t need the rest of my organization to be outcome focused for me to start to think about outcomes. For me to start to think about the impact of what I might be working.

I might not have access to customers because I might not be allowed to talk to ’em in my organization, but odds are I have some access to them somewhere, whether that’s reading forums online or finding people in my personal network, like with every single habit in the book, there is something you can start with, even if your organization is telling you you can’t.

And so, like, what keeps me sane is holding both of these things at the exact same time. I’m not going to change my organization, but I can change me. It turns out if enough me’s change, the organization changes.

Peter: And you’re tapping into something that I find is part of my work, which is recognizing that nothing happens or very little happens without cross-functional connection and collaboration. There’s this belief that everything you’re doing has to be aligned with all the people around you at all times and needs that support up and down the chain.

And while there’s some truth to that, allowing people, the word that comes to mind is selfishness or self-centeredness, and being, like, kind of to your point, you can do what you think is right. Give that a shot. There’s no one holding you back. Try it out.

Like, you don’t have to always align and connect and integrate with what’s going on around you if you think there’s a different way of working. Now there are political challenges and relationship challenges and you don’t want to just be kind of operating 180 degrees from everyone else around you necessarily, but, providing some permission.

I like what you’re saying because I think more people with the right idea need permission to like, do those things. But I also like your comment about the CEO and that change because yes, you have permission to try some new things, but you also need to recognize the reality in which you’re operating.

You’re not just gonna be able to willy-nilly make change.

Teresa: Yeah. I always tell people, I go, look, you need to rock the boat, but don’t get fired. That’s the reality, right? Like if you wanna work this way, you have to rock the boat a little bit. Just do it within the constraints so that you don’t get fired. And I think that’s these competing ideas of like, I do work in an organization that I don’t control and I barely influence and I probably will never really influence if I’m an IC and I can still have so much agency in what I do all day, every day. Your boss is not looking over your shoulder all day every day and never will be.

So you gotta find what are the safe places that you can start to introduce some of this stuff. And what I love about this is, here’s what I see happen when people do this. They start to do things in weird ways and people get curious about those weird ways and ideas start to spread. And if those ideas happen to work, they spread even more.

And it turns out we do start to influence change just by changing ourselves. And this is why I like William Bridges’ work. We’re all individually changing at our own pace.

Jesse: Speaking of permission to experiment, there’s a lot of experimentation going on in organizations right now, and a lot of folks are not waiting for permission to experiment because they are seeing the opportunity to seize these new technologies of AI to do their jobs and well, in some cases, to do maybe what might be somebody else’s job in the organization too.

And I wonder if you can put on your future forecaster hat. I can see it hanging on the wall there. And speculate with us a little bit about what this technology potentially means for the future of the product trio, future of product discovery, the future of product delivery.

Teresa: Yeah. Okay. I recently interviewed 17 people about how they used Lovable in their work. I will be releasing a blog post about this in August. I also am building two of my own AI products at a depth I did not think I would be at. Like, I just started tinkering and it ran away from me. And now I have a pretty robust AI product.

And both of those experiences have really pushed a few themes for me that I also will be blogging about in August. But I’ll give everybody a sneak peek. I think one of the biggest impacts generative AI is gonna have on how we build is we’re gonna see an even bigger blurring of our roles, and we’re gonna have to get comfortable with it.

And I say this for a couple reasons. I mean, I just talked to 17 people about lovable, most of those 17 people were product managers who were building features that their engineers are shipping without designers. Now, do I want that world? Absolutely not. I want designers involved. But why are these teams doing this?

Because their company hasn’t hired enough designers. They’re still shared across teams. They’re limited by resources and the product managers just trying to get something out there,

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Teresa: right?

What does that mean for design? I don’t know, but it kind of scares the crap out of me. I mean, most product managers are not equipped and Lovable does a pretty good job.

Like if you just want a basic boring design, it does a pretty good job. But for those of us that want delightful products in the world, it’s not gonna get us there. But here’s how I think about this. There’s always been tools that allow us to build mediocre things, and there’s always been companies that choose to build great things. I think AI is gonna make a lot of mediocre things. So for all those companies that are letting their product managers use lovable to do design instead of designers, they probably weren’t hiring designers anyway. Well, there may be more of them. Yes. But I think we’re gonna see with a lot of mediocre products, design is gonna come right back in importance because we’re gonna try to not be mediocre.

Just yesterday I saw a post on LinkedIn that was like, Lean Startup is dead. It’s free to ship now. We don’t have to learn anything. We can just ship things and here’s what… yeah, since people only hear this, I’m gonna point out that Peter is like passing out over here. Here’s what comes to mind.

Have you two seen the Simpsons episode where Homer Simpson gets to design a car?

Peter: Oh yeah, the Homer.

Teresa: This is the most relevant like pop culture reference of all time right now. What happens when we let anybody design anything? There’s no coherence. It’s a nightmare. It’s not usable, it’s certainly not a Lovable product.

Okay, so that’s the first thing I think is gonna happen is we’re gonna see a lot of blurring of rules. We’re gonna make a lot of mistakes. We’re gonna think some rules aren’t needed. We’re gonna see people try to ship products without engineers because delivery’s free. I I mean, come on, is it really free? Is it ever really gonna be free?

We’re gonna see people try to do the same without design. Some engineers are already talking about how they don’t need product managers anymore because ChatGPT can just write a PRD for them. I think we’re gonna see that all three of these roles are critically important and they’re gonna stay critically important.

The second thing I’m seeing: Getting quality out of LLM based products and features is really hard. So I’ve been talking to a lot of people about how they’re building LLM features and products, and here’s the mantra here, over and over again, getting to a prototype that looks like it works is really easy.

You can do it in one or two hours. Getting something that reliably works at scale for thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, if not millions of users is really hard, and we’re just starting to learn how to do it. And the ways that we’re learning how to do it require so much cross-functional collaboration to do it well that I think we’re gonna be forced to work even better together.

So this is what I’ve experienced with my own product. Like I started to get into the world of AI evals. It’s a big, messy topic that most people have not even heard of yet, but it’s basically evals answer the question of how do I know if my LLM feature is good, right?

It’s non-deterministic. I’m getting all kinds of outputs. How do I know across my production system that it’s good? There’s lots of ways to do evals, but the best way to do evals requires the domain expertise of your designer and/or product manager, and most importantly, your customer. And engineering expertise to automate it and get a large enough sample to represent what’s happening in production.

Right now, like, I ended up in this community of like AI and ML engineers, ’cause I took a class with some of them and they’re all talking about who has this domain knowledge and I’m, like, your product managers and your designers and your customers, and they’re like, oh, would they do this stuff?

Like, we’re just learning. Nobody knows. It’s like, it’s literally like 1994. Like, we’re just learning. And I think, like, the little that I see so far, it’s gonna require, like, not two in a box, three in a box. I mean two people at the same desk working together, discussing what’s the right way to do this.

And maybe eventually we’ll get tooling that like support handoffs, so we’re not literally sitting at the same desk doing this. But right now, that’s what good looks like.

Peter: How has building your own product changed how you think about building product?

Teresa: I’ve become an engineer. I’ll tell you, I spent my weekend like configuring VS code and using cloud code and setting up a proper dev and prod environment. Like I am pretty much an engineer at this point. Maybe not a very experienced engineer, but an engineer. Why don’t I just hire an engineer?

Because I don’t know how to separate the engineering work from the product and design work yet. Like I don’t even know what that looks like. Partly it’s ’cause I’m still learning, but I’ll tell you, I’m hearing this from other teams. Like the biggest question I’m getting from other teams about AI products is like we’re arguing over who should do what because there’s parts that are not that fun, but they’re critical to the quality of the product, right?

So right now, I personally am trying to do all the parts because it seems this question of who’s eventually gonna do what seems really messy. So I’m trying to understand all the parts.

Peter: You are your own triad.

Teresa: I am my own triad. It will not stay that way forever, that it’s not sustainable. But generative AI does make it possible. I mean, it’s helping me fill the gaps that I didn’t know how to do myself, for sure.

Jesse: And it seems like that’s the opportunity for a lot of folks, whether you sit on the product side, whether you sit on the design side, whether you sit on the engineering side. If you are one of these people who already naturally has a toe or two dipped in these other waters. You know, if you are a design minded product manager, if you are a product minded design person, if you’re an engineering person with either of those sensitivities, the opportunity is here for you to create a different kind of value than you’ve ever created before.

Teresa: I actually think our boundary spanners are gonna be our most valuable employees. I would argue they’ve always been our most valuable employees. Now, I have a bias. I am a boundary spanner, but I do think when we can speak to multiple roles in our organization, it does increase our value. And I think that’s gonna get exacerbated by gen AI.

Jesse: Teresa, what are you most looking forward to with what’s to come for design and product?

Teresa: I’m actually really excited about what generative AI unlocks, so like I personally have been nerding out on and like the tools that I’m building are all around how do we teach skills? Use generative AI to teach skills and help humans build skill. So like one headline I see a lot, like the founder of Anthropic gave a talk where he said all entry level jobs are going away.

And this like scared everybody, like how are we gonna develop talent? And I actually, I’m not so sure I agree with him because I think we’re gonna be able to level up entry level employees a lot faster because of generative AI. I think people are gonna be able to enter their careers with a lot more experience.

Like in my head, in the back of my head, I have this like Neo in the Matrix, like just downloading a skill. It’s not quite gonna be like that, but I think we do like now have the ability to let people build hours of practice on their own time through interaction with LLMs. I think it’s gonna require that we get really good at designing what that practice looks like. I think like apprenticeship is gonna look really different. And I’m actually really excited about that. And I’m someone who loves to mentor and to teach, but I’ll give you an example. The first tool I built, is I have a customer interview coach, so my students in my interviewing class submit their transcript and they get very detailed feedback on how well they conducted a customer interview and like way more detailed feedback than any of my instructors would ever have time to give them.

And they get this every single time they submit a transcript. It’s really unlocking deliberate practice. This is like version one. I can tailor this to like, oh, it looks like your last three transcripts, you’ve struggled with this particular skill. So you’re only gonna get feedback on that particular skill ’til you get better at it, right?

Like it unlocks personal learning journeys. And for me, what I love about it is now I have visibility into learning outcomes. Like as an instructor, I can go and observe, but now I get concrete data on every single student in my class. This is magical.

Peter: Hmm. Hmm.

Teresa: Now, it’s not like I gave you a certificate because you came to five class sessions.

Now, it’s I gave you a certificate because I saw your interviewing practice evolve and you reached a level of competency and it was all done through generative AI. Pretty cool.

Jesse: I love the idea that these technologies are not just going to replace entry level people, but actually enable people to level up from the entry level more quickly. And the idea that these technologies are not gonna replace anything human so much as they are going to augment and amplify the human abilities that we already bring to this work.

Teresa Torres, thank you so much for being with us.

Teresa: Thanks for having me.

Peter: Yes. Thank you so much for joining us. I know you’re pretty easy to find out there, but, where do you point people to so that they can follow up with you?

Teresa: Yeah, so most of my stuff is linked from producttalk.org. I blog every Wednesday. I might be adding a Monday AI themed post starting in September. That’s a little sneak peek also of what’s coming. And the book is Continuous Discovery Habits, available worldwide.

Jesse: Thank you so much.

Peter: Thank you.

Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway.design for past episodes and transcripts, or follow the show on LinkedIn. Visit petermerholz.com to find Peter’s newsletter, The Merholz Agenda, as well as Design Org Dimensions featuring his latest thinking and the actual tools he uses with clients.

For more about my leadership coaching and strategy consulting. Including my free one hour consultation, visit jessejamesgarrett.com. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.

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Summary: Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel, Dean of Design at OCAD, joins Jesse and Peter to discuss her global journey from Trinidad to Toronto, leading design education through relationships over craft, preparing students for social change, and her vision for decolonizing design while navigating the tension between academic values and industry demands.

Help UX and Get a Chance to receive $100! Peter is conducting a global UX and Design Organizational Health survey to better understand the state of our practice and industry. 5 respondents will receive either a $100 gift card or 1 hr of consulting/coaching with Peter. It takes about 10 minutes to complete. Thank you!

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way,

Peter: navigating the opportunities

Jesse: and challenges

Peter: of design and design leadership.

Jesse: On today’s show, we’re joined by Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel, the new-ish Dean of Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design, and author of the book Design Social Change. We’ll talk about social change and design’s role in it. We’ll also talk about design education and its relationship to design in practice, and how she uses her design skills to find success in the world of academia.

Peter: Dr. Noel, Lesley, thank you so much for joining us today.

Lesley-Ann: Thank you so much for the invitation, Peter.

Peter: We have some mutual friends in common who have said how impressed they are with the work that you are doing as the still relatively new Dean of Design at OCAD, the Ontario College of Art and Design. And maybe to start off, it would be good just to get a bit of your story.

How did you land as the Dean of Design at OCAD, and what’s this first year been like?

Lesley-Ann: Yeah, so I, I don’t think we have enough time, but I’ll, I’ll take you around some of the twists and turns. Actually I’m gonna go way back to me at 19 , me as a late teenager. I was interested in graphic design first, and I’m from Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean, and I was interested in graphic design and applied to all of these fantastic schools like Parsons and Pratt and RISD and Howard and got into a few of them and then just didn’t have the money to go.

And my parents said to me, you can study anywhere in the world as long as we don’t have to pay for it. And actually, that has sent me around the world. So I ended up doing undergrad at Universidade Federal do Paraná. Which is a federal university of Parana in Brazil, where I landed just because I was looking for good free education. And I did industrial design there.

From there I went back to Trinidad. I used to teach at the University of the Western Indies. I eventually took leave from the University of the West Indies and went to North Carolina State University as a PhD student at that point. Then from North Carolina State University as a PhD student, I went to the D.School at Stanford for a year on a fellowship, a teaching fellowship. From there, I went to Tulane University. Spent two years as associate director of design thinking at the Phyllis Taylor Center, I’m, I’m messing up the name, but I love Tulane. I love the Taylor Center. And then from there I went back to NC State as a faculty member. Spent some time there, went up for tenure, got tenure, and then got a very distracting phone call from OCAD that said, Hmm, we have a job here that you might be interested in.

And at that point, I actually did not think I was gonna leave Raleigh again for the rest of my life. And, came up to Toronto for the interview with my partner and my son. And we all looked around and said, wow, this city is actually kind of cool. And this city is everywhere at the same time. So Toronto is Trinidad, it’s Vietnam, it’s Brazil. It’s just everywhere at the same time. And, as I progressed in the interview process, ’cause I really just came up for the trip…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

Lesley-Ann: and as I went further and further in the interview process, I thought, oh wow, this is actually pretty exciting. OCAD is a fantastic university with very clear mission, and so I was very happy that they selected me for the position and I just walked then into this role of Dean of Design and I’ve been learning on the job since August last year.

it’s up and down, up and down, a very interesting rollercoaster.

Peter: It sounds like almost from the beginning you’ve had an academic orientation when it comes to design, teaching others, getting your PhD, and when I think of design, design is, such a craft, it’s such a practice. Obviously most of the people we engage with, they do it for, you know, hands-on design for their job.

