Finding Our Way

About the episode:

Dan Saffer—designer, author, and CMU professor—joins Peter and Jesse to take stock of design education at a moment when everything is in flux. What’s worth teaching when the tools change weekly? How do you define quality when AI can spin up a passable prototype in minutes? And what are today’s students teaching their professors about where design is headed?

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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, our Adaptive Path colleague Dan Saffer joins us. He’ll share some of what he’s learned on his journey from design book author to Silicon Valley design leader to his current work training the next generation of designers as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. We’ll hear his perspective on what it takes to prepare the next generation for the age of AI, as well as what they’re teaching him about design process, design’s value, and where that value is headed.

Peter: Dan, thanks for joining us.

Dan: Hello. Thanks for having me. this is fun. Unusual seeing you all so far away.

Jesse: It feels so natural, doesn’t it?

Peter: For those listening, we have with us Dan Saffer. Jesse and I have known Dan for over 20 years now. I believe I met you, Dan in 2003 or 4 at a Designing Interactive Systems conference where you were talking about metaphor in design, and you were getting your master’s at CMU, the very program similar to what you’re now teaching.

We’ll get into that in a moment. You worked with us at Adaptive Path for a number of years, and then you went off and had your own journey including through Silicon Valley, and now have found yourself… are you a professor at CMU? What is Dan Saffer doing now?

Dan: My official title is Assistant Professor of the Practice at the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Say that three times fast.

And what that means is I worked a lot in the industry and now come back and teach students how to go be industry professionals mostly in design.

I mean, I teach design in the school of computer science. I teach people that want to be UX designers, product designers, AI designers, product managers, user researchers, kind of a wide gamut of folks that come through the program.

And that could be anything from our PhDs to master students and people that are doing stuff at the business school, like people that wanna be PMs or people that are just interested in design and want to come find out what that’s all about, and data scientists, and really, you name it, like we are one of the most popular undergrad, second majors in the entire university.

So it’s really fun. A pretty wide variety of people come through, some of whom it’s, like, this is what design is, and some of whom have worked, you know, in the industry for years.

So it’s been a very interesting three years to convert from practitioner, design lead to design professor. And yeah, speaking of a journey and speaking of finding our way.

Peter: Well, we’re gonna get into that, but you said the phrase, I teach design. What does that actually mean? What does it mean to teach design in this HCI program?

Dan: Wow, this is a super long topic. So HCI has got a number of different disciplines that are a part of it. So there’s computer science, there’s psychology and sociology, there’s learning sciences. There’s engineering and there’s probably one I’m missing. But there’s also design.

So, in the design faculty, is kind of where my subclass is, is all about teaching a number of different things. We teach service design. We teach interaction design fundamentals. We teach advanced interaction design. I teach a lot of design and AI and we also teach some kind of entrepreneurship, like getting a startup out and those kinds of things.

So that’s kind of what teaching design is currently. So I do a lot of the kind of advanced and AI type stuff, although I have taught pretty much everything else that I just mentioned at one point or another.

Jesse: So in addition to the work that you’ve done over the years, you’ve also written a bunch of books, right, where you have explored different facets of practice within design, interaction design, digital product design. And I’m curious about the threads that you’ve seen that are influencing the way that you engage with students now around those fundamentals.

Like, you wrote one of the classic books on interaction design, Designing for Interaction. You were talking about gestural interfaces before other people were, you were talking about microinteractions before other people were. I’m curious about how all of that work around establishing the deep patterns of how humans interact with these systems is playing out now as we’re seeing, really, this wave of radical change as you are engaged with that leading edge and these AI technologies and how they fit in.

Dan: How I like to think about it is that there’s really only two things right now that are really worth teaching.

One is the fundamentals, and one is the stuff that’s kind of on the cutting edge.

And the stuff in between is really kind of up influx, like the design process is right now kind of in flux. And different methods are in flux. User research is in flux. There’s lots of stuff that is kind of in flux right now.

But there are certain things that never change because human beings never change. So there are certain rules and principles and foundational things like typography and what looks good and how things act, and getting a product sense and reframing and problem finding and meaning making. All those things that are kind of the core, basic, super-skills of design, I think are a really important thread to maintain that connection to Henry Dreyfus and George Nelson and all the people, you know, all the designers that came before us many, many years ago, but now we also have this, like all this new stuff that’s coming and that is just something that, yeah, we are trying to kind of keep up with, figure out what is worth teaching.

So that students can use that to generate things, to generate concepts, generate ideas, to help them you know, do kind of the old school production work. But what we’re trying to keep is the judgment and the thinking part of it. The solving the right problem, the strategy part of it.

So trying to keep those things that are really important about design, while still saying, okay, there’s this new technology. We’re all fumbling around with it. It’s clearly nascent, it’s clearly important, and what do we do with it? And so those two things are the real pillars of what I’m trying to teach and imbue students with my pearls of wisdom these days.

I mean, it’s funny ’cause, like, the original books were meant to be… the Designing for Interaction book was meant to be a textbook. It was meant to be a standard book for design students because there just wasn’t anything out there like it, you were cobbling together all these different articles.

And so the idea was, let’s put it together as a textbook that can be taught. And I’m assuming, because I still get like a dollar or two a month in royalties from it, that somewhere somebody is still teaching it.

Peter: Since you just mentioned the book and maybe whether it’s Designing for Interaction or Microinteractions, what, given what you are working on now, and what you’re witnessing and experiencing, what do you look back at what you have written and think, oh, that no longer holds, that was somehow inaccurate or inappropriate, or you were able to successfully kind of establish some foundation there that does still feel relevant today.

Dan: Some things you really have to question, like, is it worthwhile to be doing wireframes now? I mean I spent a lot of time in the book talking about wireframes, and we’ve kind of talked about them for years as being a great way to get people to look at your designs without focusing on the visuals,Right? That’s the whole purpose of wireframes.

Jesse: Right.

Dan: Is that valid now when I can spin up a whole, basically a whole branch, a whole prototype of something that kind of works or looks and kind of feels like… Should I bother teaching wireframes now?

I do, because of exactly what I said,you know, I’m trying to give students a lot of things that are in their toolbox that they can pull out and use when it’s appropriate. That’s the hope where they’re like, oh, wait, if, people keep getting stuck on the visuals here, maybe we should just do the wireframe version so that they can go back and kind of backfill or, pull this dusty old tool out of their toolkit and blow the dust off of it and be like, here, let’s try this old thing and see if it still works.

There are definitely things that I have found that are becoming more relevant. Things like task analysis now is incredibly important when it comes to thinking about agents, for example.

Before you remove an entire person’s workflow or change their workflow by adding in an AI agent to it, you should probably understand that workflow and all the decision points and what’s happening and what the different nuances of that workflow are before you just plow through it with an AI agent and push the button and have it try to do everything at once.

So there’s lots of stuff like that. I mean, remember when prototyping was incredibly hard? it was almost impossible to get something that looked and felt like it worked. I mean, but that’s the olden days now. Like now in an afternoon you can get something that looks and works pretty well.

Jesse: So what are the implications of that for designers and design as an activity?

Dan: I mean the, biggest implication of that is I do no thinking upfront, and I just am like, type, type, type, type, type, prompt, prompt, prompt, go, oh, look, here’s the app. It’s finished, it’s done. Here’s the prototype.

That’s the big drawback to it, right? Where you are quickly prompting and then you are not reviewing to see if it’s good, if it’s valuable, if it actually works the way that you think it should.

Now the bonus to it is that you can spin up four or five of these in the time that it used to take to do a piece of one, and you can then test them all and play with them all and try them all out and see which one really works.

That’s the holy grail of this whole thing is that you can have these things that look and work really well and you can test them and you can get them in a week or less.

Jesse: I think it’s interesting and exciting to think about this as part of an individual designer’s creative process in fine tuning because it seems to me like, why would you need a robust, fully built out, fully detailed, fully realized prototype?

Hopefully it’s because you’re asking some pretty fine-grained questions across those different prototypes about what is the most valuable design process.

What I wonder about is how this plays out in a cross-functional environment, where the designer isn’t the only one coming to the meeting with a prototype. And in fact, it starts to look a little bit like High Noon, like, you know, show down at the O.K. Corral, where it’s like, I got my prototype. You got your prototype, let’s shoot it out, and let’s see whose prototype takes the day.

And I wonder about the implications of these tools for collaboration, not just for individual ideation.

Dan: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t think this is also anything that’s super new. I remember way back in my career that PMs would show up with screenshots of what they wanted to be designed, and it’s a similar kind of thing. Now though, it just looks great. I mean, it looks real in a way that a marked up screenshot for me to design never did.

And I agree. There is this weird, now, tension kind of between PM, design, engineering. It’s like, how do we work on these things together and make sure the right idea wins?

That I think is what is really important. And that is also the thing that AI does really badly, again, which is, are you solving the right problem? Are you going about the right way? Are you framing the problem correctly?

That is something that AI does not do well. If you come with your prototype and it is for this problem, and I come to it with a better framing, then, probably, hopefully my idea will win out because it’s like, oh, I see how you thought about this. This is a different, a better take on this, ’cause it’s solving the real problem, not the problem that we thought we had.

Our classic old consulting problem. You come to us with something that you think is the problem. We find out what the real problem is.

Jesse: Right.

Peter: Yeah, RFPs often had the solution inferred, and we would have to try to back out of that and probe that.

Dan: But I have been talking to a lot of industry leaders, many of whom don’t want me to talk publicly about kind of what they’re doing, but that’s fine. I’m gonna genericize it. But a lot of it is that there is really this merging and blending of the teams, where a lot of the time that designers used to spend in their silo making mocks and prototypes is now spent alongside the PM and the engineer working to refine a prototype or multiple prototypes together.

And, to me, that’s a pretty great solution. I think that to have that kind of close collaboration where you’re working that closely rather than often doing kind of waterfall kind of stuff, where then you toss it over the wall to the engineer.

But again, you have to make sure, just like with our old friend Agile, that you have the time upfront to actually think about what is the right problem? Are we doing this the right way? Are we solving the right things? Is this worth our time to actually spend, to refine?

And I’ve also heard that on certain teams, there are definitely designers who are now shipping production code because it is in places where there’s not enough engineering talent to really handle those, or it is stuff that engineer’s don’t have time for, or don’t have much interest in. So like, final, like, production polish. A lot of times the designers are now doing that and I love that.

I was like, ding, ding, ding, ding, you know, like, ’cause you used to have to file ’em as like a bug report or something like that. Trying to get people to actually work on some of these polish things and being able to go into the code and do little tweaks and ship. Wow. Amazing.

Peter: When you were talking about teams, I understood it to be a designer working with cross-functional product manager and engineer. Something I wonder about is designers working in design teams.

When we collaborated at Adaptive Path 20 years ago, all of our projects were done by teams of designers that had complimentary skill sets, you know, range of experience and it wasn’t just us. Most design agencies would staff teams of designers because that led to better design when you have more brains tackling a problem.

Over the last however many years, 10, 15 years as design’s moved in-house, you tend to get the lone designer, even pre-AI, right? The lone designer working on a Scrum team, in their silo trying to make stuff.

Part of the reason I co-wrote the org design book was to see if there was a way to team-ify design in-house, ’cause, again, I believe designers not just work best, but do their best work, like deliver best when they can work with one another.

I’m curious what you’re seeing either in your observations in industry or college contexts. Usually you have the students working together on projects, and so there’s a teaming there. How does this supplant, support, change the dynamic of, collaboration within a design team when adopting these tools?

Dan: There are two things that I have heard about this.

One is that in a lot of these organizations, there’s still a design organization and then teams are still formed, like they have been for the last you know, however many years.

Someone gets lent out to the onboarding team or the safety team or the transaction team or whatever it is, but they still live in the big design org. I don’t think that that particularly has shifted very much.

And because it seems so easy for one person to be able to spin up these things, the concept of a team is completely lost. That you have people that are doing everything and there’s no one over their shoulder, there’s no one alongside them who is doing the plusing work, as we used to call it, at Adaptive Path, making things better. There’s no one doing that.

And the AI certainly isn’t gonna tell you, Hey, this is a dumb idea. You shouldn’t be doing this. So I think some of that diversity of opinion and diversity of ideas is going to get lost.

And I do worry about that as we start to move to these single person being able to do the PM role, the engineering role, and the design role all at once in one thing, is it just going to be everyone doing everything poorly?

So that’s what I do worry about.

Jesse: It is an interesting question because it’s almost like, you know, isn’t this where we came in?

Dan: For sure. Yes, time is a flat circle here.

Jesse: Yeah, exactly. When we entered this industry in the nineties, what you had were software developers or maybe software engineers who were expected to manage their own projects. They were expected to conceptualize user experiences. They were expected to make the technical, architectural decisions about the components and the modules and the technologies and all the bits and bobs that would need to go together to create that experience.