I’m wondering what it was, After you got your maybe that first degree in industrial design, what was it that drew you towards more of a teaching and academic path as opposed to a practice, craft path?

Lesley-Ann: Maybe it’s that I describe the academic path more clearly because it’s easier for people to understand, right? I, think a lot of us as designers, we learn how to hustle and we, you know, there are designers who get jobs and then there are designers who maybe I’ll use kind of business language, the designers who make jobs, right?

And so, you know, a lot of us really are moving from hustle to hustle to hustle. I started off in furniture design and then really spent there’s a gap in the story that I just told you. I spent a long time doing consulting work as a designer and working for really anybody that I could convince that they needed design, you know, whether it was government ministries, export promotion councils, really anybody, theater production companies, anybody who, who was interested in design or who I could make interested in design, I would do projects for them.

But I ended up being drawn to academia, I’ll have to say, because of the stability, you know, and there was a point where I was like, okay, I need a little bit of stability. I have a child’s education that I’ll have to pay for eventually.

And then there are some countries in the world where there will be fewer stable opportunities for designers. It’s not that design work doesn’t exist, it’s that maybe the stability of a full-time job in design might not exist. So that’s really how I ended up in academia because academia provided some stability when I needed it.

And then what always interested me in academia is that, okay, if you are from a place without design jobs, kinda like what’s the role of design in that kind of space. You know, like having studied in Brazil, going back to Trinidad, those have always been questions that I’ve focused on, you know, what else can we be doing with design? Is it just about graphic design? Is it just about jobs or are there other things that we could make with our design abilities?

Jesse: What do you see yourself creating now at OCAD?

Lesley-Ann: So at OCAD I see myself, this will sound very, very wishy-washy. I see myself creating space.

Jesse: Mm.

Lesley-Ann: So in my last role at NC State, I worked with a lot of PhD students, and at OCAD, like we don’t yet have a PhD program, but I do see myself doing that kind of PhD advisor role almost, with a lot of faculty members who are doing research.

So I, see myself creating that kind of environment at OCAD where people are supporting people to deepen their own practice, creating some additional opportunities for students trying to emphasize that there are many different ways of doing design and, there is space for your design practice in this world of design.

I think of the Dean role as a support role where I am supporting a lot of people to be great.

Jesse: I imagine that entails a lot of context switching as you are shifting from one leader’s needs to the next leader’s needs. As you’re engaging with the leaders of these various design disciplines or programs that are all under your umbrella, how do you manage all of that?

Lesley-Ann: So we have six programs at OCAD. Lemme see if I could count them all. We have graphic design, advertising, illustration, industrial design, environmental design, and material art and design. And these are our undergrad programs. And then we have graduate programs in design, which I have less of a role in.

interestingly, in the undergrad programs, I use this as my entry conversation with people, I’ve had an active interest in all of these six programs. I mean, it’s a coincidence that I ended up here, but, you know, I always, I loved illustration as a teenager. My first job was in advertising. I worked in graphic design for a little bit because that’s where we all find work. I am an industrial designer. I’ve collaborated a lot with architects, and I used to do ceramics and jewelry, and so it’s that I am often drawing on a little bit of knowledge that I might have, you know, I am then this generalist and I’m drawing on some general information that I have on all of the programs.

Then my own knowledge of academia and teaching and learning, and that’s how I’m having the conversations with the different chairs of the programs, or the faculty members, and then my design practice most recently has been about co-design.

And so actually, I’m using those skills because I have to do a lot of listening to understand people’s work. And then sometimes I’m co-designing with them, right? Helping them to co-design their research, practice, co-design new courses that they’re teaching. Sometimes even co-designing experiences with industry. That’s really how I’m navigating all of these conversations. I’m using a lot of my co-design skills, as well as some of my knowledge from design across the disciplines.

And then, because I’ve been around a block a few times, you know, there’s stuff that you end up knowing because you’re old, right? Or you end up knowing how to have conversations with people because of age. And so some of the work that I’m doing is just based on that positionality, right? You know, I, I have a, a design professor colleague. I have to laugh as I say it, but he’s, he is been calling me an elder for a few years, and like would come to me for mentorship.

And now in this role it’s like, okay, I’m taking up that space and maybe assuming that kind of positionality as, okay, I’ll give you support and guidance to get you through the process. So that’s the way I’m doing this work now.

Peter: It sounds like, if I understood the six programs at OCAD, at least the undergrad programs, they’re not particularly digital. But I saw that Ben Shown from Blink UX had visited your class. And, obviously that’s a UX design practice.

What is your relationship to more digital design, UX design? How are you seeing that in the context of your school as well?

Lesley-Ann: Yeah, so now we, we might get into the conversations that might get me in trouble, but that’s fine, right? There are a lot of places where the UX content isn’t explicitly visible in the titles of programs, right?

I visit a lot of design schools and I think that a lot of design schools, we have these legacy titles. We have 20th century names. We might have actually like Bauhaus and Ulm kinds of names of programs. And I think that there is digital content in a lot of the programs, but it’s not always very visible, right? So the UX, UI work is happening primarily in our graphic design area, but also in industrial design.

And I saw this in the last school that I was in as well. We would see UX, UI in graphic design and industrial design, right? Oh, maybe Ben said this, somebody told me that architects make the best UX designers, which I didn’t know, right?

But, you know, so I think that there’s digital content everywhere. I don’t think that the names of the program clearly say where the digital content is. So actually like one conversation I’ve been leading in our program is, I’ve been having people brainstorm around different “what if?” scenarios. So one of the scenarios that I gave people recently is, well, what if we just concentrated less on things, you know, and focus more on a thing-less area of design?

Because our programs have legacy titles, they’re really programs around things, right? And so, you know, if we make the thing-lessness a little bit more explicit maybe that might prepare people for strategy and UX and UI and management and all of these other areas where there are in fact a lot of opportunities for design, right?

But I really just kind of planted the seed for the conversation and maybe ran away. No, I didn’t run away, but I do think that we will continue that conversation. Our masters programs are, I’ll say, thing-less programs. So we have SFI, which is Strategic Foresight and Innovation, Design for Health, and Inclusive Design.

You know, those are our three design masters programs, right?

And even though I’m asking people to think about the thing-lessness, right, I also like things to understand other ways of thinking. So, when I learn to make a chair, for example, I’m learning a process that I then can apply to anything.

And I think when designers can see their work in that kind of abstract way, then they can work anywhere. And that’s really I where wanna push the conversation to at OCAD where, you know, even though people are learning in these initial silos, that they understand, well, actually it’s a process that they’re learning that they can then apply in many different contexts, and we are bringing you here and, making you comfortable with being flexible and then you can take that flexibility in other places.

Peter: This will sound diminishing, and it’s not the intent. To what is OCAD a trade school, like, are students coming there to get skills to get jobs, versus maybe a more kind of classical view of education where they’re going there to engage in a passion and who knows what will come out on the other side, but the journey is the reward.

How are you framing that now as dean?

Lesley-Ann: So we have both conversations here, right? Where we do talk about, you know, what jobs are people going into. And then in some of my work, of course I have to work with industry and the thing is, I am more on the other side where I think education is about people learning to be flexible and learning to address issues and people exploring different paths.

And I do very often lead conversations like that. I’ve just had to remember that I actually have had the privilege of paying for very little education. You know, I studied in Brazil for free, studied in Trinidad for a fraction of the cost, had a, PhD scholarship. And, you know, sometimes when I talk about education being the journey, I do have to also think about the people who are mortgaged to the hilt to try to pay for education.

So, you know, we have to have both conversations at the same time. So we do have some areas in our programs where people are very, very job focused and very focused on what are the immediate rewards of the educational experience or immediate outcomes.

And then there are other people who think about it much more abstractly, and are thinking about the journey and the collaborations and the research that will happen, and then the research outputs. And so I am kind of like moving between both conversations all the time.

And maybe I should say too, then in the way that I am starting to promote collaboration, that’s also on the journey side of it, rather than the specific job side of it, where I’m really trying to promote collaborations across disciplines, where we could be exploring problems much more creatively. That leads to the jobs that people are looking for, you know, and creative experience, the different experiences of school lead to the outcomes that people want.

And actually also my hesitation about talking about jobs so much is that some of us don’t want jobs and that’s okay, right? I actually heard that at undergrad and I felt it was very transformative for me to hear that early, where my professor walked into the classroom and said, ” There are no jobs for any of you,” which is frightening to hear.

But his point was that we make them, we make the jobs. And I found that very empowering. And actually I didn’t really look for a job then for the first 10 years after I graduated because I was listening to what this professor had said and kind of like following different opportunities. And then I had a baby, and then I realized, okay, maybe I do need a job.

Peter: Separately, we can talk about the role of design and its relationship with capitalism.

Lesley-Ann: Yes, yes, yes.

Jesse: I find myself wondering about change, you know, and the relationship between academia and industry being so much kind of dictated by the pace of change in each of these spheres. And often I feel like the challenge for academia, and you referenced this when you talk about, you know, 20th century titles and things like that, the challenge is to stay in step with the current state of industry while also providing the necessary validation and reflection that academia has to offer.

And I’m curious about how you see that tension and how you resolve that within your programs.

Lesley-Ann: Yeah. I don’t know yet if I’m resolving it. You know, one way that I think about that tension is that there, well, I mean… I’m gonna respond in a few different ways, right?

One conversation that I’ve had with students actually is about relationships and just the importance of relationships. And this is gonna sound maybe a little airy fairy, but it’s real, right? That school context, university context is creating an environment where these relationships are formed and whether these relationships are formed with other students, with faculty, with alumni, with industry, you know, all of these relationships are actually important for students’ growth right now.

If we are faculty that are always just embedded in our work, in our teaching, we maybe can’t keep up with the pace of change of industry, right? We have different areas of focus, you know, we are trying to do different things with the way that we teach.

What we can do is we can continue to build our relationship with industry, right? We can, you know, be bringing industry partners, whether into classes, giving talks. Again, we can be building these relationships with industry partners.

And then I think our job is to keep people flexible and fresh so that, I have to say, industry continues the work, right? I, don’t think that it’s possible for any school to prepare students a hundred percent for a specific job, but, you know, we can have people leave school with the right mindsets and the flexibility and the ability to innovate and all of that, and then they continue learning in industry.

Peter: Relationships is something Jesse and I talk a lot about in the context of leadership, right? To lead is to relate to others and bring them along with you. And the reason we talk so much about it is that designers are rarely taught how to develop strong kind of business relationships, at least.

Lesley-Ann: Mm-hmm

Jesse: The focus is on craft in their development.

Peter: …and we talk with folks who’ve been doing design work for a decade, they get into a leadership role, and all of a sudden they now need to tap into their soft skills. It’s not, soft skills is not a phrase that I like, but it’s, it’s often how it’s labeled.

And so I’m wondering, given what you said, how do you see helping folks earlier on and possibly in school develop these soft skills? Is that something that’s maybe an evolution in what you’re teaching or, how you are guiding students so that they are better prepared when they enter the world?

So often design programs are tailored towards design services, like, agency practice, which is very different than what most of the designers are now embedded in an enterprise. And I’m wondering how that’s maybe changed how you are setting people up as they leave school.

Lesley-Ann: So I am going to take what you just said and use this as a soundbite for everything. You know, just the importance of relationships I don’t know how I ended up learning about the value of relationships, right. But I, think that the relationships are as important or more important than a craft.

And maybe it’s that if you are going into leadership in particular, I changed the way that I thought about design work. Maybe like if I think about my first 20 years of practice as a designer, which has aged me, right? I think somewhere after the first 10 years I was like, oh, it’s not just about me. It’s actually about all of these other relationships that I need. And then started to realize that these relationships also lead to other opportunities or learning,

so that has been a work in progress.

But we have made this a visible challenge as we talk about teaching post pandemic. You know, even though the pandemic was five years ago, we are still feeling the impact of the pandemic on the teaching and learning.

And I’ve been explicit in my leadership role saying that we are talking about relationships and we are going to do what we can to make sure that the students are building relationships, because the pandemic kind of took that ability away from them, right?

Now some of it is my philosophy driving this where I think, okay, like I said, we can’t teach you every single skill, but we can encourage you to have relationships with people who have the skill, or we can encourage you to develop relationships that will lead you to other opportunities, so it’s that the relationships are needed sometimes to maybe backfill.

You only have a, finite amount of time. That sounds so transactional, right. But I mean, you know, you, you have a finite amount of time in school and, in focusing on your relationships, other things can happen even after the school experience is gone.

Jesse: I find myself wondering about the change that is going to be required for the school to create the space, as you put it, for these things to happen, and your role within that as change maker. You’re relatively new in the role. There are clearly some expectations that came along with the chair.

And I wonder about how you make the case, build momentum, get in there and make change happen, as a new leader in an organization like this one.

Lesley-Ann: So let me drop a name now. My friend Don Norman. And, seriously when I became Dean, Don said, alright, you’ll now be a public figure. I was like okay. And then, you…

Peter: So you had known Don already.

Lesley-Ann: Yes, yes. I have a kind of funny story about… Don probably doesn’t know the first time we interacted, but I think I had a paper out there in the world, that was written even before I started my PhD, like a really badly written paper that he thought was interesting actually.

And I was writing about design education, like Trinidad or something like that. And he emailed me about the paper and then he kind of commented and he says, and your citations are wrong or something. We started off having these email interactions and then our relationship got closer through the Future of Design Education projects.

And then we’ve had quite a few interactions since. He also told me, well, you can’t change everything or you can’t get everybody on board the train and you have to make small wins. And so that’s really you know, the same way I talk about relationships for the students. I am working on my relationships with faculty. We have about 70 full-time faculty. And so I’ve been working on the relationships with them and figuring out in each relationship what’s a small win or a win-win kind of scenario, And how can we then amplify that to do other things? S

So that’s where you hear maybe MBA talking, right? Where I’m really trying to see, well, okay, what is it that people are trying to get to? How does that align with some of our academic and strategic goals? How does it align with trends in the industry or in academia, you know, and how can we get everything to align so that people are thriving.

I really like these words, thriving, flourishing, joy, and I think that despite the crazy context that higher education might find itself in, that I really have to figure out how am I supporting people to do well in the work that they’re doing.

Jesse: So for you as a leader it seems like there’s always the risk that that support going out turns into no time left for anything but line item firefighting with people all the time.

How do you maintain balance between being a support resource for your leaders in the way that they need, and your own leadership?

Lesley-Ann: So I carve out some time for strategic thinking, right? On my calendar, right? I mean, it doesn’t always say strategic thinking. But I do some big thinking regularly. I ask other people to do big thinking as well.

And the first time I did it in one of our meetings, somebody said, we don’t have time for blue sky thinking. I’m like, yes we do. You know, because the thing is, higher education right now feels like it’s on fire. I mean, I’m in Canada we are not dealing with the same issues that you’re dealing with in the States, but you know, everywhere in the world right now, higher education actually is in chaos, right?

And it’s like we can’t only be putting out fires. We do have to think a little bit more long term, and we have to make sure that we have space for that, right? So there’s that. I regularly do professional development. You know, I find courses, go to other people’s events and learn. I make time to learn. That’s what it is.

And then I work with a coach who’s like a therapist and she listens to me and then she says, you’re not crazy, you know? So, so yeah, I think to balance things, we have to create the time to be doing different types of thinking.