And then they would be expected to write the code that put all that stuff together. And that was the job for decades before the advent of user experience design as a discreet discipline within the product development process. And, you know, along the way we got product managers and we got, you know, growth hackers and all the other kinds of variants that we got.

Peter: Barnacles.

Jesse: Yeah. Well, but that’s the thing is, like, if it’s all kind of coming back to this idea of the creative contributor who can think on multiple levels at once, what does that mean for the mandate of a design team within an organization? And what does that suggest about the actions that a design leader needs to take in order to activate and realize whatever that mandate turns out to be?

Dan: Now I have heard that in these organizations that I’ve spoken with, and they are all fairly large, have pretty good sized teams in them, that they’re still doing things like design crits. So that is why they still live in a design department. They do have like weekly crits and those kinds of things that are still part of design practice.

And I think that is good because if you are a solo designer working on a single team with a PM and an engineer and maybe a data scientist, you’re not getting that kind of design critique that you might get in larger organizations.

But at a smaller company or a startup, are you gonna get any of that? Probably not. You’re probably just going to be expected to do it all as yourself. And frankly, the tools are not ready there yet. And most of the people that I see get sucked into startups, particularly young designers, they’re not ready for that kind of overall responsibility yet. They don’t understand it.

And so it is, it’s a concern. Now that being said, I know and have worked with people that could rock this, could really like just take this tool and do, like, amazing things with it on their own because they have a great product sense. They have a little bit of a coding background. They’re methodical, they have really good ideas.

They actually bother to think through problems. They do thinking upfront.

So there are a certain set of people that I think this will really, really ignite. But I don’t think that’s everybody.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Peter: I’m curious in the context of your classroom, I’m assuming students are doing projects, and I’m assuming they’re doing them in teams. How are you seeing your students navigate collaboration with these tools, that can so much encourage everyone kind of doing their own thing, right?

These are not collaborative tools, usually. Figma is, but the various LLMs are very much like me and the machine are having a dialogue and getting anyone else involved is awkward.

And I’m wondering what dynamic is emerging that you’ve witnessed, if any?

Dan: It depends on the class. So in the advanced interaction design class, it is very kinda one-on-one. But we do have crits with the other designers in the class because that is a, traditional design studio class.

In the designing AI products and services class, we deliberately set up the teams in that class to have technical people, business people, and designers on them.

And so we deliberately try to make a simulacrum of what it’s actually going to be like to work with people of other disciplines. And that is always one of the biggest highlights of the class.

And one of the things that the people love the most about the class, because they come in and they’re like, especially if they’re coming from like the design school or the engineering school or the business school, they’re like, I have been trained to look at things through this very narrow lens. And having to actually discuss and debate even when they are using the tools to put together an agent or a gen AI product or those kinds of things, they are all debating and talking about it as a group of people with different backgrounds.

That’s kind of the best we can do, because you’re right, the tools are not currently set up to do collaborative work.

Peter: Does someone end up, like, owning the keyboard and the other two are talking to them…

Jesse: Whoever controls the prompt controls..

Dan: Yes. I, I, think it does end up like that honestly, I think it is like…

Jesse: the product.

Dan: There is someone who is the designated AI lead when they are prototyping, and that is the person who is in charge of that piece of it.

Now, I will say that before anyone starts to prompt, we force them to spend a week or two trying to figure out what exactly it is that they’re going to build. We don’t let them just run off and just start prototyping. We really force them into doing some ideation, some ranking, some consequence scanning, thinking about what could go wrong. Thinking about things like the business, like the financials. Like, is this gonna be actually valuable to the business? And then, like, do people want this? Is it actually a real need that people have?

So we really force them to go back to design process. We kind of force them into like doing the upfront stuff before they ever touch the keyboard.

And I think that is a great practice for them to have going out in the world.

Jesse: Do you think they see the payoff, the benefit of that?

Dan: I do actually. I think a lot of them really do think that it is valuable, that they just haven’t wasted their time building prototypes that no one wants or that no one will pay for or no one will buy.

And we especially get a lot of designers who are like, oh, I’ve never thought about the business side of things before. I’ve never thought about how much this might cost. And that’s great.

And then we’ve get a lot of engineers who are like, well, I’ve never thought about whether somebody wants this or not. So, it is eye-opening from a lot of different sides, and I think that they do find value in it.

Now, whether they are continuing this process out in the real world, I’m not sure. We lose them after they launch, but I think it is a valuable practice for them to have in their lives.

And certainly in the advanced class, we definitely spend a lot of time talking to them. Like we give them a product brief that sucks and have them try to figure out why it sucks, where it sucks, how to fix it, how to reframe it, all of that before ever again doing any kind of concepting or prototyping or those kinds of things.

Although, I will say sometimes we do have them use the given crappy brief to make the prototype of what is being suggested and see how terrible it is and be, like, is this, what, is this real? Is this really what you want?

Jesse: Right. Right,

Dan: So that alone is an actual valuable tool ’cause you can spin up a really crappy prototype based on really crappy requirements really fast and see immediately like, Ooh, I can see some real problems here. It really blows holes in the PRD, which is great.

Jesse: Yeah. I love the idea that the reason you’re getting crappy results is because you haven’t been specific enough about what you’re asking for. Or there are inherent contradictions in what you’re asking for that have to ultimately be resolved.

Which kind of comes back to what you were saying before about what design actually brings to the equation, which is problem framing and this kind of taking problem framing as a process, really to shoot a frame over at the machine and see what the machine comes back with and say, okay, is this actually what we wanted? And creating space for that human judgment in the process itself.

And I think that the fear, and for some people, the promise, is that that first one that comes back is gonna be exactly the right thing. And I wonder about not just the process implications, but the mindset implications for for designers, other creative people involved in this creative process who have to be able to look at what came back and actually say, you know what, this isn’t good enough. This isn’t ready for production. This isn’t what we wanted.

And whether there’s a skill set there. I mean, you referenced taste, and I wonder about where that fits into how we frame the value that the human on the human side of the keyboard brings to that interaction.

Dan: I think that we should think about taste in a broad sense. I think there is a lot of design copium happening right now. Where it’s like, well, my brilliant aesthetic judgment will save me from the AI machine, and I don’t think that that is true.

I think these things are gonna be able to present pretty good looking things in short order soon.

And I do think that there is actually a lot of underlying taste about UX that I think is getting lost here. Like, does the flow make sense? Does the information architecture make sense? Does the problem make sense? Are we making it too difficult to do these things? Are we making users do too much work? Is this wrong for our particular context? Can we do this thing because we have compliance issues or regulations that we have to follow?

So I think there’s a lot of taste questions that are really like a lot of judgment questions that have to fall into the big taste category. I think it’s taste broadly in terms of both look and feel. Does this work for our users, our organization, our context, and I think that is really important.

Now, I will say, caveat, that there are times when that push the button, the first thing that comes out is gonna be fine, is gonna be fine for certain basic tasks.

Jesse: Right,

Dan: If I’m making a thing for myself and, I’m the only one who has to see it, well, I don’t care about things like accessibility, does it make sense to a broader audience? Does it make sense at scale? No, it doesn’t. It just has to work for me. And so something that the machine cranks out that’s 80% fine is fine and I’ll just use it.

Now, that just does not work when you’re talking about working at scale, working for lots of other people. People still want good designed things and will always, I think, want good designed things.

But there are these situations where good enough is good enough and we see this all the time with, you know, just to take an old school example… My restaurant site does not have to be the most cutting edge website in the world. It just has to be clear and see things. And a template is perfectly fine for that.

And I think we will see the same thing with AI, that it’ll create a little app for us. That’s fine. It’s based on best practices and a kind of perfectly okay looking generic user experience and UI and it’ll be fine.

Peter: You’re mentioning concepts of good and good enough, which are, part of a definition of quality.

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Peter: And I’m curious how that conversation is going on in school or with some of these companies you’re talking to. I don’t recall if you were at Adaptive Path when I tried to define quality inside the company, and caused some… you do, okay.

Because it caused some consternation because where I landed was that quality was defined through a conversation with the client. Like it was an agreement, was quality. And if the client was happy, then the design was good or good enough.

And there were people internally who were like, no, ’cause our clients aren’t gonna have the same standards that we do and we should be aspiring for something greater. Fair.

But when then pressed on how do you know when something’s better, it was all, you know it when you see it, which to me doesn’t hold water, right?

And so I’m wondering, as you’re talking about taste, and I know you’ve talked about discernment and you’re in a design school where the goal is to help people develop their craft, and the only reason to develop craft is to make things better, right? Is to deliver higher quality stuff.

How does that quality conversation happen? Or what is that conversation around quality that you’re taking part in or leading with, whether it’s students or, again, the kind of relationships you’re having outside of school.

Dan: It is definitely a very hard thing to define and try to wrap your head around, particularly for students because it’s like, well, this is good, good enough. And I actually last semester, I came up with like a metric or a rubric for myself, which was that this is better than it needs to be.

And for me, that is, that is the mark of quality. Like it didn’t have to be this good, but goddamn is this good? This makes doing this, whatever, this thing is so much better.

Jesse: That is literally word for word what George Lucas said about The Empire Strikes Back. He was disappointed in the production team because it was better than it needed to be. They spent so much of his money on it.

Dan: Yeah, I mean, to me it’s, like, it is that deep understanding of the goals, the task, and solving that underlying problem that I think really sets something apart as being high quality. And again, it’s really better than it needs to be. And that is a surprisingly hard concept to convey to students.

Peter: Well, yeah. How do you teach that? Or, you mentioned crits that you say your advanced program is part of. Like, how are you helping them understand that perhaps what they are showing is not good enough and that it can be better? What does better mean? Is it simply better because it solves the problem better that we have defined, or are there standards of quality that you are trying to help them appreciate and understand? Kind of more common standards of quality.

Dan: Yeah, some of this is a lot of the kind of tacit understanding that you get when you’re doing the kind of one-on-one crit, I guess there’s a number of different things that I’m looking for and trying to get them to see. And some of what I think I’m trying to teach is getting them to see their product through my eyes, how I’m seeing it, and the things that I think are off.

Not that my level of quality is insane, but getting them to notice the things that I do that they don’t. I remember two years ago I was like, that thing is off by one pixel. And the student was like, how did you see that? And I’m like, well, I’ve been doing this a long time. Like I can tell when something’s not aligned, even, you know, even a little tiny bit. It feels off, it feels like it is not quality.

Now, something like that I would not even consider. That’s not quality. That’s like baseline craft, like make things align.

But you would be astounded in the fundamentals class, how many people are just like, what do you mean grid? We don’t need a grid.

Jesse: Well, I think it’s interesting how this applies to where AI tooling comes into play, because it comes back to that same thing. Can you tell that it’s off by a pixel or not? And can you tell that the results that you’re getting are off in some way or not? And it’s interesting the way that what you describe is the honing of awareness and the sharpening of one’s ability to detect the stuff that you wouldn’t have detected early in your career.

And to detect the misfits.

Dan: Right. ‘Cause so much of it is like, it’s all nuance, it’s all small stuff. And it is just getting them to be like, well, why is this three steps instead of two? Can you put these two things together? Or you know, are you making users do too much work here? That’s a huge one for me right now, where it’s like, well, we’ll just have users when they get to a spot, they’ll log in and they’ll do all this other stuff for free.

And I’m like, no, they will not, they will not do that for free unless there is a big payoff for them, unless there’s this value exchange from doing all this work. And trying to get them to see, like, don’t make the users do unnecessary work.

Trying to figure out ways to streamline the flows or make things that are invisible clearer. Like, you know, how the rules work. So one of the problems that we have them work on, that they just turned in, is, like, working with a dating app, trying to figure out how to add this new feature to a dating app and then they have to start thinking about, well, how does this work for people that have paid for the dating app and people that have not paid for the dating app?

And trying to figure out what the rules for that kind of system is, is pretty challenging in some of their cases. And that would be something that would be really hard to try to describe and put into an AI right now.

You can do it, it’s just, there’s a lot of complex thinking that has to go into that and trying to get them to, A, think about it in the first place, and then B, figure out what those rules should be. And then C, how do those rules manifest in the system and where do they manifest is a big kind of journey that they go through.

But yeah, teaching quality is extremely hard. And especially, you know, you get a semester, you get three or four months to do this. And I always am like, well, I hope that wherever you land after this will be your finishing school. Where you will have, I mean, just like I did at Adaptive Path and trying to finish kind of like what you’re starting the kind of education journey through an apprenticeship

Peter: Let’s talk about that.

Dan: Finding our way,

TM.

Peter: Almost a month ago I did a guest lecture at a grad school course at Berkeley’s I School. And I don’t get a lot of opportunity to engage with the youths. And I was kind of taken by the challenges that they foresee as they consider that next step.