And then actually, I hate to say it, I switch it off at a certain time, you know I’m a parent, I’m a partner, I, really try to turn off the workday at a certain time and then go and walk or kayak or whatever, you know, with people who maybe love me a little bit more than um, than the other people I support, right?

And, and then that keeps the balance that, maintains it.

Jesse: Hmm.

Peter: So I should have realized this earlier. You are the second Canadian dean that we’ve had on our show actually recently. In that we had Roger Martin, I don’t know if you know Roger, he had been the dean of the Rotman School at University of Toronto. He’s not there anymore, but we had him on because he was very much about the intersection of design and business.

And one of the things he mentioned is that when he became Dean of the Rotman School, He had a vision for the program and it was actually a very simple vision. He said he wanted the Rotman School to be Canada’s name business school outside of Canada, like to have visibility outside of Canada.

And then it took him 15 years or something to like chip away and make that happen. But he was able to make that impact.

And I’m wondering your vision for the school at OCAD, if you had one coming in, in terms of what you thought it could be, or now that you’ve been there almost a year, you know, what do you see as your vision? What is that change that you’re trying to lead to towards, for the school.

Lesley-Ann: Yeah. It’s nice that you interviewed Roger Martin. I’ve never met him, but I mean, he did what he set out to do because I knew about him and Rotmans before I even knew about anything in Canada, right?

My big vision before I got here was I was like OCAD has decolonizing design written in its academic and strategic plan and goals, and so there is an energy around decolonizing here that I’ve not seen in other places that I’ve worked. And so my big goal when I came in was around making decolonizing design, making OCAD really the visible place around the world for that work. And I imagined us, you know, doing partnerships with people in New Zealand and Australia and South America and, you know, really then bringing this more fringe movement into mainstream design.

And then of course, I would’ve been building on Dori Tunstall’s work before me, right? ‘Cause was the dean before me. And I think there’s still a place for that work. I am now of course recognizing that, okay, Roger Martin took 15 years to do that. You know, deans, we think in five year terms. And so my first five years, I think the goals might be a little bit more conservative, right? When I came in, I found that people wanted more community post pandemic.

Peter: Mm-hmm.

Lesley-Ann: So, you know, some of the work is again, about, actually all of the work is about relationships. So it’s about relationships between faculty and students, relationships with academic partners.

So I’ve been having a lot of conversations with universities in the area about, okay, let’s collaborate some more, let’s do more research. I am, in fact, investing a lot of energy into research because I’m coming from an R1 university in the States, North Carolina State University into OCAD.

So I’m trying to bring in that kind of research mindset as well. So, you know, some of my goals are around research relationships, and then some industry partnerships. So, I mean, little bit more conservative, but it is in fact, you know, they’re tied to what Roger Martin’s goals are. You know, definitely about OCAD’s visibility, you know, making sure that OCAD is very visible globally.

And then that we are doing research, and we are driving industry practices around our values, you know, so OCAD is a very values-driven institution and we are transparent about our values, and I think that we can also transform some of the industries that we are active in, you know, around our values, around decolonization and indigenization and anti-racism and all of these words and philosophies that really drive the work that we do.

And I think that we can impact the industries that our students go into.

Jesse: It’s interesting to think about how this mission carries within it the notion of design as a tool for creating positive change broadly in the world by changing design itself. And I’m curious about the relationship between design and change as you see it, because I know that this is something that you’ve definitely given some thought to over the course of your career.

Lesley-Ann: Yeah. I think as designers, we are always trying to change the world, right? You know, okay, so let me use some quotes here. So there’s that Herbert Simon quote about design is always the practice of, changing existing circumstances into preferred circumstances, right?

And so if we are thinking in that way, then everything that we do in our work is about imagining this future and thinking about what are the steps to get there, right? So I think that it’s a real superpower that designers have.

You know, working across five different universities, I’ve seen that almost every design student, you know, when they are given the opportunity to create their own projects, their projects are very often about creating social change and campaigns and making sure that the world is better. And I think that we could really lean into that.

So actually, one of the scenarios that I gave the faculty in our brainstorming activity a couple weeks ago was about what if our program was just designed for social justice and maybe we got rid of all the silos, and everybody then is kind of focused on that social change or social justice or, you know, because a lot of the projects that faculty want to work on, that students want to work on, are in fact in that social change, social justice space.

So I thought, well, what if we did that, instead of having an advertising program and a graphic design program and a… right? People have to warmed up to these conversations.

It is what we do as designers. It sounds so airy fairy, you know, we, are always trying to make the world a better place, right? And so, you know, we could actually be more explicit about that too in our education.

Peter: I was thinking back to your MBA, as well as a PhD in design, and your teaching design, but you maintain this relationship with industry, so you’re kind of straddling these, and you’re talking about how designers seek to drive meaningful change, positive change, but designers are also, in my experience, really good at getting in their own way of realizing the change they seek, right?

They don’t focus on relationships, they focus on the thing. When it’s time to speak up and engage and do the work of driving change, which often requires politics and communication, designers are, like, many designers are just back all, all the way off of that. They’re like, no, not me.

But the reason I brought up the MBA thing is, you’re seeing folks early on in their development, and some of it for me is, personality types that gravitate towards different fields and practices, right?

And, you know, you’ve spanned both. So you kind of suggest that it’s not a hundred percent, and I don’t mean to be too stereotyped here, but there does seem to be a personality type that drifts towards design. There’s perhaps a different personality type that drifts towards business and marketing and finance.

How do we help those folks in design embrace what those folks getting an MBA learn about how to show up with others and make change? ‘Cause that change management’s a formal class, right, In an MBA program, that designers are never taught.

But, what would it mean to try to seed earlier on or help those folks, whose personality might encourage a certain introversion or reticence or focus on the work and craft, that if they want to make change, they gotta show up differently?

How is that going from your point of view?

Lesley-Ann: So I used to teach a class, which I call a social studies class for designers. And I’ve actually met more and more people who are teaching that kind of critical education that was absent from design education. So, you know, how do we get designers to think more critically? We definitely have to weave that critical thinking into the education.

So my design education was about pretty things. And that’s not enough. If designers want to change the world or whatever we say we want to do, we need to know more about the world. Like you said, we have to understand politics and current affairs and, you know, we really need to have broader educational experience than designers used to get some years ago.

And so I’ve seen more and more people, you know, like at the academic conferences, reporting on how they’re changing their classes to have more critical discussions in the classroom and then have designers engage with people more.

So I think of the business people as different though. The first conversation about the critical literacy, that’s like getting the designers closer to the social scientists and maybe the humanities people, so that we are seeing the world through a different lens.

And then in my MBA, actually, like, organizational behavior and organizational development. Those were the courses that fascinated me because I could see, again, the designerly-ness in those courses that I had never had to think about before, right?

So, to answer that part of the question, I don’t know that I’ve seen a lot of people doing that early on, you know, having people understand organizations and how organizations work, how people work in that kind of way. I haven’t seen a lot of that in the undergrad training, but I’ve seen a lot more people bringing critical conversations into undergrad.

So I do think that design professionals will begin to change and look different as this kind of education gets a little bit more common. But the thing is, there is always that tension between, let’s just focus on craft and skill, and then let’s get a broader education. And I will always be in the camp of let’s expose the designers to a broader education. Because anybody can learn the crafts or I hate to say, now we bring the AI in…

Peter: That relates a little bit to what I was thinking when I was last in Toronto, I didn’t get a chance to see you in a conversation with Michael Dila, where you were discussing the future of design.

design

Lesley-Ann: Yeah.

Peter: And I wonder when I ask you what is the future of design, right, what are you leaning toward as you look out? ‘Cause you’ve mentioned co-design, right? You’ve mentioned relationships, you’ve just mentioned AI, right? What is your sense of the change and trends that are brewing, and how are you going to, I don’t wanna say maintain relevance, but, you know, stay engaged, appropriately engaged. Not just yourself, but the school that you’re helping lead, so that it, especially in what feels like a time of, I don’t even say rapid change, just discombobulation…

Lesley-Ann: yeah…

Peter: Just, it’s a weird time right now. So how are you steering the ship through that and toward what’s the distant point on the horizon there?

Lesley-Ann: Okay, so again, this is gonna sound so fuzzy. I, It’s about flexibility and relationships. You know, that’s kind of like the only thing that’s gonna get us through this rollercoaster, right?

I am not afraid of AI or higher education is under threat, I mean, I’ll say that I’m not afraid of that threat, we’ll always be relevant. I think that we will be less relevant if we are fixed and we say things like: This is the curriculum. This is the way we do things. This is…

So, it’s that we have to be part of these conversations and we have to be experimenting with the different trends as they come and go, right? So if the trend now is AI, we all have to kind of figure out a little bit of it, right? We might not have to stay on the trend, but we have to understand what it does.

You know, I think that the core skills that we have will always be relevant, and it’s up to us to also emphasize our relevance to whatever society we’re in.

Jesse: What are some of those skills that you think will keep design relevant in the future?

Lesley-Ann: So, I think that making is important.

Well, actually understanding the agency of making things, you know, just that thing of being able to sit down and even without AI or anything like that, sit down and say, well, okay, this is the idea I have in my head and I get this idea from my head onto a screen or onto paper or whatever.

And then the thing is made, whether I make it with my hands, or whether I’m using 3D printing or, you know, I think that that’s making skill and that making ability will always be relevant.

And not everybody in society, even though everybody makes, not everybody is aware of that agency and that power of making things.

And I, in my own research, I’ve taken that agency, designerly agency, and used it in children’s education, and that’s how some of the work that I do around social change is tied to that thing of knowing, I can make this object, maybe I can make, this will sound so hubristic, I can make the world, right?

But knowing that you can take power of things around you like that, I think will always be relevant. Even if the tools we are using to make things will change.

Jesse: I’m struck by the idea that design is inherently about agency, about empowerment, about the ability to do more with your dreams than just dream them.

Lesley-Ann: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I have an industrial design bias, and those of us who do industrial design, we have no idea what jobs we are gonna do, right?

But I think when I speak, ’cause a lot of people just never get jobs in, you know, there are some jobs for industrial designers, but I’d say they’re fewer than graphic design as a matter, but industrial design education, I think, gives you a sense, well, the industrial designers I know think that they own the world. Why? Because they know how to make a chair. They know how the printing press works. You know, they could kinda look around a room and break apart every single object in a room. And, that gives them sometimes this kind of sense of power that maybe makes them very obnoxious.

But I think that that’s, that’s good for people to know that we make this world around us. Well, I, I’ll use language that I use often these days. The world doesn’t just happen to us. We make it. And I think that that’s good knowledge for us to have. So that it creates some action as well from people.

Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. Because inherent in that knowledge that we make the world is the implication that we can remake it anytime we want, and that’s a powerfully optimistic statement, I think.

Lesley-Ann: Yeah.

Peter: You mentioned earlier, OCAD’s values system, or set of values. And some that you inherited around things like decolonizing design, but you also recognize that you’re not gonna like “Decolonized design, check, moving… What’s next?” Like that’s, that’s a process.

But I’m wondering, something I think a lot about is a challenge that designers, but particularly design leaders, face when it comes to values.

And this touches, I think on some of what we were talking about with respect to agency. Design is a humanistic endeavor, right? It’s in the arts and humanities.

We are often, though, designers and design leaders, are working in industry. And industry has a different set of values, a corporate set of values, a more calculating set of values. An MBA set of values, maybe a little more mechanistic, little less about agency and creativity and generation, and a bit more about calculation and deconstruction and analysis, and a different set of tools.

And I’m wondering, navigating these different value systems and your engagement with industry, you’re talking about trying to help bring some of OCAD’s values into industry. Like my country’s on an anti-DEI kick unfortunately…

Lesley-Ann: mm-hmm.

Jesse: Hmm.

Peter: …Canada I know it’s a different conversation there.

But I, I imagine there’s tension in the values that OCAD is encouraging and the values that industry, even your industry partners are willing to receive. I, I don’t know how much decolonizing talk you can bring inside some of these types of corporate environments.

How is that conversation going, and how are you helping designers think about, or maybe even just for yourself, think about living in these different worlds of a more humanistic practice, of care, of ethics, of equity, and then a more corporate industry mindset of business results.

Lesley-Ann: Well I try not to think of it as different spaces. And when I used to teach, we would have conversations about ethics and the students would talk about what do I do if I get a job offer from tech company, whatever.

And I would actually say, I want you to take that job because I would prefer that you are designing my technology than the person who has not had these conversations about ethics. That’s what my hope is, as leader, as an educator, that we are having these conversations about ethics or we are having these conversations that are driven by values, and the graduates will take these values with them into the work that they do.

Interestingly, well, in Canada you can have conversations about decolonization everywhere and indigenization and, you know, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you know, we went into a conversation with RBC or TD Bank and we led with decolonization because that’s the context that we are in, because everybody talks about it all the time.

Maybe in 10 years time in design we’ll see that because really, well, okay, things are complicated on your side of the border because people can’t talk about these things anymore. But if I think about design education, even up to last year, at every single conference I went to, people were talking about these critical issues so much that I would’ve said then in 10 years time, everybody in design would be bringing these values into everything that they would doing, right? And we wouldn’t be thinking in this kind of bifurcated way, right?

Now, I’ve always said to my, like, industry partners, I’m in academia and I know I, maybe I’m in a little bit of a bubble or privileged space where I can lead with these values, but I, also say at least I can do this work and be public about this work.

And that can drive maybe the way some people in corporate spaces have their conversations. So you know, we can lead the corporate world to continue to talk about values and I am in fact hoping that our students and our graduates will go out and take the values conversations with them into the world of work.

Jesse: Speaking of optimism and design, what are you most optimistic about l ooking ahead?

Lesley-Ann: I’m generally optimistic. I’m a little bit over-optimistic about futures, you know, and equitable futures and I imagine social change in this way where we reach one barrier and we eliminate it, and then we find the next one and we eliminate it and we find the next one.

And so I’m just kind of optimistic that we will be always moving forward and changing the world and it will get better and better and better.

And so 10 years from now, everything is gonna be a lot easier for people than it is now. And maybe I’m thinking explicitly about people with marginalized identities.

You know, I think a lot about accessibility, about homophobia, transphobia, you know, so I, just imagine that life will be easier in 10 years time. Fingers crossed.

Peter: What’s the role of design, in driving towards this positive change?

Lesley-Ann: There’s the role in the movement of, you know, galvanizing people and getting them on board the movement. And then there’s a structural kind of change or structural work that we can also do as designers, right? So if you are in UI or UX, you could be bringing in principles of trauma-informed design from the start, or, you know, principles around accessibility.

You’re bringing that into the work and you’re making sure that bad design doesn’t go out at all. So I, think both in making the movement of people, and then just looking at the individual issues and trying to just break them apart and get rid of them, there’s a lot that we can do as designers and I was prepped for that question because my students ask me this all the time when we did that social studies class.

They’re like, so what can I do as a designer to change the world? And I’m like, it doesn’t matter if it’s big change or small change, we can all do something.

Jesse: Fantastic. Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel, thank you so much.

Lesley-Ann: Thank you so much for this invitation.