I’m wondering what you’re seeing, what you’ve seen from your graduates and how they’re faring, what you’re hearing from your students or hearing from those graduates as well in terms of, right now there’s a lot of commentary, you know, there’s that Figma report that said that hiring managers are even less likely to hire juniors now than perhaps they have been.

And I’m just wondering kind of how that’s playing out in your context.

Dan: Yeah, I mean, it used to be that most of our grads would be hired before they left school. Like, and that doesn’t happen now. I’d say maybe, 25%. I’m actually just kinda guessing here. You know that it’s a small portion of them that actually have jobs right as they leave.

Peter: I remember, when things were nuts, that there were… a significant portion of students at CMU had a job for them before they started school. The fact that they got accepted into CMU meant that the Googles of the world were like, go to school, but know that, you know, you have an offer from us.

Maybe not a job, but at least an offer when you graduate in two years.

Dan: Yeah, that’s exactly right. they would come in fall and interview you and give you a hire Before you graduated and then they just hoover you in when you were done, which is incredible. And that stuff never happens now, except for maybe some really technical roles. Obviously if you were, an AI computer science person right now,

Peter: Sure.

Dan: That…

Peter: But it’s not happening out of design anymore though.

Dan: It is not happening out of design anymore. Now I will say in the three years that I’ve been here, it has definitely gotten better. It was pretty bleak the first two years that I got here where it just took students a very long time just to land on their feet, even with a lot of help and support and trying to connect people.

And we do a lot of things like portfolio reviews and I spend, a lot of my time in spring and summer looking at portfolios, trying to help get people ready for school, get ready for post-school, get them kind of launched.

And I’m actually seeing that yes, there is a slight shift that I think is happening and I think that there are people that are looking for new grads, but you gotta be very AI forward, that you have to have those skills to be hired because those are things that a lot of the in-house people don’t have…

Jesse: right.

Dan: …or they are things that at places like Anthropic or you know, at at OpenAI or you know, or Google or any of these kind of big companies that that’s how they work now.

And so you have to have those skills to get in. And so that is weeding out a lot of people on the job market right now who have years of experience. They just don’t have the AI skills. In order to fit into their new process or where they want to or where they wanna be, or they want to get people in who can help teach these new AI skills to their existing…

Jesse: Right.

Dan: …staff.

Jesse: right.

Dan: see glimmers of hope in the hiring world.

Jesse: It is interesting to think about what this means for design leaders. So, you know, we’re closing in on the end of the first quarter. I’m a design leader and I’ve got a certain amount of budget that’s been reconciled. I can can hire four juniors, or I can hire two seniors or, you know, I can create some kind of mix there and trying to figure out how I craft new roles on my team and how do I shape my team for the future.

On the one hand, it feels like the value proposition of design itself is pulling away from execution. It’s pulling away from pixel level delivery, right? It is much more pulling toward the problem framing skillset that you talked about. The kind of thing I would look to seniors to do mostly, but I can’t have a team of all seniors.

For one thing, they’re too expensive, and for the other thing, there aren’t enough of them. So I need to be able to build out my team with a group of people who have a broader skillset. But I can’t look to juniors to do what they used to do for me, which was production and execution. So it almost suggests that there is a reframing of the ladder within design, so to speak, because juniors don’t prove themselves in the same ways.

You don’t prove yourself by your mastery of a tool. You prove yourself by mastery of a system or mastery of a problem space potentially.

Dan: I will say that I do think that juniors are not in Figma pixel pushing as much. Although I still think, for the foreseeable future, Figma will be a tool that people keep using and will continue to use. And I think you’ll be moving a lot of stuff from Figma to code and back again, and eventually there’ll be some kind of merger there.

I do think, however, that juniors will do some of that production work. I think the difference is that that production work will then actually go to production…

Jesse: hmm.

Dan: …will go, out and launch. I think you’ll have juniors who are able to make tweaks and bug fixes for small things.

And that’s how they’re gonna cut their teeth and launch it and see what happens. And that’s what they’re gonna be doing.

Peter: It’s almost… I started doing a lot of qa. It’s almost like, back in the day when, a good way to understand how software worked was to file bug fixes and just to understand kind of those nitty gritty details.

Dan: Right. And that’s how you’ll start to understand the design system. That’s how you’ll start to understand the customer base. They will be put on these smaller things or they will be part of a larger team with more senior people to do some of that kind of work.

Now they probably won’t be doing as much Figma e stuff. They’ll be doing a lot more building kind of stuff. So I think if you are a design leader right now, I think starting to get people in and starting to see how this generation works with things, I think even having one or two of them on your team is gonna be really valuable.

Not that I am a hundred percent biased and I will, and I will be, I mean, it is sometimes shocking to me how this works because I’m like, what do you mean you built an agent to do this thing and you built your own design tool to do this little thing?

Like that stuff to me is, like, mind blowing. I’m like, wait, you’re able to do that? And so that stuff is really super cool and super interesting.

Peter: Earlier you used the phrase “AI skills” and I think you just explained a little bit of what you mean by AI skills. And my org design brain kind of stood up because I think a lot when it comes to how we define roles, right, those roles are often built on skills.

So a product designer will have interaction design skills and visual design skills and information architecture skills. And those skills are basically tool agnostic, right? We are using the same skills for the last 20 years. We just, first, we used ’em in Photoshop or in Visio or in OmniGraffle, and then we migrated to Sketch or Figma and et cetera.

You said AI skills, and I’m wondering what you mean by that. Like what does it mean to develop skill nimbleness, familiarity, comfort, competency with AI in a way that is maybe analogous to developing skills with interaction design or information architecture?

Dan: I think there’s two ways to look at it. One is familiarity with the technology itself. Understanding what AI is capable of, understanding what is required to make it, understanding what is the risks, understanding like just basic stuff like, hey, this is gonna be really challenging because we need a particular kind of data to get this, and we don’t have that data in order for AI to make this kind of inference.

So it’s just understanding AI as a material, I think is one half of it.

The other half is what my colleague Nick Martelaro calls the “AI augmented designer,” where it is the use of AI tools in the design process.

So these are things like being able to do certain kinds of prompts. These are things like being able to create an agent to do certain pieces of the design production work that you may want to do. This is being able to set up a technical environment that you work in, and being able to talk to engineers about how to work with the tech stack that’s there and in order to push stuff to production.

So all those kinds of things, and being able to kind of work fluidly between a tool like Figma that gives you an overview that lets you see the whole system. That’s where your design system is. And then a tool like Claude Code or Figma Make or something like that in order to actually prototype and bring this thing to life in a way that would’ve been impossible five years ago.