Peter: Oh our pleasure.

How can people find you, engage with you?

Lesley-Ann: So LinkedIn should pay me, but LinkedIn is the easiest. The easiest place to find me is actually LinkedIn. Yes, all of social media, LinkedIn and Instagram are easy, but LinkedIn is the best place to locate me. And then I mean my email address is somewhere on OCAD website, but it is lnoel at ocadu dot ca and people can respond.

I’m actually slower on email, but I’m available and accessible to people.

Peter: And anything you want to plug?

Lesley-Ann: So I am, I, I could plug my book.

Peter: Please do.

Lesley-Ann: I’m the author of Design Social Change, because I really have been having these conversations about agency and seeing the world around us and understanding what needs to be changed and then taking action around that change. So I’ll, I’ll definitely plug that.

And I’ll also say to people, if you’re in Toronto, come and visit OCAD. ‘Cause we are in a really cool building downtown Toronto. So even if you just come and take a picture in front of the building, come and do that. Yes.

Jesse: Thank you so much for being with us.

Lesley-Ann: Thank you.

Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholz. com and jessejamesgarrett. Com. Peter recently launched The Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter. Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz. And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.

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Summary: Peter and Jesse are joined by design and business consultant John Gleason. Coming up through P&G’s famous design initiative, we get his perspective on design beyond digital products, such as consumer packaged goods, we explore some significant parallels across industries and design domains with important lessons on the pitfalls that lead to diminishing influence for design leaders, and share what they should advocate in order to break the downward spiral.

Help UX and Get a Chance to receive $100! Peter is conducting a global UX and Design Organizational Health survey to better understand the state of our practice and industry. 5 respondents will receive either a $100 gift card or 1 hr of consulting/coaching with Peter. It takes about 10 minutes to complete. Thank you!

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way,

Peter: Navigating the opportunities

Jesse: and challenges

Peter: of design and design leadership,

Jesse: On today’s show, is design dead? That’s the question strategy consultant John Gleason asked at a recent design conference panel. The ensuing discussion struck some familiar notes for digital product design leaders, but John Gleason doesn’t come from digital product design. Today, we’ll get his perspective on design beyond digital products, such as consumer packaged goods, the stuff you find on the shelves in grocery and drugstore. We’ll explore some significant parallels across industries and design domains with important lessons on the pitfalls that lead to diminishing influence for design leaders, what they should advocate for, and how to break the downward spiral.

Peter: Hi John. Thank you for joining us.

John: Delighted to be here, Peter. Thank you.

Peter: So you and I met on the internet, specifically LinkedIn, around a discussion that was happening based on an article written in Fast Company that was explaining what this journalist had witnessed at a panel of design leaders that you helped moderate. And the title of the article had the provocative statement: Is Design Dead? So that’s how I’d like to start this conversation with you. Maybe we’re starting at the end, and then this can be a very brief conversation…

John: What if I said the answer is yes, end of story?

Peter: Then, then, then we wrap up the podcast.

Jesse: Thanks everybody for listening. You can find us at findingourway.design.

Peter: But seriously, I do want to ask, it is meant to be a provocative, obviously there were discussions happening on that panel and in that room that led to this question. So when you’re faced with a question is design dead, how do you respond?

John: Well, we respond by creating a conference to talk about it. So my conference partners and I, David Butler, who was the first head of design at Coca-Cola and Fred Richards, who’s a long time ECD, CCO -type person in the brand design space at big agencies. The three of us came together just simply to talk about the industry itself.

And as we compared notes, I have started to see that design is in decline, particularly in the consumer facing space, probably starting eight or nine years ago, kind of as evidenced by shrinking budgets and shrinking organizations and diminishing the reporting structure of design into leadership in those companies.

And a lot of the people that I’ve talked to kind of chalk it up to, oh, well that’s the economy. Oh, we’re gonna cut budgets, it’s belt tightening, it’s these things. But I’ve had the chance to peek inside more than a hundred big corporations and a couple thousand design agencies. And so I see patterns that emerged.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: And that led to the provocation of “Is design dead?” And I think we inherently knew that the answer was no, but I don’t think the rest of the room…so we had about a hundred people design leaders from various companies, mostly consumer facing corporations, but we had telecom, we had financial services, we had healthcare, we had core tech there in the room represented as well.

I don’t think most of the people in the room saw the patterns because they only see what’s happening in their company, or the one or two companies they may have been a part of. And so there was certainly evidence, as we started to unfold some of the things, people were, “Oh, just thought that was belt tightening. I just thought that was seasonal. I just thought that was post pandemic economy.” That started the conversation.

Jesse: So tell us a little bit about these design teams that you were studying and what was the change that you noticed over time? What was happening with these teams?

John: So a, few things that I’ve had the chance to see. I’ve tracked about 200, almost 250 companies since about 2016, 2017.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: And it’s things like, what agencies do they work with? Have they built in-house teams? What’s the reporting structure of the organizations? And some of the patterns that I’ve seen, Jesse, are 39% of those companies, so 95 companies of the 243, have cut the top one or two levels of their design function…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

John: … or they’ve downgraded the title to some lower title in the company, or they’ve downgraded the boss, the reporting title of the boss of those organizations. Conversely, only 6%, only 15 of those companies have done the opposite, have elevated design with a higher title or a higher reporting status in the company. 9% of them, 22 companies have eliminated more than half of their entire design function in a single year.

Jesse: Wow.

John: 84% of them, this one shouldn’t be a surprise to people. 84% of the design leaders or the heads of design reports to a specific function in the company…

Jesse: hmm

John: Marketing, innovation product. To me, the troubling part of that is 75% of them don’t report to the head of that function.

Jesse: hmm.

John: They report to somebody lower in that functional hierarchy, which again, to me, signals a deemphasis of design, as a more of a service organization than a beacon for the future. Almost half, 47% of these companies, the head of design is at a senior director or lower.

Jesse: Hmm.

John: They’re not even in the executive community inside of those companies, nor do they have a career opportunity to grow beyond that director, senior director, some are even senior manager.

Jesse: That’s as far as the design ladder reaches in those organizations.

John: Right, right. Yeah.

Jesse: So I find myself curious about the mandates of these teams and what these teams are being asked to deliver, and whether those mandates are shrinking as the teams scale down and move downstream as you’re describing in these very large organizations.

So what kind of design are we talking about here?

John: They certainly are diminishing in the scope of influence inside of those companies. So many of them, the design organization in a lot of consumer goods companies is really a packaging function.

And it ends up being a decoration function for packaging.

Jesse: Okay.

John: In some cases, they might be able to influence a better consumer experience, but, in many cases, especially in the, present economic circumstance, it’s cost cut, diminished, streamlined.

Jesse: Right. We’re basically talking about boxes and bottles on retail shelves.

John: Yeah. Yeah. And, there are some where design sits in an R and D or innovation organization…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

John: … where design influences, again, the structural component of packaging.

Occasionally they’ll influence the juice and the powders and the things that are inside the boxes and bottles. But mostly more powerful R and D organization says, Hey, design, we’ve got that. We’ll take care of that.

Jesse: Right.

John: And they tend to be looking at very narrow components inside the company. The other interesting thing, particularly as it relates to a more digital component, is many of these companies have assigned a chief digital officer in charge of the digital transformation and digital pathway for those big companies, building their own design teams, largely UX, UI and some development, although development tends to be outsourced and offshored. And they’re not connected to the other design capabilities inside the company.

Jesse: Right. Yeah.

John: And in fact they sometimes compete. I did some consulting work for a couple of companies where there was somewhat of a bitter, antagonistic relationship between the head of design and the head of digital.

Jesse: Yeah. Well this is, I laugh because this is a regular pattern that we saw in our consulting work going back 20 years. That if the digital product design team was more closely aligned with digital than with design, sometimes that created a conflict and that created friction internally in terms of how things got done.

I’m curious about the evolution that you’ve seen in these mandates. So in what ways have these design teams had to refocus their efforts as they’ve scaled down?

John: I spent 20 years at Procter and Gamble. I was a part of the very earliest portions of P and G’s journey to elevate design.

Jesse: Hmm.

John: When I joined the design function, there were 60 people in the design function at P and G. When I left, about five years later, there were 350. It was all around strategic design, leadership, the head of design, Claudia Kotchka at the time, and the CEO AG Lafley had a vision for design. So, why I believe design is in decline is most of the design responsibilities that I see today are nowhere close to what I experienced at P and G.

Peter: Hmm.

Jesse: Hmm

John: That’s the decline part, but you know, there are one or two work generations that have come in and out of the workforce since the early two thousands. I’m often brought into corporate organizations either by the head of design who wants to try to figure out how to articulate up to the C-suite about how design is more important, how it should be invited earlier, how it should be organized and not just touching an artifact, you know, a package or a website or a banner or something, but influence the entire enterprise.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: The C-suite often has no clue what design would do with the rest of the enterprise other than the thing that they had been doing…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

John: … in the company. And so there’s often that disconnect.

Jesse: right

John: One of the things that I often see, first of all, there is no school largely for design leaders to step in and talk business.

Jesse: Right.

John: Very, very few programs. IIT does a nice job. SCAD is beginning to do things like that by building a business innovation component. But largely it’s teaching the tools of the industry. So when somebody lands in one of these important jobs, they speak the language that they know, whatever it is: UX, UI, digital, color theory, communication theory, whatever those things are. And the thing that I have seen is, when they are under duress, when the business pressures start to pile up, most design leaders recess back into becoming uber project managers for the design activities, rather than leaning into the organizational component of influencing structure in humans and leadership.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: If it gets to that, it begins to spiral. And within two years, that person is often gone because they’re micromanaging their team, and they’re trying to deliver great outputs, but not really influencing…

Jesse: Right.

John: …where design can influence. Design has a superpower of seeing things that other people can’t see, but often can’t articulate that in the context of the business language.

Jesse: It almost suggests that, there’s, like, this gravitational force that pulls leaders down toward this sort of operational value proposition, as opposed to a more strategic value proposition for design as a function, for themselves as leaders, that takes active, ongoing energy to resist for leaders, yeah?

John: One of the things I observed at P and G was when design was added as this new strategic capability for the company at the request of the CEO AG Lafley, the other functions felt like they had to defend themselves against design taking the fun stuff away from them. And part of it was, it isn’t trying to take things away. There was a component of let’s make sure the right people are with the right skills, are working on the right things at the right time. The influence of design was intended to try to make everything else better.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: The ability to step back and really advocate for the user, in our case, the consumer. You know, P&G was pretty well known for consumer research and brand management and marketing, a lot of other things. So the idea that design could step in and knew better than these things that have been in place for 50 or a hundred years, some people kind of took it personally.

I earn a lot of enemies in the design space when I say this. I say if a company really wants to elevate design in a truly strategic way for the entire enterprise, it’s my opinion, the first head of design probably should not be somebody with a portfolio.

Jesse: Hmm. Who should they be instead?

John: It should be somebody that might have come out of the business, might have been a marketer, might have been an innovator, might have been a strategist, but has a high IQ for design because those people know how to have the battles with other people with more stripes.

They know how to, play the political game. They know how to influence. And I’m gonna be horrendously unfair and I’m probably gonna get a lot of mail from your listeners. Designers index introvert.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Peter: Yeah. You’re not gonna get any pushback on that.

John: Which means I don’t want conflict. I’m gonna run away from conflict and I’m not gonna address it.

Whereas Claudia was an accountant by education and a marketer by training. And she had no fear walking into people that had more stripes than her to say, you’re not doing it right. I mean, she threatened a few business unit presidents to say, I’m taking your whole design team because you haven’t treated them well. You don’t respect them, and they all wanna quit, so I’m gonna take them.

And of course, you can’t do that. And, you know, then the tete-a-tete occurred, and those are extreme examples, but part of this is, unless a business leader, whatever function you’re in, and I’ll highlight design in particular, unless you’re willing to fall on the sword for some things…

Jesse: mm.

John: … then, you can expect that the pressures of the business environment and the politics has the risk of crumbling your status in the enterprise.

Peter: A couple of thoughts. The first, it’s interesting to hear you say that about that idea of your first head of design not necessarily being someone who came up through the practice. It sounds like Claudia was like that. Jesse and I have had that experience, him more directly than I, with the head of design at Capital One, which was the company that acquired Adaptive Path, was Scott Zimmer, who… his background was in brand and marketing.

But he was design mature. He understood the opportunity that design delivered, and this was, you know, over a decade ago, better than almost any design executive I ever met, he knew how to communicate up. He knew how to get senior leadership excited about what designers could do in a way that designers often struggle articulating their own value.

So I’ve seen that. I wanna go back though to the design in decline conversation. ‘Cause in order to decline it had to have risen…

John: yep.

Peter: …before then. And you explain the P and G story where a very savvy CEO invests in this function, makes it strategic.

Like AG Lafley clearly had a plan. With Claudia had a kind of lieutenant who could realize that plan. But that’s likely an outlier, Right. Whereas in these other organizations where design was elevated, I’m curious what you see. ‘Cause you know, you’re, coming at us from a consumer packaged goods, maybe more in the advertising, marketing side compared to where Jesse and I live.

But my concern for those design leaders who were elevated is that they had not been set up for success by their leadership. Their leadership didn’t know what they were doing, elevating them into those roles. Say we’ve taken a director or senior director of packaging design, we promoted that person into a VP role that had broader design mandate.

But this person with a packaging design background knows packaging design. They don’t understand design for innovation, design for new product experience, all of those things. Maybe they tried, maybe they didn’t, doesn’t matter.

But at some point, like, because this person hadn’t been set up for success, it would almost be inevitable that there would be a decline, regardless of broader economic conditions. I’m seeing you nod your head.

So I’m curious how this could have been handled better by everybody, you know 10 to 15 years ago instead of like, oh, you have a title with the word design in it, so we’re gonna give you more authority, but we’re not gonna necessarily understand the implications of what it means for you to be an executive. We’re just gonna all of a sudden give you that title. it just feels like, this was bound to happen.

John: You’re exactly right that it is in fact bound to happen because the vast majority of the companies that I’ve worked with and or studied, where the company chose to make a deliberate attempt to elevate design with a higher title, a new person that they perhaps brought from outside. The first observation I’ve made is most of the senior leaders, the C-suite leaders in those companies they don’t think somebody at a VP, SVP, EVP or Chief title needs to have somebody around them to protect them.

Jesse: Mm.

John: No other chief or SVP in the company, you know, they’re navigating the politics themselves. The head of R&D, the head of finance, the head of marketing. The most successful of those, where it was elevated, Proctor is one where AG Lafley was, in essence, the protector for Claudia.

When Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo, she also was the inventor that design was gonna make a difference at PepsiCo. First elevated somebody internally. Didn’t work so well. There was a big packaging fiasco with Tropicana. But, I give her a lot of credit by not walking away from it after that fiasco and she continued to lean into it. Ultimately hired Mauro Porcini.

Peter: Mm.

John: David Butler, when he was brought into Coke, there was an influencer behind him that planted the seed that design could be more strategic. Mark Mathieu, who went on to Unilever, then Samsung but in those organizations there were people that were aligned with and connected to those people to help provide some business interference.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: And in those organizations, they had a longer run and a more strategic run for design.