So those are the two big skills. One is an understanding of the material, the way that AI works, the probabilistic nature of it, the risks of it. And then the other is how do I work with that as part of my design process?

So having those two things, I think, is what is really valuable to design organizations.

And then of course having the other skills we’ve been talking about, the foundational things, judgment, being able to understand when something is good, being able to figure out what is quality. The combination of those things, I think is a really valuable asset to have on your design team.

Jesse: Well, and another thing that came to mind as you were speaking with all of this is the ability to be, well, adaptive in how you approach things. Not to be too wedded to a particular tool set, not to be too wedded to a particular process, but to be experimental in your approach.

We were talking about the 25th anniversary of Adaptive Path and the experimental nature of how we approached things there, and I wonder if there’s something similar that applies here.

Dan: Yeah, absolutely. I mean the tools change every couple weeks. You know, I mean, it’s pretty funny.

I keep telling the story, but I’ll tell it again, which is, I was teaching my class like, oh look, you can take stuff from Claude Code and put it into Figma. and they’re like, oh, that’s interesting.

And then of course the next question was, well, can you take stuff from Figma and put it back into Claude Code? And I was like, absolutely not. You cannot do that. And then a week later I was like, remember when I told you you couldn’t do that? Guess what? Now you can.

And so there is definitely this idea of, yeah, being willing to be like, oh, now I can do that. Now my process can shift a little to accommodate as the tools get better and better and more sophisticated.

But always knowing that like with any new technology or any new tool, it’s a bumpy ride. it’s not gonna be fully baked all the time.

I mean, the stuff is still buggy and the stuff changes and if you’re doing releases every couple weeks, as a lot of these places are, there’s just unexpected stuff is gonna happen.

So right there is this idea of experimentation, of playfulness and the ability to like throw stuff out and luckily, as designers, we need to be used to that. We need to be used to having a prototype that we’re like, eh, nope, this doesn’t work. And you know, the kill your darlings mindset really helps when everything is in flux. For sure.

Peter: I have to imagine though, it makes it so difficult to teach when the sands are shifting, right? Because usually teaching, right, is built on a corpus of knowledge that has been honed over decades, and now it’s just… all this change is occurring. And so how do you develop the confidence that what you are communicating is worthwhile, right?

Dan: I mean, it’s humbling. And you have to caveat everything when you are talking about this cutting edge stuff like this. This is true.

Now, it may not be true by the end of the semester. I remember my first semester teaching the design for AI products and services class.

That March, every single day of that March, there was a new AI release or big update. Every single day.

And I was like, how do you keep up with this? I mean, you have to be changing things on the fly. You’re adding in new readings, you’re adding in new exercises, new projects.

Like right now, like our final project for that class is all around AI agents, and that is a space that is really up for grabs and the technology is really not ready for prime time. And so how do you teach students to work with a technology that is kind of janky but is gonna improve?

And some of that is, how do you go back to fundamentals? How do you tie it back to basic things that we know?

And so that’s why, for example, task analysis becomes really important again. ‘Cause it’s like, what are we trying to replace here? Can we make sure that the AI can actually do those things? Or what is the point where the AI should intervene in this system? And what are the places where the AI should absolutely not intervene in this system?

And so having those kind of discussions is really important. Even as the top of the ocean is extremely frothy and tumultuous, down at the bottom is, yeah, is very settled.

And so the more you can kind of tie those two things together, the better off you’re gonna be. But it is not easy.

Peter: Well, and something we haven’t really touched on that I think you’ve written about, is AI not as a means in your workflow, but AI as a material that you are shaping for others to use.

And you’re discussing process. When I think about this, I think back to working with Jeff Veen, speaking of Adaptive Path, right?

Who, even before Adaptive Path, would argue for designers letting go of pixel perfect delivery in favor of a more rules-based mindset, ’cause you never knew what browser people were going to have.

Dan: Right. I remember Jeff’s famous dictum, which I always tell my students, which is, if you’re not embarrassed by it, you waited too long to ship it. And so I always talk about that.

Peter: But over time, whether it’s web browsers or mobile, designers were able to get pixel perfect again and really control it.

But now with this new world, it feels like there’s the possibility for things to emerge. And I mean that literally from an emergence standpoint, kind of the evolutionary theory standpoint of a lot of local things happening and then something comes up and you don’t quite know what it’s gonna be.

And I’m wondering if that’s something that you’re seeing or teaching, or how are you helping your students be okay with not specifying to the nth degree what the final output is, but instead setting up conditions that lean towards desired direction but aren’t, you know, putting real firm stakes in the ground of this is what the experience has to be.

Dan: Right. So there’s a couple, couple ways to think about how AI is being additive to the classic double diamond process.

Which is that, yeah, at the beginning when you’re doing strategy, you have to think of things like data. You have to think of things like risk, you have to think of things like, if you know upfront that this is an AI project, is this appropriate for AI?

So things like that in the like design strategy portion, thinking about those kinds of things.

But then once you get to that second diamond where you’re talking about design execution, making the thing, right? There’s a lot of kind of new pieces that are starting to fall into place there.

And by new, for some of them, I mean old, in that it is things like designing for intent, trying to figure out what someone’s intent is, which was something that actually came out of conversational UI stuff that those folks have been working on for years. Trying to figure out what is it that people are really asking for here. What are they trying to say and what are they trying to do?

So for example, if I type into a chatbot and say, What’s the best coffee in Pittsburgh? I could be asking for a number of different things. I could be asking for, find me that, I could be asking for, is there a place that will ship it to me? I could be like, is a place near me?

There’s a number of different intents I could have with something that generic. So trying to figure out what intent is and then what is the AI output that best matches that intent?

And what is the best AI input for that too? Is it a chat box? Is it direct manipulation? Is it working behind the scenes to do things like you know, like finding a face in your camera image that it’ll focus on. That’s not something I wanna do manually all the time. That’s a really nice AI trick that can happen in the background.

So figuring out so you’ve got: no AI, you’ve got AI kind of chatbot, and then you have like generated or temporal UI that like, hey, the pieces of whatever you need start to appear. And that’s kind of like what is starting to happen right now.

So is there like a GUI portion of it as well? So there’s that chunk and then there’s the chunk about, like, what is good human- AI collaboration, HAIC, like what are the best practices there about when to ask, when to interrupt, when to just execute, how to explain something, how to say, ” this isn’t working.” Talking about my confidence level in what I’m giving back to you.

All those kinds of things, which are again, still evolving, are things that are affecting the design process as a whole.

And yeah, people don’t talk about those things as much as they should because yeah, they’re focused on the tool part of it.

Like, can you build this thing really fast without thinking about like, well, what are the things that we now need to think about? Because I think people are often thinking like when they’re using these AI powered tools, they’re using them to build traditional software. They are not using them to build AI software, which has a completely different mindset to it.

Peter: Right.

Jesse: So, with all of this stuff unfolding in so many multifaceted directions, what are you most curious to see? What are you most curious about in terms of what happens next?

Dan: I think that there is a couple of interesting points coming up.

We just mentioned one of them, which is, how do I start to get generated widgets or pieces of apps or parts of apps that are displayed as I need them for specific tasks. So this kind of temporal, generative UI pieces.

I think that is something that we’re gonna start seeing more of in the next two to three years, I think maybe even earlier. ‘Cause we’re starting to get all the pieces of those put together right now. So I think that is, I think that’s something that’s coming pretty fast.

I think the thing that’s gonna happen in the next year is that we are gonna see a real merger between Code and Figma, where you’ve, got Figma for that big overview. The ability to put together flows and things that are really hard to do in code but are easier to do visually and with direct manipulation, we are going to start seeing the merger of those where I’m gonna be able to put together a flow in Figma or Figjam and then say, okay, code this flow up so I can test that code.

Okay, great. And then it’ll be like, okay, well apply the design system to this. Okay, great. Well I’m gonna move this button over on this thing because it looks misaligned. Okay, well then that automatically translates into the code. So I think we’re gonna start seeing that kind of code and overview slash flow really start to merge. And I think that’s a really exciting point.

And then I think that the agents, the ability to take action on things and do things on your behalf is going to get better. And I think that will be pretty interesting where you’ll be able to, you know, have it do things for you on your behalf.

Now we’re seeing with things like OpenClaw, we’re seeing some crazy, wild stuff and I think it’s absolutely bonkers that people are installing this on their machines and having it go do stuff for them. It sounds like a nightmare to me.

But I mean, one of the things I think is super interesting about OpenClaw or whatever we’re calling it now, Moltbot… But that it is establishing its own goals and working more proactively in a different kind of back and forth than we see right now.

So right now, in order for me to get AI to do most things, I have to prompt it. I have to say, go do this thing for me. What if it starts to be like, well, I did this thing for you, or, Hey, I’ve noticed this thing happening and I’d like to do this thing for you.

So that it is more of a back and forth dialogue rather than I am always the actor, the AI is a passive servant.

And I think that’s really interesting from a interaction design perspective, from a HCI perspective, from a lot of different, from a security perspective, from a risk perspective, I think that there’s a lot of like weirdness there as we’re seeing with OpenClaw.

But I think it’s a really neat future to design for, and I’m looking forward to starting to think about that.

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

Dan: Yeah.

Jesse: Anything you wanna plug while you’re here?

Dan: It’s been a pleasure to find our way. I will plug my own podcast, which is AI in Design, which is a little weekly podcast we do, where we recap the week’s news and talk about it with my colleague Nik Martelaro, who is more on the tech side.

So he’s able to explain things to me that I’m like, what is this MCP thing? And he’s like, okay, here’s what it is. So really great for folks in perhaps in your audience who are design leaders and stuff like that, to start to wrap their head around what’s going on at kind of that cutting edge, which is… We try to not be like, oh, look at this news thing that’s happening, or look at this big deal. We’re very focused on the intersection of AI and design. So that’s kind of our niche.

I also have a couple workshops coming up in the Rosenfeld- verse, so that’s happening. Gonna be doing some of those. I think around the Designing for AI conference that’s happening, but also I think before that, like in April or May. And then there’s another one, I think in October that are all happening. And, yeah, that’s my plugs for now.

I am working on a designing for AI products and services book with two of my colleagues, John Zimmerman, Jody Forlizzi. It is, as you may imagine, a very difficult book to write.

Given the circumstances that we’re in right now, how do you start to make this into a thing that doesn’t get outta date the moment that you send it to the printer?

We are really trying to find those fundamental things that are unlikely to change, and that is very hard these days.

Jesse: Well, thank you so much for joining us.

Dan: Yeah. Thanks for having me. It’s, been fun to hang out and catch up.

Jesse: Thanks, Dan.

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.

If you’re looking for help with AI transformation or you just need a private advisor to help you solve your hardest leadership problems, visit my website at jessejamesgarrett.com to book your free one hour consultation.

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.

When the ground is shifting and the destination isn’t clear, how do you lead? Peter and Jesse explore the mindset and skills required to navigate the liminal moment—when old ways have dissolved but new ones haven’t taken shape. From core mindsets of maintaining situational awareness and striving for balance, to core skills around communication, persuasion and connection to build lifelines, this is a conversation about what it actually takes to lead through uncertainty.

More about Jesse: https://jessejamesgarrett.com/

More about Peter: 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.

This is Liminal.

Change is hard. Leading others through it is harder. In this episode, Jesse and I probe what it means to lead through a liminal moment. The mindset you need, the skills and behaviors that will carry you through. Designers have spent decades pushing organizations to embrace change. Turns out that’s easier to advocate for when you are not the one being disrupted.

Jesse: Hello, Peter.

Peter: Hello, Jesse. So last time you used a metaphor of surfing. Uh,talking about how when you are surfing, you cannot set it and forget it, that it requires this total presence, total attention, constant awareness of what’s going on, constant adaptation to the signals in order to stay on board.

And you were saying that as a parallel to the mindset that leaders need in this liminal moment or the liminal circumstances that they find themselves.

And I wanted to pause there and then pick it up now, because I think, you know, in that last conversation, we, we set up a lot of the context of why we think we’re in this liminal moment and what it means to be navigating liminality.

Peter: But I think there’s an interesting conversation to be had around, I guess two areas, maybe more. The liminal mindset, which I think is your surfing metaphor, addresses, and kind of a liminal skillset, right? What are the practices that you can undertake that enable you to succeed when things are liminal?

And so one of the things, you know, you’re pointing out with the liminal mindset is that, vigilance, right? That, that need to maintain alertness, awareness…

Jesse: Yeah.

Peter: To not be rigid, right, and, and stuck in a particular mode or mindset, but to recognize the context in which you’re operating, the seas on which you’re bobbing up and down and, and to act accordingly.