Where the newly appointed head of design steps in, I’ve seen 10 or 15 of these where they were promised access to the CEO and the CMO but that access turned into, oh, I need to prepare three weeks ahead of time and send the deck one week ahead of time in order to have a meeting with the CEO.

Whereas the example, and again, I’m super spoiled by this AG Lafley role model. Claudia had a design board on which Ivy Ross was on the board at the time. She was at the Gap or Old Navy. She’s now at Google. Tim Brown was on that board. AG never missed a board meeting. So the relationship that design had with the CEO at P and G was a casual one.

Jesse: Right.

John: It wasn’t surrounded by formalities and PowerPoint decks and, you know, six weeks lead time. McKinsey did an amazing study on the business value of design in 2018. DMI did something where they created a design value index with 16 or 18 companies, although I think they cherry picked 16 companies that were performing well so that they could track the commercial value. The UK Design Council did it before DMI and then my own observations, I’ve kind of developed this notion of six attributes of what I call design engaged companies, one of which is advocacy. That the senior most people in the company see that design is a critical component of the company and they support it appropriately. There’s access, there’s meetings, there’s, you know, public recognition you know, titles and all those other things that come with advocacy.

But it’s just not the two humans. It’s just not a CEO and the head of design. it’s advocating that design needs to touch other parts of the company.

Jesse: Mm.

John: You know, when I step into a C-suite conversation, I often say, so, you know, how does design play a role in your company? Oh, you know, packaging or product or innovation. and I often touch on things, well, do you have any design talent looking after employee engagement, trying to create a place that more and more people have a passion for wanting to work here?

Oh, well, that’s our HR organization. It’s like, you know, with all due respect to the talented human resources people, most of human resources is built to protect the corporation.

Peter: Right.

Jesse: Indeed.

Yeah.

John: … to inspire more loyalty to the enterprise.

Jesse: So I find myself curious about this notion that there’s a skillset that is needed in order to really drive design at this executive level, that these design leaders have not been able to cultivate within themselves. I work as a coach with lots of design leaders at different stages in this process. And for some folks, they get to that executive level and they realize that like, oh, everything that I’ve learned up to this point is almost completely irrelevant now.

John: Right.

Jesse: And so I’m curious about like, what are the corners that you’ve seen leaders have to turn as they kind of ascend out of simply overseeing design as a function to actually being an active participant in executive level leadership?

John: Well, design leaders recognize that virtually everything they do is part of a team sport.

Jesse: Hmm.

John: And, it inhibits their ability to articulate what it is we’ve contributed to the enterprise…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

John: … because it involves so many other people to get a product to market or to create a new experience or whatever those things are. And in most cases, rather than trying to step up and say, we had this impact, they often acquiesce and say nothing.

Jesse: Mm.

John: And so somebody else often steps in, you know, the ad agency is notorious for stepping in to say, Hey, we, completely repositioned this brand and we did this. We created new experiences, but it was the ad campaign that helped drive a 40% lift in sales.

And part of it is, he or she who has data, has power.

And design, there’s so much that design does that isn’t measured by data. And so it’s super hard…

Jesse: yeah.

John: … and to me one of the abilities is, how do I talk about impact? It doesn’t have to be a mathematical calculation or effectiveness.

And then the other is, creating a vision. As much as one of design’s superpowers, in my opinion, is creating the future for a product or service or experience. We do a terrible job doing it for ourself and our own organization and how we’re gonna fit in, in an organizational context.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Peter: Yeah. In my coaching and in my masterclass I stress the importance of, I call it having an agenda, just because the word vision can mean multiple things. And so I call it having an agenda, and it’s something that so many design leaders, yeah, lack, like, they don’t realize they need to have their own point of view.

Jesse: Point of view, right.

Peter: Their own perspective, their own change that they seek, or if they don’t, they end up just getting in a reactive mode. They end up simply responding to whatever’s coming at them because there’s nothing that they’re trying to drive. One of the reasons Jesse and I were interested in having you join us is your background is consumer packaged goods, P and G, more on the marketing, brand, quote unquote consumer side.

Our experience is more on the digital side. And I think it’s interesting to consider what’s different, what’s the same.

Something that you’ve been touching on,

A designer’s and design leader’s ability to connect their work with value and feeling like they need to have every link in the chain specified or they can’t commit to any ownership of it. But I think related to that, you’ve touched on this, but I’m curious what you see in your world, Jesse and I have talked a lot about the primary value of design is in facilitating or multiplying other functions’ ability to succeed as opposed to design delivering direct value.

Jesse: Yeah.

Peter: You’re nodding your head. So it sounds like you’ve seen something similar, but how do you counsel those leaders to navigate that conversation when their leadership is like, well, what has design done for me lately, and design can’t say I shipped this thing. ‘Cause they didn’t, but they worked with these groups, and through that work, they helped those groups improve what it is they’re doing. What is your approach to telling those stories better?

John: I think you’ve struck a nerve on one of the big opportunities for design, because design often is a curious source of questions. What if, how might we, did we look into that,who said that? You know, who are we trying to reach for what purpose?

And the business is about, let’s go, I don’t have time for these questions. You know, we gotta get something out the door.

And especially in tough economic circumstances, the planning horizon becomes this quarter, next quarter, which isn’t a boundary space that design is very good at. Design is much better… they want to talk about the future of the brand, the consumer, the experience. And somebody at the conference used this rubric of the now, the near, and the far. Design tends to want to talk about the far. The capacity of the business leaders and the business, especially, the more dire the circumstance, the more they want to talk about the now.

Jesse: Right.

John: And so a CEO might only have capacity for 1% of their time on the far, even though that should be a part of what he or she is really thinking about for the corporation.

But design wants to spend their time beyond the near and into the far, and so there’s, a misalignment of planning horizons.

Jesse: Well, it’s a tricky place that design leaders find themselves in, too, because I think that often they feel like they are like standing on the dock with a stack of life preservers, watching these executives flail in the water, going, “Hey, I can, I can throw you this thing at any time. And you’ll be good.” And they’re like, “No, no. Focus on your current work.”

Right? And so like, how do, how do you strike that balance of actually activating the real value proposition of design as a function, actually, you know, maybe rescuing some of these C-levels out of the water before they drown, while also making them feel like they’re getting what they want from you.

John: Well, let me, continue your metaphor of the executives flailing in the bay.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: When an an executive is in that circumstance, who are the likely people or the likely functions they are likely to go to first…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

John: … in the attempt of trying to save the ship or save themselves? Design is often the last one,

Peter: They will go to marketing, they’ll go to sales, they’ll go to whomever.

Yeah.

John: They’ll go finance, they’ll go to supply chain, they’ll go to regulatory, you know, depending on the business and where the stress is. and that’s where I think design needs to learn how to lean in to show that they’re a business solver, not a creator of an artifact…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

John: …you know, code or a device or something. One of the best examples, and I use this example all over the place, is Logitech. Bracken Darrell, the former CEO hires Alistair Curtis. And everywhere Bracken went internally and externally, he said, I hired Alistair to help create Logitech 3.0. And so advocacy. Bracken set the vision for Alistair, and much of that continues now under Haneke Faber and Molin.

Peter: Hmm.

John: And, to me, part of it is, how do you empower the design lead so that the rest of the business expects you to be invited to the important business stuff.

Jesse: Right.

John: And in fact, lead some of the important business stuff. If the senior most people continue to see design as a creator of artifacts and implementer of execution, then it’s super hard for that person leading that function to elevate beyond.

Peter: Well, this begs a question that I have been asked for 25 years,

So we know that design seems to need executive sponsors. You’ve stated that your research has shown it, in a way that other functions don’t need executive sponsors, right? You mentioned that advocacy role is one of your six indicators of a kind of a design mature, design ready environment.

That begs a question, how do you realize that executive sponsorship, someone like Bracken, someone like AG Lafley, someone like Ginny Rometti at IBM, someone like Carl Bass at Autodesk, these CEOs knew that design could help solve their problems, so they didn’t need anyone to educate or evangelize.

Jesse and I, and I’m sure you do as well, but Jesse and I, the vast majority of the design leaders we talk to or work with, their leadership are not advocates. They might not be hostile…

Jesse: yeah.

Peter: … right? They might be even curious, but they’re not advocates. And so the challenge that, so many design leaders face is how do they turn those executives into advocates?

Can you even do that, right? There’s some commentary over the last 15 or so years that, like, if an executive doesn’t get it, there’s very little you can do to help them get it. Like, it’s not like it’s a hidden mystery. It’s not that no one knows that design can help business.

McKinsey’s written about it. HBR has written about it. Roger Martin wrote about it like AG Lafley proved it through the P and G success. And so is it a fool’s errand to try to convince or persuade that executive to advocate for you? Or is that worthwhile?

And if it is, what have you seen, at least in the organizations that you’re looking at, that starts turning that tide so that executives who may have been, again, not hostile– if they’re against design, there’s almost nothing you can do–but, are you aware of mechanisms that, have helped turn that corner.

John: There are some things that I’ve seen. There are some things I recommend. One of the underlying reasons that I believe design is being dismantled and diminishing, is what I call C-Suite ignorance. Part of that is there are new C-suite members being minted every week. Many of them have never been exposed to the idea that design could be anything but…

Jesse: right.

John: …a decoration station. So they just don’t know. And, the other reality that often occurs is the genetic makeup of people that reach C-suite status or senior executive status, they get to a point where they can no longer admit they don’t know something. So they can’t admit that they don’t know that design is or isn’t something. So they lean in to whatever they believe or perceive or have experienced design to be in their past.

Jesse: Yeah.

John: I mentioned earlier that I’m often hired by heads of design trying to articulate up.

The other group that hires me are the C-Suite people who want a discreet advisor who’s gonna whisper in their ear about, tell me the things I should know about design.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: They’re not gonna publicize broadly that they don’t know, then, and, you know, they ask me to be discreet about the relationship.

And it’s a Cyrano de Bergerac kind of thing. I try to tell them what they ought to know, and how they ought to play that out to their organization. And some of it is just purely an exploration. Why should I care? I keep reading that design is something I should know about, you know, why don’t I know more about it? Why isn’t it more prevalent?

And I think part of it is, nobody questions the existence of a chief marketing officer. No one questions the existence of a chief financial officer.

But design is a confusing word. It’s a confusing concept. It’s a noun, it’s a verb, it’s an outcome. It’s an organization. And most people in the business context see it as the participation or creation of an artifact, not necessarily a way of thinking or a mindset so to your question, Peter, small wins is a big successful pathway.

But oftentimes, if you read marketing publications, the typical CMO has an 18 to 22 month time window of their credibility and existence in a company.

Jesse: Mm-hmm. Right.

Peter: That’s it. Not even two years.

Jesse: Yeah.

John: Not even two years. So they’re not looking at things that are gonna be three years from now. They need to go prove and deliver now…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

John: … which again impacts the ability for design to help influence and be a partner in that, delivery. Something we did at P and G, Claudia Kotchka, in the very early stages, brought in IDEO to run a hands-on work session for the top 50 executives in the company.

And it was very much a hands-on exercise, that had nothing to do with P&G products, but more about how do you rethink and re-see, and how do you stay focused on the user and the consumer, and how do you build better experiences?

It was a half day workshop and, you know, imagine 50 high performing type A’s sitting in a room being led through a workshop, but there were varying degrees of impatience, I would imagine.

But a part of it was, then they translated it to a business opportunity for each of the businesses that were in the room. So, okay, we did this generic thing altogether. Here’s how we do this. Focus on the consumer, how might you create something.

Now, and they literally handed things out to say, we’ve looked into most of your other businesses, and here are some things that could be, as we look at consumer behavior, things you might be interested in looking at. Now it probably was a great commercial for IDEO, too, inside of this group to say we’ve already thought about some opportunities.

But, the economic circumstances were more positive. They weren’t belt tightening times like they are now or 2009. Capital was very cheap to acquire. So there were circumstances that I think accelerated our ability to do things like that.

Jesse: Right. I feel like all of this connects to a question that I often ask my leadership coaching clients when they are stepping into a role for the first time, which is, what are you inheriting? And yes, you’re inheriting a team and you’re, yes, you’re inheriting a product and you’re, yes, you’re inheriting a legacy, but you’re also inheriting a whole bunch of expectations.

Expectations that maybe were set by the leader before you, maybe were set by leaders that these executives, to your point, had other exposure to, that may have nothing to do with what you think the value proposition of you and your team and design as a function actually is.

And so it then becomes this game of resetting expectations, and in a lot of ways listening. Just simply listening for what these executives think you’re there to provide and figuring out how to start to lay out the stones on the path that will take them to the value proposition that you actually feel like your team has to offer. But that’s a time consuming process. It is not something that happens overnight.

And to your point, in a lot of these cases, 21 months is the horizon. So how do you balance those things?

John: I think you touched on something really important, Jesse, is the idea of, a design leader that might be interviewing for a gig inside of a company, are they asking the right questions about what does it look like today…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

John: …because one of the things that I’ve seen is most internal talent acquisition teams inside of companies have no clue how to hire for this role or even for the whole function.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: They think they need a portfolio, they think they need, you know, these things. And if they’re not getting help from a recruiter who knows this space, especially for a critically important role like the head of design or a VP of design.

One of the things that I coach the design leaders is, every meeting you have with your colleagues and counterparts in the company, you should be planting the “what if” seed somewhere in the organization to say, What if it looked different? What if it could be here?

It’s a super inexpensive way to try to get them to bite, you know, to lean in and say, you know, why would you say that that’s something we should look at? Then you can lean in with consumer data, or you can lean in with trend data, or you can lean in with economic circumstances.

The other thing that I advise every design leader I coach with is, put a gigantic bogey in the ears and the minds of your senior leaders. You know, hey, I think I could help get us a billion dollars of incremental revenue if, you know, and then lay out, have your hostage list there.

I need a team of this size. I need budgets. I need, you know, advice, I need your advocacy. I need these things, but I think I could help lead us toward an incremental billion dollars in revenue. And, almost none of them actually do it because they’re scared to death to be accountable for a number that they don’t have full responsibility of, How do you go deliver it?

Jesse: The big, hairy, audacious goal.

John: Yeah, exactly. Part of it, Jesse, to your question, keep planting seeds, keep leaning in, keep pushing, keep challenging, keep questioning, so that the business eventually sees… One of the things I often see, especially in consumer goods, is the business leader saying, we don’t have the time and we don’t have the budget to go do that ethnography study.

Jesse: Right.

John: We already know what we need to know about the consumer. And, here’s the idea that we’re gonna launch. And oftentimes it’s not a bad idea, but it’s not gonna be the disruptive category-changing domain-creating idea.

It’s gonna be a conservative… in most cases, consumer goods companies are notorious for calling flavored line extensions, a massive new innovation.

Jesse: Hmm.

John: And it’s like, I don’t think the consumer thinks cinnamon is particularly innovative.

Peter: The time dimension’s an interesting one. And I had a realization as you were talking about the 21 months, as you’re talking about how design often succeeds when it’s able to look far, and the results of truly impactful design take more than 21 months to be realized.

But on the flip side, what I also see with design leaders is an impatience that things aren’t as they should be now. Like, they know what that change should be. They know we should be doing more ethnographic interviews. They know we should be running projects in this different way. They have a sense of, it’s evident how this should be all operating, why aren’t we just doing it that way?

And so in some areas there’s this impatience that gets in their own way. You know, you’re talking about every conversation, move things a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. Design leaders are like, why? We know what we should be doing. Why aren’t we just doing the thing?

And so I’m curious your thoughts on squaring that designerly impatience and frustration that we’re not doing the thing that is evidently the right thing to do now, with this kind of two- to three- or however many -year time horizon for design to actually be realizing an impact and what you see in your world.

John: Well, if I use the concept of A/B testing

Peter: Sure.

John: out of the UX/UI space…

Jesse: hm.

John: … if a courageous, and maybe insane, design leader would say, okay, we’ll do it your way and not do this research, but I’m gonna secretly go figure out a way to get the funding to go do the research and I’m gonna create a parallel project and then compare the outcomes of what it is that is created, or envisioned, from it, to begin to show the business.

Because the astonishing thing that I see from more and more big consumer goods companies is they spend a lot of time doing what I call the CYA research. “I’m gonna do a test of the package just before I launch it. Not to say we’re gonna kill the project or change the project, but I just wanna make sure I don’t get fired if it goes south.”

Whereas if they just spent half that money on the upfront curiosity side, the impatience of the business to go deliver something this quarter, next quarter, now, doesn’t provide the ability for design to go do the alternative explorations.

Which is why, the safe flavored line extension and those things become kind of the standard fare of consumer goods companies, and not terribly different than the software digital space where, you know, I’m gonna do a live A/B test. And the user of this travel website’s not gonna know that this set of people are gonna have these buttons in this place and this set are gonna have this button.

But part of that gets to, how do you truly affect change? And I, think there needs to be a, if we do it this way, here’s the outcome, here’s the likely outcome.

If we do it this way, it can be a bigger payout. The challenge is, if I’m a marketing director or a CMO, am I really gonna fund something that isn’t gonna launch for three years?

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: It might cost me $5 million between now and then to launch it and have no results and it could die along the way.

Or am I safer delivering that line extension that is good. It, you know, it’s gonna, it’s gonna drive something…

Peter: 10% improvement is better than zero.

John: Correct.

Jesse: You mentioned affecting change and change is something that we talk a lot about over here on the digital side and design’s responsibility for and toward change, and I’m curious about your point of view on design and its relationship to change.

John: I believe design should be a catalyst for change.

I believe that design should be an arbiter of culture inside of companies. One of the other of the six attributes I talk about is, Is the enterprise people-centered?

Because one of the things I often see is most designers and, even UXers talk about being centered around the user…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

John: …and having an empathy for the people that are gonna buy my product, use my product, you know, use my service, experience the thing I’m creating. But then they say, oh man, but John over in supply chain, that guy’s a jerk. He’s a barrier to me. He’s always getting in the way. So the idea of empathy only seems to apply to the work you’re doing for the thing you’re creating.

Peter: Right. Yep.

Jesse: Right, right. Right.

John: One of the big opportunities for design is having empathy for the senior most leaders in the company. Do I understand the pressure they’re under, and what they have to deliver? As opposed to feeling like they don’t understand me and they’re just laying unreasonable mandates on me.

So a part of it is, this idea of change, this idea of culture, I think a lot of designers, when they’re creating that vision for the future and, potentially that next big thing, they’re not really thinking about what has to change to drive it.

Jesse: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It puts the design leader in such an interesting place too, because especially if you’re fortunate enough to be at an executive level, at a C level or a VP level, when you’re closely engaged with a larger executive team around the executive level decisions that drive an organization, it can often feel like your job is to create alignment, right?

Your job is to align and be aligned, and find the alignment somehow in the room to create the harmony and the unity across the executive team, to genuinely deliver on a strategy for the organization. But if your mandate is to be the one person in the room who is like, ” Hmm. The way that we’re doing things is not good enough,” your strategy needs something more. It can feel like it really puts you in an awkward position, right?

As an executive level leader, how do these leaders deal with that?

John: Using the life raft example of the executives flailing in the harbor: is design the voice in that room that people are gonna listen to and believe?

Jesse: Right, right, right, right.

John: When they say something has to change.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: You know, there’s a gentleman that I count as a friend in the design industry, Chuck Jones, who is a multiple-time chief design officer.

And he’s very candid about the things that design doesn’t do very well, but he’s also very candid about, you know, when you walk into that new job as the head of design, you need to walk in with a point of view and a vision.

And he told a story at the conference where he walked into one of his roles and he said, within some short period of time, four, six weeks, he said, I think I’m reporting to the wrong place.

Jesse: Mm. Mm-hmm.

John: And he made the case to say, this is the outcome if design continues to report as current, here’s the opportunity by changing it. And of course he had to have a few other meetings with important people to go make that change. The challenge is, if you can state the need for the change in the context of the business, not, not just an opinion, critically helps your case.

If you can bring a champion or an advocate along with you, ideally a peer that’s in another function,

Jesse: Yeah.

John: ” Hey, I agree because this needs to change.”

Otherwise people are gonna take the path of least resistance. I mean, human nature is to avoid conflict, avoid change, complain about change, especially if it’s difficult. It’s like the old adage. Practice how you play. And if you can’t practice in difficult circumstances when it’s game time, you’re not gonna play in them.

Jesse: Right, right.

Peter: So Jesse and I, and it sounds like you as well, John, think about this idea of design as an organizational function.

it provides clarity into the real role of design. Not to make things, not to artifact, whatever, but, like, it is a function that engages in a set of activities to realize some value to the business.

The challenge is design, as the three of us would like it to be understood, conflicts with the quarterly culture, quarterly requirements, needing to report to Wall Street, all the things we’ve been saying, right? That quarterly mindset that so many companies embrace constricts design, so that it’s no longer design, it’s basically production. Someone else has told you what to do and you’re executing on it.

That makes me wonder, is that true of other functions as well, or are other functions perfectly happy operating in a quarterly mode, and design is different?

And, I think it very well could be. But then, in that quarterly culture, things become more acute depending on the health of that business.

And so the next thought is, is design only available as a kind of luxury function for those businesses that have already realized some success and some stability and don’t have to be as quarterly minded, and can have a longer term point of view? Are they the only organizations that are really able to embrace design, ’cause they’re the ones who can allow design the space it needs to succeed.

But then that kind of conflicts with, again, what the three of us know that design could be doing to help struggling companies, right? Like it’s a set of tools that can be useful in a lot of different contexts.

The interesting story is how can design help a company that’s struggling, succeed? But those companies aren’t willing to spend the time to allow design to have that change. So the only companies that are really embracing design as fully as they could are those that were probably doing okay already.

Jesse: You need to be successful to have design, and you need to have design to be successful.

John: Well, you’ve got it, podcast over. Thank you, Pete. Thank you, Jesse.

Peter: As someone who’s, you know, more of a business background than Jesse or I, operating perhaps at an altitude or with a set of companies that are different than the ones that Jesse and I, more traditional organizations say, how do we change the conversation then, so that design is not simply seen as a luxury?

Jesse: Where is the traction for design leaders within this context?

John: One of the interesting corollaries to what you laid out, Peter, is a design community inside a corporation, if they can create a cadence of a longer term pipeline, then it makes it easier to accelerate things inside the quarterly dynamic.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: So, if I do have the luxury of having a very small portion of my portfolio that’s a five or 10 year lighthouse project to say, you know, where could this company go in the future and have a, you know, a slightly larger one that’s five years and a slightly larger one that’s three.

And then the majority of the things we’re working on are inside of two years, then it becomes, you can play to the acceleration needs of the business to play the quarterly game. The challenge is there isn’t often appetite at the C level to suddenly create that pipeline if it didn’t exist..

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: …before and the monthly, quarterly, you know, this quarter, this year, kind of dynamic. If that becomes the exclusive of the portfolio I’m working on, you can almost never get to that longer term. ‘Cause somebody above you has to approve the budget and the time and the resources to focus on this thing.

I’ve taught a four-day design thinking class in an MBA program in a university. And I bring a brand partner in. I get the students into a consumer’s home based on the product. And the dynamic when I’m selling this to potential brand partners, the way I sell it is, I want the project that you think is important, but you haven’t been able to fund it for the last three years. The company hasn’t seen it important enough to put official funding behind it. And I’m gonna show you how design thinking can help you accelerate an opportunity.

And of course, they’re, you know, what can you do in four days and, you know, all these other things. We show them that, hey, two consumer visits can be better than none. And two consumer visits can be better than all of the quantitative survey data that you might collect that isn’t watching a human do something or not do something.

Jesse: Right. So, you know, I feel like there’s a lot within the stories that you’ve shared with us and the research that you’ve done that suggests diminishing opportunity for design and for design leaders, in a lot of ways, and increasing obstacles. And I find myself wondering, where is the bright spark within all of this, and where is the opportunity that maybe design leaders ought to be giving more attention to right now?

John: Coming out of the conference event that we held, we had three kind of principles that founded. The first was the question, Is design dead? The second was, you’re not alone and you don’t have to do this alone. The third was, “so what.” We wanted to have a “so what” component to every session.

You don’t have to do it alone is an observation that I’ve had, and no doubt you all have seen it as you’ve poked into different companies and met with a myriad of leaders. Everybody thinks they’re fighting a historically unique battle because they don’t get out and talk to their peers. As a result, they end up fighting it themselves without a roadmap.

And almost everybody that attended the conference used the term therapy. This was great. I realized I’m not alone.

But then the, “so what” thing kicked in? And we said, okay, so what are we gonna do about this? And so I do think that letting people learn from each other, not just from people like the two of you and I that might drop in for a period of time, and then we drop out, and get people comfortable with: What have you done? What have you tried? And use the massive community of design as a way of trying to help revive and resuscitate the opportunity to carry it forward.

I’ve got a great deal of passion for trying to see design change the trajectory and try to help drive that. And I do think that we need more examples of where design created an unexpected outcome.

Jesse: Fantastic. I love that vision. I love the call to design leaders to be those examples and provide those examples that inspire the community. John Gleason, thank you so much for being with us.

John: Jesse, Peter, thank you so much for the invitation. A amazing conversation, and obviously we could talk for three or four more days.

Jesse: Yeah, absolutely.

Peter: Yes. Thank you so much.

Jesse: Where can people find you on the internet if they want to track you down and learn more about what you’re up to?

John: Well, my LinkedIn profile is there to find me or John at GetaBetterView.com.

Jesse: Fantastic. John, thank you so much.

John: I enjoyed this. Thank you.

Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway.design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholz.com and jessejamesgarrett.com. If you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett.com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.

Jesse and Peter explore how AI is revealing the true value proposition of design teams. They discuss why “whoever controls the prompt controls the product” and why design leaders must understand their organization’s expectations before embracing AI. The more things change, the more they stay the same—AI may be new, but the fundamentals of design leadership remain critical.

Jesse’s presentation “The Elements of UX in the Age of AI” is now available as a digital download. Get your copy today.

Peter has just launched his masterclass “UX/Design Leadership Demystified” in two formats—self-study and cohort course. Learn more here.

Peter: Make sure to stick around to the end of the episode to hear a couple of new offerings from Peter and Jesse.

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way,

Peter: Navigating the opportunities

Jesse: and challenges

Peter: of design and design leadership,

Jesse: On today’s show, reflecting on my talk: The Elements of UX in the Age of AI, Peter and I sit down one-on-one to talk about AI and its implications for design roles, design processes, and design leaders. We’ll talk about the new skills teams will need, the old skills that won’t be going away, and why. In an AI-enabled world, whoever controls the prompt, controls the product.

Peter: So, a few weeks ago now, you gave a talk on the Elements of User Experience in the Age of AI. And that’s where I want to start. As a UX guy, when I see commentary about the intersection of UX and AI, or rather, primarily, design and AI…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

Peter: …it typically focuses on the top two layers of the elements diagram, the surface layer and the skeleton layer. And really the surface layer. I don’t even know if we’re getting much from a workflow standpoint. I’m just seeing screen design…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

Peter: …being what’s being discussed. And I’m wondering, am I missing something? Where is the conversation happening about AI and how it’s affecting the lower levels of the diagram? The structural concerns, the scope concerns, the strategic concerns? ’cause that for me, given my background in strategic design, is where my focus is at.

And it also feels like, well, that’s the kind of thing AI can’t do. It requires my human brain. But I also don’t want to be that guy and be ignorant of the possibility that these tools are able to have a more kind of foundational…

Jesse: mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Peter: impact on the practice of developing user experiences.

Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. So the way that I tend to think about this technology is in terms of what I see as its two strengths, which are analysis and synthesis. Which is to say, finding patterns within a data set, and then extrapolating from those patterns something broader, right?

So the pattern finding is the analysis part, and analysis is the stuff that’s gonna kick in when you’re down at those lower levels on the elements of user experience, where you’re talking about strategy, where you’re talking about scope, where you’re talking about user needs, where you’re talking about business requirements, where you’re talking about business models, where you’re talking about functional requirements, content requirements, all of those kinds of things.

So this is where getting a whole bunch of data together and feeding it to the machine can help surface patterns that you might not otherwise see. And this analysis value proposition for the LLM is where I see it coming into play in these more kind of strategic and product strategy, scope oriented domains.

Then when you get toward the top layers of the elements, then you start to get into these areas where the synthesis matters more. Where it’s more about what can you create, what can you generate out of the insights that you’ve created, out of the, really, the constraints that you’ve identified on your design problem.

Because if we think about the double diamond, this is where divergent thinking comes in, where you are generating possibilities, creating ideas, and then convergent thinking comes in where you are refining those ideas based on criteria that you’ve developed. And so these are both areas where an LLM can potentially play a role in a user experience design process.

What we see though, is that in these analysis oriented areas, where you are turning user needs into insights, turning those insights into requirements where you are evaluating and refining possible strategic directions, these tend to be processes that are owned by people outside of design. They may be owned by people in a UX research role. They may be owned by people in a product leadership role. They may be owned by people who are in a business leadership role.

But often the direct purview of a design leader doesn’t actually extend all the way down the stack of the elements of user experience. And so what you see is a lot of the things that end up influencing user experience outcomes are actually owned by other roles in organizations.

So I think part of what you’re seeing is that what design leaders feel like they can authentically control is the stuff that’s closer to the top of the stack, whereas the activity that’s happening at the bottom of the stack is happening in other parts of the organization, or that design leaders are ceding their influence over those areas out of a sense that that’s somebody else’s job, and my product person is gonna handle the AI that generates requirements, and I’m not gonna try to handle that myself.

Peter: Weird that you say some of this, in part because I tend to think of the user needs part, the user research part is very much within the realm of design, typically.

Jesse: It depends on the organization. In some organizations, the people who actually own that stuff don’t report into a design leader.

Peter: That’s increasingly true, but not historically true, at least when it comes to UX research. There’s other forms of research.

Jesse: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Peter: As you’re saying this, I’m thinking about something I saw a day or two ago on LinkedIn where a design leader was saying that unless you know code or are some Jony Ive-level brand craft wizard…

Jesse: mm.

Peter: that AI is going to take everything in in the middle or AI is going to subsume the work you do.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Peter: And I responded, well, maybe, if all your leading is production, but that’s not design, right? And so one of the things that’s been clear to me is design leaders telling on themselves about how they have led design and how they have abandoned those lower levels of the diagram.

Jesse: Yes.

Peter: And I say abandoned. It was not taken from them. If they knew what they were doing, it was there for them to lead. In my role as a design leader, I led folks doing the research. I led folks figuring out organizational models. I led folks developing the insights coming outta research that drove, that informed, I should say, product requirements. There were other means of informing product requirements…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

Peter: …certain kinds of customer conversations or whatever.

But, maybe the conversation about AI and UX is really just a conversation about UX and design.

It’s casting a light on just all the different ways, the varieties of ways that this has been led, this has been practiced in organizations, because, my point of view, both having led teams and working with design leaders of teams, is most of the teams I’m involved with have some responsibility all the way up and down the stack.

You know, they maybe have more responsibility the higher up the diagram you get, sure. And the lower down the diagram, there’s a conversation to be had, but it’s a conversation. They’re not simply taking user needs from someone or the strategic objectives from someone. I guess, if as a designer and design leader, all you did was executing on the synthesis parts as you were calling them, the upper levels of the diagram, yes, it does appear that much of that work can be done by machines…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

Peter: …and that, for me seems like an opportunity for design.

But it’s, intriguing how many people see it as a threat.

Jesse: Right. Well, so, as you know, this talk came out of the work that I’ve been doing with design leaders for the last several years as a leadership coach. And in working with design leaders on their leadership challenge, it was this recurring theme that kept coming up of like, I’ve gotta figure out what I’m gonna do about AI.

And what I found in those conversations is the value that AI potentially can deliver to your team depends a lot on the value that your team is seen as delivering to the larger organization. So if the value proposition of your team is narrowly focused on quality and speed of delivery of design assets, the value proposition of AI for your team is very different than it would be for a team where your value prop is more rooted in product strategy, user research, driving requirements, that kind of thing. And that kind of thing is gonna be highly variable because we’ve seen, as we’ve talked about with the variety of design leaders that we’ve talked with on this show over the last few years, we’ve seen a wide range of different frames for the value proposition of design as a function.

And so where AI fits in, I think really relies on the leader clearly understanding what the organization thinks design is there to do for them.

Peter: I had a similar conversation with some folks probably two years ago now about design systems, and the rise of design systems. And these folks were thinking of putting together an assessment of your design system situation. And as they were sharing this with me, what I realized is that that assessment had very little to do with the design system.

Rather, that assessment was a probe on the organizational maturity when it came to matters of design and user experience. That, what you got out of that assessment was going to more be an indicator of what you were just talking about in terms of how the organizations that these leaders are in, understand design.

And I think this is something we’ve talked a lot about, but I don’t know if we’ve talked about it on the podcast. And I wrote a little bit about it a couple weeks ago, which is the benefit for design leaders in considering their team, as a function, as an organizational function of the firm.

Jesse: Yes.

Peter: … not as a set of practices or activities.

Jesse: Yes. Or as a group of people to defend or protect, right?

Peter: Yeah. It’s more than just a group of people. There’s lots of ways you can slice these companies. You can have departments, you can have business units, you can have functions.

And when you think of design as a function, it gets very simple in terms of what others expect of your team. You mentioned the word value proposition, right? What is the value proposition of your team? And, when you think of the value proposition of your team, as if it were a function, you can start looking at analogies of, well, what are the value propositions of product management, of engineering, of marketing, of sales? And how do you line up with that? And design has a really hard time lining up with that. That value proposition is different across different companies because design as a function is like a, um, a symbiote, I was gonna say parasite, but let me, let me say symbiote…

Jesse: [Laughter] better.

Peter: …design as a function is a symbiote in that it ends up taking on the shape of the organization it’s part of in a way that other functions I don’t think do, right? Marketing is gonna kind of look the same wherever it is. Sales is gonna look the same wherever it is. Engineering’s gonna mostly look the same wherever it is. Design is going to have to take on the shape of the organization that it’s part of in order for it to deliver its value, because design’s value is, much more about multiplying the success of other functions than delivering something straight on its own, right?

And so, maybe before people start getting caught up in, how am I going to be disrupted by AI…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

Peter: … to do some groundwork in thinking about, how is my team showing up as a function of the firm? What is our value proposition? What do people expect of us? How satisfied are we with those expectations? Or do we need to change those expectations? Are people thinking of us primarily as UI production, or are people coming to us for the full stack of user experience delivery?

And then once you have a sense of what your value proposition is, what people’s expectations are of you, now I’m wondering, how AI can be a tool to enable you to realize your objective in terms of how you want the rest of the organization to see your team.

Jesse: Right. So there is delivering within your existing mandate, so to speak. Like, we’re gonna leverage this technology to better meet the expectations that have already been set, right?

And then there’s the question of, well, can we push the boundaries of those expectations? Can we make a play for a broader value proposition for design in the product development process, for design in the product strategy process, to have more of a voice, to have more of a point of view that it brings to the table on where all of this is going.

Jesse: One of the things that I mentioned in the talk that I think is a really important piece for design leaders is, in an AI-enabled digital product development workflow, whoever controls the prompt controls the product. Whoever is talking to the robot that makes the thing is the person with the power. And so your choice as a design leader is to figure out which things do you want control of the prompt over.

Which areas of the product do you want your people to be the most prominent voice around, and building processes that support that voice and that engagement with the technology to elevate that value proposition.

So it may well be that you’ve got, as we were talking about, product and maybe even research, people who are nominally owners of the lower planes on the stack who don’t have a strong point of view, who don’t have, you know, a facility with the technology or an ability to wrangle it toward those objectives. If you can step into that void, if your people can do that better than their people can do that, you can make a play for a wider value proposition for your team and for design as a function. But you gotta master the prompt craft first.

Peter: This is interesting. I’m glad we’re getting to prompts and, I suspected we would get there. This ties into something else that I don’t think you and I have discussed on the podcast, but have discussed outside of it, which is the three types of power.

This is something that I was introduced to about a month and a half ago at the Advancing Research Conference in a talk given by Robert Fabricant. And it’s a model where within any group of people, but let’s think about it within organizations, there are three distinct types of power that show up in these organizations.

What most people think of when they think of power is positional power, right? The senior most person in their ability to tell other people what to do. The second type of power that comes up is expertise power, that someone has special knowledge of a thing, and because of that, other people will listen to them because they don’t have that knowledge. So this person might not be particularly senior, but they’ve, to use the example you just shared, they’ve mastered prompt craft. They know prompts better than anybody else.

The third type of power is relational power. and that’s how people, it’s gonna sound mercenary when I say it, use relationships to make those connections with others within the organization to then realize their power for getting things done, getting the things they want done.

And what’s interesting is, as you’re talking to me about prompt craft, that suggests a kind of expertise power, right? I know how to wield this tool better than anyone else, and this tool is super important, and so you’re all gonna listen to me because of that. In these analyses of power, far and away, what is considered most important is relational power.

Jesse: Right.

Peter: What often comes out are people say, well, what about positional power where you can just tell people what to do? If you think about. how people in higher positions tend to wield their power, they rarely do it by fiat. Yes, in the public consciousness, that’s what we see. But look around, even if you are a design leader, you’re not just telling your team what to do. You’re inspiring them, you’re engaging them, you’re making them want to do that thing. Not because you told them to, but because even if you’re senior to them, you’re wielding relational power to bring them along.

Jesse: Yes.

Peter: And so I, find myself getting maybe a little stuck on this idea of the person who controls the prompt controls the product, because that is this demonstration of expertise power, which UXers often fall back on as why they should be listened to, because they’ve done the research, they’ve talked to the users, they’ve generated the insights. We’ve observed the tests.

We know what is going to be the best experience, so we should be in charge. And that never works or rarely works. So there’s clearly some value in expertise power. It gives you your credibility that you’re someone to listen to and engage with, but it feels like there’s something missing in that equation that you’ve been shaping.

Jesse: Yeah. Well, so two things come to mind for me around this. First of all, I definitely do not mean to leave relational power out of the equation. You’re not gonna get anything done just by having. a phalanx of the most expert prompt crafters in the room. You get your hundred monkeys in there, and demanding that you be handed the authority over the entire product.

But the other part of it that I think makes this craft expertise different from other craft expertises, is that it is manifestly an accelerant for creative processes, for product development processes for product delivery processes, where your expertise doesn’t just make you an expert. It makes you the person who can deliver a better thing faster.

And so in these areas where, again, if there is a power void in the organization where somebody else hasn’t figured out how to close the gap around, let’s say, using AI to create really robust PRDs, if you’re able to take the junk that comes outta your PMs and turn it into really robust PRDs, you become the center of that expertise. You become the center of that influence, if you’ve mastered the technology that can bridge those gaps for the organization.

I’m not saying that that doesn’t come with a lot of political scaffolding to create that opportunity for the team. So the leader has still got to be engaging with and negotiating with all of their cross-functional partners, all of their executive stakeholders, to be able to make the case for why we should do things following all of this stuff that their team is producing with AI support.

But if they are able to do that, it starts to create a leverage point for more human-centered influence in product development. And so that’s, I think, the really interesting opportunity.

Peter: In your talk, you mentioned that you created the elements of user experience diagram because no one knew why you were there, like, why you were in the room. Why would I work with this information architect slash user experience person…

Jesse: He doesn’t even draw. Why is he here?

Peter: Yeah, how are you helping us develop products? And the diagram was a means to answer at least parts of that question. And so thus people knew, to bring you into the conversation.

Jesse: Right.

Peter: And that still feels in many ways, like, the circumstance today, like, UX is not eagerly sought after. There might have been a period where it was, but even at its most eagerly sought after, it was still relatively minor.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Peter: People recognize its value, people understand its importance, et cetera. Another way to say it is there was never a UX gold rush. There’s never been a design gold rush.

Jesse: Right.

Peter: There’s an AI gold rush going on right now.

Jesse: Yeah.

Peter: And, there was something about when you were talking about the elements of, user experience as, this thing you needed to bring people along who could barely be bothered to understand why you were in the room. And now with AI you have to kind of beat them away, and many of them don’t even really wanna understand it, right?

They just want to do it. It’s, I gotta get on the AI thing. There’s something about this dynamic between UX still trying to pull people in, and AI being this gravity well.

Jesse: Right. Well, so you may recall from our early years in this industry in the late 1990s, this brand new technology called the World Wide Web came along, and it was gonna transform everything, and they were wiring everything to be webby in one way or another. And nobody really knew why. Everybody just knew it was important and many of those things did not work, right?

Many of the projects and experiments and attempts to integrate web technology into enterprises around, you know, in that sort of 1995 to 2005 kind of timeframe, just plain didn’t work because they were bad ideas. We are in the bad ideas phase of this technology right now for sure.

I feel that what UX design was able to do for the web 20 years ago was provide some filters, provide some frameworks, provide some ways of thinking about these challenges that helped people separate good ideas from bad ideas. And I think that there’s a similar role for design to play now, in continuing to bring the human expertise to separate good uses of the technology from bad uses of the technology.

You know when we talk about use of research, one of the big things that comes up with AI is the concept of synthetic users. The idea of doing user research by basically asking LLMs to pretend to be users. This is a bad idea. This is not a good use of the technology. It is not a substitute for actual data. Again, if you want to do some analysis down there at the bottom of the stack, then you’re gonna get some high value use cases.

So separating the high value use cases from the low value use cases is part of the work that has to happen here. And I think that work is mostly going to fall, honestly, on design leaders even more than some of their cross-functional partners because, as you pointed out, the territory of design is so vague that if your goal is to drive human-centered process, drive human-centered outcomes, you might need to be piecing together a much more diverse portfolio of AI support tools than somebody whose narrow focus is just, get the code out faster, as might be the case with your engineering partner.

Peter: This is putting me in mind…. our conversation with Amy Lokey, Chief Experience Officer at ServiceNow, where, as she told it, her team has for a couple years now, really been at the vanguard internally within ServiceNow in figuring out how to best take advantage of AI tooling and AI opportunities, largely in service of creating highly usable and effective experiences, right?

They’re kind of the most boring of enterprise software, and I mean that with love, but very, very pragmatic enterprise software. It’s a lot about data-driven or data experiences. Lots of cutting and pasting from one thing into another thing, et cetera.

And recognizing that AI can play a role in automating a lot of this labor. And the value that they were able to articulate, that she was able to articulate from a user experience standpoint, was kind of classic 1994-era cost-justifying usability of time on task and how long it took people to do a thing.

And what was interesting about her story, I think in this regard… One, she and her team, she had the credibility such that others were listening to her, and that credibility had been built up over time by demonstrating that value proposition such that when she steps up to help the company figure out how to make the best use of this technology, people aren’t looking at her like, but you’re just the box-drawer, what do you know about AI?

But instead, oh, your prior work in helping us adopt the System Usability Score allowed us to see how, when we improved System Usability Score, we improved customer outcomes, which led to greater customer satisfaction on various metrics that we track, led to greater retention and, you know, business success.

So if, you’re coming up and saying, Hey, let’s let my team get out in front of this AI thing, we’re gonna listen to you because we know that you drive value.

Jesse: Right.

Peter: I think for me, I guess a lot of it is this functional concern. If you’re feeling fear as a design leader about AI, the solution isn’t to AI at it more.

The solution is to identify how you can raise the level of trust that others have with you in your organization, such that when you now want to engage with AI, they will listen to you.

Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. I think that AI is similar to UX in this regard, in that what it really has organizationally is a multiplier effect, but that multiplier effect depends on what’s already there to multiply. So, if you’ve already built the bridges, if you’ve already gained the trust, if you’ve already built the value proposition, AI will let you activate and multiply that value proposition.

If you haven’t already done that, if you’re dealing with a pretty scant value proposition, you’re not going to be able to multiply that very much with AI. So I think you’re absolutely right. The political groundwork has to be there. The operational groundwork has to be there. The cross-functional trust has to be there. The team engagement and commitment has to be there.

You know, there’s a lot of resistance on the part of design teams to engaging with these tools for the fear that that is going to take something away from them. It does absolutely depend on how the organization is approaching it, and if you are approaching it with thoughtfulness and sensitivity to where that multiplier effect can be applied, then you’re going to reap that effect more quickly. And if you’re just throwing stuff against the wall, you know, the spaghetti phase of AI development, trying to see what sticks, then yeah, things are gonna get messy.

So I think it is about being strategic. It’s about leaders being strategic about the value propositions of their teams. It’s about leaders being strategic about where that value proposition intersects with the larger ecosystem that they’re a part of, and where there is an opportunity to amplify that existing value proposition or build upon it.

Peter: Right, right. And I guess one of the things that we’ve talked about in the past is maturity, organizational maturity, design maturity. And one of the risks that many design leaders unknowingly kind of engage in is that, when it comes to design maturity, they are often way more mature than the organization that they’re part of.

Jesse: Yes.

Peter: And they tried to show up as this very mature person and the organization’s not ready for them. This is something going back, when we spoke with Jehad Affoneh he talked about how he’d had jobs in the past where he couldn’t talk impact because the people around him wouldn’t know what do with an impact story.

He had to talk about internal collaboration, ’cause that’s what they valued at that organization, was, did other teams like working with his team?

And so I guess on that note, in thinking about accelerants, about this situation, right? The risk here is that design leaders embrace AI in a way that misses, is not aligned with, is not able to be taken up by the organization that they’re in.

Right.

It might be amazing. It might be, something that could very likely drive tons of value for this organization, but this organization is just not ready for it. And so it frankly gonna be wasted time and effort.

And so design leaders needing to figure out where to pitch themselves, such that the AI- driven interventions that they are proposing are ones that can be taken up. And, when you meet your broader organization where they’re at, not where you are at, but where they’re at, click in with that and then over time bring the people around you along.

Jesse: Right. So, it’s about understanding the expectations being placed upon design as a function. It’s about being clear on what you see as your own value proposition, and the difference between those things and creating the space, if necessary, to expand how that value proposition is perceived by the organization or how that mandate is construed by the organization, yeah.

Peter: Let’s get a little practical, tactical.

Jesse: Yeah. Sure.

Peter: You talk about prompt craft and…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

Peter: …the person who controls the prompt controls the product. What is your understanding of the mechanism, of the process, by which that might actually happen? If you were to coach somebody, an interested design leader around getting control of that prompt, and then driving the direction of the product towards these human-centered ends, what would you coach them to do?

Jesse: Right. The first part is about just finding your opportunity. Finding the place where you can accelerate some part of the value that your team is there to create. So from organization to organization that might vary. Identifying the use cases within your workflow, your broader workflow, not just your design workflow, but the broader workflow of everything that you do together as a team to bring a digital product to market.

And looking at that through the lens of acceleration, and honestly, the lens of human expertise and figuring out where the human expertise is most valuable and preserving that, so that what you’ve got is AI not supplanting human expertise, but augmenting human expertise.

Often in digital product development there are these steps of translation. Translation of a strategy into requirements, translation of requirements into design specs, translation of design specs into actual design artifacts, translation of design artifacts into production code. Wherever you’ve got these stages of translation, those are places where the AI is gonna be a super valuable sort of an accelerant there.

So in different organizations, there are gonna be different specific use cases within their workflows based on, again, what the team’s mandate is, as well as what the capabilities are that the team brings to bear.

But ideally what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna get your most nimble, abstract thinkers, and you’re gonna get your best writers together, and you’re gonna talk about how we use language to define what we do. And start to develop shared language, common vocabulary, controlled vocabulary that enables you to have a shared knowledge base of repeatable stuff that works. You know from the work that you’ve seen me do with the prompt craft that I’ve been able to develop some highly reliable, repeatable tools for myself in supporting some of the work that I do.

I can see that being scalable beyond an individual to an entire team, where you are collaborating on a knowledge base of reliable language, reliable, literally grammatical structures, that people can take and adapt and reapply in new contexts to create new solutions. And so it’s that shared understanding that ends up being really the collective source of value that a team ultimately ends up developing through this work.

Peter: Shared understanding of what, and when you say team, which team?

Jesse: I think you can define the boundaries of a team as broadly as you want to invite people into your prompting circle, and shared understanding of what creates consistent results. So this is the big challenge with these technologies, is that by their nature they are probabilistic. We want them to be a little bit inventive and be a little bit creative and come up with things that we don’t expect. The trouble is that sometimes we really need to control how much the machine is giving us things that we don’t expect, and so the ability for the team collectively to understand, here’s how we constrain the framing of a problem so as to produce a consistent result, ends up being the shared craft of the team itself.

Peter: Apart from accelerating, and maybe automating, these interpretive breakpoints in the process, how do you imagine AI tools changing how we develop products? You know, we’ve got some fairly well worn, at least digital product design processes, not that everybody follows them.

Are we just doing our process a little better, a little faster, or do you foresee real shifts in how we work? For example, with the rise of design systems, some people thought that, oh, we should just start with high fidelity comps in our design process. Now, I actually think most of the time that’s a bad idea. But, you know, an argument can be made.

And so like what is being enabled that might shift the order of things, or the responsibility of things within a product development process?

Jesse: So I think it does depend on where you are in your product development process. Early stages, AI is gonna be great for rapid prototyping, right? We’ve already seen so many examples of this where, there’s enough in the training data sets out there that if you sketch out a general sense of the functionality that you’re looking for, it can create something that looks like it does that thing. It won’t actually do that thing, it’ll just be a prototype, but it’ll be a pretty good prototype and maybe even a testable prototype with some additional layers of prompt craft behind it. You could probably create some pretty robust, fully instrumented prototypes of different product features and functionality and put out into the world.

Once you get into later stages of development, I think that it becomes more about refinement and alignment, making sure that you are integrating features and functionality in consistent ways. In the talk, I talk about the prospect of human and machine readable documentation, the idea of creating product documentation that a person could read and understand what you’re doing together, and a machine could read and actually be able to take action on because it would have a fully formed understanding of what you were trying to create.

I can see organizations moving toward that as a means of activating this kind of potential. You know, you touched on design systems. I think this is one of the huge things where, as I see it, it doesn’t make sense to me for design systems not to have an LLM interface. To my mind, the future of the design system is that it’s a robot that you talk to, that you feed it requirements and it matches those requirements with the system that it’s learned and generates product for you, right? The idea that humans would continue to kind of like spelunk into design system documentation in order to cobble together bits and pieces of UI kind of doesn’t make any sense anymore in that world to me.

Peter: One of the things you mentioned in your talk that’s related to this is how LLMs and any tool built on LLMs will kind of regress to mediocrity.

Jesse: Yes. Mm-hmm.

Peter: And the role of the human is to help get the solutions past mediocrity.

Jesse: Right.

Peter: Right. And so something I’ve been hearing about the role of not just designers, but anyone involved in product development, but primarily, say, designers and product managers, or at least people doing the work, there’s gonna be perhaps even greater importance in that idea of discernment.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Peter: Taste as it’s sometimes called.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Peter: Talk a little bit about that, and what the implications are, that it’s less about just turning the crank and getting something out the other end, but this application of discernment.

Jesse: Yeah. yeah. So there was a slide in the talk that just says B-Y-O-B-S-D. Right? Bring your own bullshit detector, because the AI won’t be that for you. You have to be the one who knows more. So if you are working with the AI in a space that you are unfamiliar with, it is your responsibility to know more than the AI does, in order to be able to know when it’s feeding you something valid and when it’s not.

And so maybe that’s about choosing your use cases, and maybe that’s about developing more robust validation processes around the output that you get. But what we see over and over again, is where people go wrong with this technology, is when you tried to design a submarine, and you knew nothing about fluid dynamics and you knew nothing about, you know, the structural factors involved in submarine design. And so it gave you something that looked like a submarine but didn’t function like a submarine and, surprise, you drowned, right?

So this is the kind of thing that we’re seeing out there. Whereas, if someone with that taste, with that discernment, with that expertise, is able to leverage the tool and screen what comes out of the tool and say, this is valid, this is not valid, I’m gonna pay attention to this. I’m not gonna pay attention to that, that’s where you get the multiplier effect. But what gets multiplied is human expertise. Human capability.

Peter: And that leads to something that I wrote just this past weekend. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to write for my newsletter, and I ended up writing about something that you and I had spoken about a few days prior, which is the definition of skills when it comes to design.

So in my org design work, particularly when I create career frameworks for design organizations, at the heart of those career frameworks is a taxonomy of skills, interaction design, visual design, information architecture, et cetera. And I looked at my skill rubrics to try to get a sense of, what does AI do to these definitions of skills? What does it mean to be an interaction designer in an AI world? And as I looked at my rubric, I pleasantly realized that rubric as I had defined, it was already tool agnostic.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Peter: It didn’t say anything about OmniGraffle, Vizio, Figma, that’s not what the skill is.

The skill of interaction design is, are you able to design a system that allows people to interact with the system to accomplish their goals…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

Peter: …probably feel some sense of satisfaction, maybe even delight in doing so, and that is tool agnostic. Humans have been designing all kinds of stuff that provide that kind of sense for decades, if not millennia.

As you were talking about kind of enhancing these abilities though, or this concept of discernment, one of the challenges that comes with skills definitions is, skills are often about aptitude, but aptitude is different than taste. It’s hard to measure someone’s discernment ability.

Jesse: Yes.

Peter: I can say that, as you become more senior as an interaction designer, more advanced and developed as an interaction designer, you can design more and more kind of complicated and complex systems, wiring together different technological platforms, maybe online and offline platforms, like you can handle that complexity.

That’s usually what you think of when it comes to scale. And that’s typically what the definition of the skill involves. And so I’m, thinking about how discernment’s gonna become way more important, right? So much of the value that people are currently delivering is their ability to, themselves, do the task…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

Peter: …just get it done. If we can delegate much of that “getting it done” to a tool such that our job is to now shape it, mold it as you, I think you said in the talk, think about it like, you’re throwing clay, right? You throw the clay on the wheel and now you’re, spinning it and you could make an ashtray like I’ve tried in the past, that looks like ass, or you can make something beautiful. For me, it raises this interesting question, which I don’t really grapple with, with my career frameworks and career architectures, which is assessing discernment ability, assessing taste, not that that’s not important, but it hasn’t been very important in UX design, right?

In UX design, what’s been more important is the ability to create something that works, that’s usable. I think we’re gonna be shining lights on different parts of the work than maybe has been shining on it before.

We were so focused on someone’s ability to grapple with tools, right? The number of resumes in the past that talked about, I can use Photoshop, or I can use Illustrator, and now I can use Figma. That’s all going away. And so what’s left as we consider candidates…

Jesse: right.

Peter: …as we build teams, as we think about the folks that we’re bringing together to do this work.

Jesse: Yeah. So to my mind, it comes back to really what designers have always done, with an important twist to it, which is, can you visualize the experience that you can see someone having?

How fully can you visualize that experience that someone is going to have with your product? How fully detailed is that vision? How many of the different parts of it can you really see in your head? And then having visualized that, can you conceptualize what it would take, architecturally, to create that as a digital product?

Can you conceptualize the breakdown of screens and components and in some cases data structures and other things that are necessary in order to realize that vision? And then the third part, and this is where it gets tricky for a lot of designers, can you express that in language? Can you linearize that in a way that an LLM can ingest and interpret and make sense of and move toward, and then can you take that result and iterate upon that, and build upon what it creates?

Peter: So I have three things that I wanna make sure we get to before we go.

The first you talked about, can you express it in language and linearize it? I’m wondering when you say language, do you mean specifically words or could it be words and pictures?

Jesse: It absolutely could be words and pictures, yes.

Peter: Okay. Because, thinking of designers, right? Designers are visual people, but with pictures you can communicate multiple streams of information that the LLM could be taking in to better understand what it is that is being asked of it.

Jesse: Yes. Yes. Multimodal is what they call it. Mm-hmm.

Peter: And, I think when people think of prompts, they think of typing lots of words.

And so it’ll be interesting to see how prompts evolve to accommodate multiple modalities of input.

My second question, in the talk, you mentioned how, back in the day, 2004, 2005, you were giving a talk around, websites that evolve based on use, that can adapt to use.

And this is something you and I have in common. This is something we both pursued a long time ago, and we’ve seen bits and pieces of it, right? If you look at any page on Amazon, that’s actually a demonstration of an emergent information architecture. The things that you are shown are based on prior behavior.

But one of the things that people keep talking about, at least in the design space, is kind of emergent UIs and how the UI can shape itself to what you need, not the content that it’s giving, but literally the tooling, the interface elements that you’re exposed to.

And I’m wondering, what do you think of that? Because this is something we’ve also been talking about for 25 years, and I keep not seeing.

Jesse: Well, I’ve never been into this vision to begin with. There’s not a lot of precedent for humans preferring infinitely customizable tools. Humans would much rather use a larger set of more narrowly focused tools than one big, giant Swiss army knife with 1700 blades on it that’s gonna flip different blades out depending on the context.

The various attempts at this, you know, just straight up haven’t worked. The closest thing that we’ve seen, I would say, have to do with more sort of task- or context-focused workspaces in UIs, where you can flip between modes, where I think about something like Photoshop, where you can just like really dive in and just do, like, pixel-level editing and like push all of the other stuff out of the way, and then when you’ve got to do some big kind of document stuff, you can bring the tools back in and do other kinds of things with it.

So I don’t see AI creating infinitely variable tools because humans don’t like infinitely variable tools. Humans like tools that they can habituate to. And that’s not to say that there isn’t a place for AI in creating other kinds of dynamism within these environments, but I think that that probably is going a step too far for human brains.

Peter: And one last thing kind of drafting on this, or maybe a different way at it, and something I’ve been suspecting, is how the development of these AI tools and the accessibility that they give so many people in now building their own software is… Are we going to see more and more products for, I don’t wanna say smaller and smaller audiences, but for a bunch of audiences, every, every audience, whatever it might be, can get its own product because with these tools, you can spin up something that really serves that particular segment.

This might not be a tool that you know, gets to a billion dollars ARR, maybe it only gets to $50 million in ARR, but $50 million isn’t nothing.

And are we gonna see more and more folks creating tools that generate a $100,000 to $10 million in revenue and be fine with that? And it’s not quite artisanal. I don’t know if you can call something that’s created with AI artisanal…

Jesse: that’s an interesting question.

Peter: …that’s a whole different conversation about craft and the role of craft in this. But, that mindset of smaller…

I.

Jesse: Yeah.

Peter: … special purpose, you know, kind of Kevin Kelly’s “thousand true fans” oriented software, instead of what always feels like everybody around us is trying to do, which is create something that goes big.

Jesse: Right? Yeah, I think so. I think there’s absolutely an opportunity there. Honestly, I think that’s a part of the larger thing that we’re likely to see, which, when I hear about vibe coding these days and people generating apps out of nothing, what they’re mostly making are tools for themselves to fill some gap, to fill some hole in their own workflow.

And so I could definitely see a lot of creative professionals out there potentially creating tools to support their own workflow in different ways out of this technology. What it takes to scale that, to be a commercial product, to give it the stability and the security and the reliability necessary to be a thing that you could sell to somebody is maybe a different level that a lot of people aren’t gonna get to.

But to make something that can run on your machine, that can help you quickly, you know, organize your task list or prioritize features or whatever the particular thing is, I can absolutely see a lot of that going on.

Peter: So just last question for you. What are we not talking about? What have I not asked about? Or what are you not seeing in the discourse that you think is important and worth exploration?

Jesse: Hmm.

It’s hard to think of what’s not in the discourse because there’s so much discourse.

I’m gonna come back to the emphasis on language actually, because I think that there is not enough talk about the linguistic craft here, and the ways in which small changes in grammatical structures in word choice, in the way that you phrase and frame problems– because that’s what the work is, prompt work is problem framing for a machine to generate a response to the problem, and the more effectively you can use the mechanics of language to frame a problem in a way that the machine can understand, for you to have your own sort of theory of mind in the way that we use that phrase in philosophy and psychology to describe how we respond to the internal mental state of another entity in the world, the extent you can develop your own theory of mind about the AI and your own linguistic approach to engaging with it, that’s the skillset across the board, regardless of the problem that you’re trying to solve.

Peter: Sounds good. Let’s end there.