That actually puts me in mind of Ed Catmull’s book Creativity, Inc.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Peter: Where he argues against rigidity and stability in favor of balance and equilibrium, right? He credits Pixar’s success as not doing the same thing every time and not being really rigid around how they do things, but always being able to return to a equilibrium. But, but allowing themselves to bob and weave a bit, and to go with the flow, again, to continue to use that metaphor.

And so, yeah, I’m, I’m curious, as I reflect that back on to you where this is taking your brain.

Jesse: Yeah. Well, I think that you point out a few important pieces of the puzzle.

So first of all, just to think about it as a mindset rather than as a skillset. What that entails is an attitude, a stance, a way of setting your own priorities within your own mind about what you pay attention to, what you give focus to, what you give energy to, and what you don’t.

And so that first piece of it, the mindset piece of it, I think is really critical.

And then layered on top of that, you have, you used the word vigilance, which sounds to me a little, perhaps a little harsh because vigilance can sound like taking a defensive posture, which I don’t think this is actually what this is.

Peter: I’m talking Charles Bronson, Death Wish, here, yo.

Jesse: Yeah. But rather, in our conversation with Colt, he talked about the concept of situational awareness, which is very commonly applied in military context, where it simply is about, are you on top of what’s going on right now? Not what was going on five minutes ago or an hour ago or yesterday, but are you on top of what’s going on right now?

And are you paying attention to the things in the present moment that are actually the most relevant things. And that is this notion of maintaining situational awareness that I think is really critical.

A lot of it is about operating in real time, being able to be in a real time, tight feedback loops, you know, between perception and action. Allowing yourself to kind of iteratively refine your judgment as you go, rather than, you know, committing to the master plan front and then driving that forward no matter what the waves do, because then the waves are just gonna put you under.

Peter: Yeah. And it’s, it’s interesting because I always forget exactly how the phrase goes, but, you know, plans are useless and, but planning is essential, right?

So you mentioned the liminal mindset, and I agree there is a state of being, a state of showing up that’s important. But I think there’s also a liminal skillset.

Jesse: Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Peter: And I think designers, design leaders can embrace a set of skills that they are good at, or should be good at,

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Peter: And apply them to navigating liminality.

And so when you talk about not being beholden to plans, there’s something around the value in having a vision, you know, in these liminal moments, the value of, like, having some sense even in the confusion of where things might be going and, and being able to lean into that.

But it’s, I guess it’s not having a vision, it’s having visions.

And…

Jesse: Well, and it’s interesting for design because of the way in which this kind of pulls against this auteurist view of the designer as the master planner, as the architect, as the orchestrator of every detail, in that the liminal moment doesn’t permit that. It requires you to respond in designerly ways, but not in ways that look like delivering against the master plan.

Peter: That reminds me of, you know, a challenge that some designers have and have had for decades working in digital media where you can’t specify to the nth degree exactly, you know, your layout and your typography and your color scheme and all that. And the frustration that many designers would have.

But instead to recognize that the role of a design leader is more one of orchestrating elements in a context towards a desired goal or outcome, as opposed to fixing some presentation you know, in some kind of snapshot of time.

Jesse: Form, right? Yeah.

Peter: I guess a lot of this is getting back to this notion of fluidity, of feedback loops of, well, flow.

But, but you want it to be directed, right?

And that’s where I think even if you don’t want to be beholden to a vision, a specific point on the horizon that you are death marching to, come hell or high water, I guess what I’m realizing is a lot of the leadership practices that I discuss, you know, generally are highly applicable here.

And the one that’s coming to mind is having an agenda, right. You know, having a point of view, having a perspective of, Yes, I don’t know where this is going, but I have a sense of where it should head, based on my experience, my perspective.

And just knowing, I’m having a hard time articulating this clearly, right?

But, like, by having an agenda, having principles, having a sense of purpose, having a sense of your own value.

I think you talked about this last time, the difference between values and value, really, like, having your own value system as a foundation upon what you’re standing, will help you make better decisions as you’re trying to figure out how to navigate this uncertainty, this ambiguity.

Jesse: Yeah, yeah. As a leader, especially, because of the volume of information you are consuming and processing and making decisions based on, you have to have rubrics. You have to have heuristics. You have to have rules of thumb that can guide you through these situations where the data is imperfect and the picture is ambiguous.

And if you don’t have that, you are very easily led astray by red herring signals.

So you need to know what you’re kind of listening for, especially as a leader, because of the multiplier effect that you have in your role, because of the ways in which, not just the levers that you have your hands on that other people don’t that influence the way entire organizational structures move, but also because, when it comes to mindset, the leader sets the tone for the entire organization. And the mindset that you instantiate in your role ends up becoming what the people on your team model themselves on, and what you end up creating.

Peter: Since our last discussion, I’ve had a few conversations with design leaders around embracing AI tooling…

Jesse: hmm.

Peter: …that feels relevant here. Well, and it feels relevant here, especially as you’re talking about modeling the mindset, because I think, you know, this uncertainty is opportunity.

And it’s a positive opportunity. This is a, you know, we can charge into this breach and come out the other side having made a positive impact. But only if we approach it with some spirit, if we have an agenda, have that point of view of what to make, how to make sense of, of the mess that, that we’re maybe currently operating in.

Whereas I was talking to one design leader and, and reflecting on how, you know, in a near term future, her team might no longer need Figma, right? Put a design system inside an LLM and, and design right out of that in production-ready prototypes that use live data that collapse the distance between what design is doing and what engineers receiving.

And as I said this to this design leader, they reflected how it was triggering them to think about how their team would not be working within that tool. Even though this particular design leader is rarely themselves in that tool, right? The team’s identity has been aligned with this tool. And, you know, what does it mean when this thing that has been our identity is taken away from us.

Now, on the other side, was this other design leader I was speaking with, I told this last time, where it took two to three months to get this design team comfortable not using Figma and going straight to the AI tools.

And it was two or three months of misery for this design team where they’re like, we don’t like this, this isn’t what we signed up for, we didn’t expect this to be our job. But then once they came out the other side,

Jesse: Yes.

Peter: They, they embraced it.

And I think in part that leader, because again, they weren’t a craft leader, they were this ops leader, there was something about that relationship that allowed this leader to see these people through this challenge, without getting caught up in their own identity getting caught up in it as well.

Jesse: Right, right. Well, I think that this is one of those situations where success requires optimism about change. It requires the leader especially to go, You know what? We don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t know how we’re going to get there. It’s a mess right now, and it’s going to get messier. But I believe there is a place that we can get to, that is a more positive place for everybody.

And you know, as we talked about last time, I think it comes back to, what do you think the value of design actually is in your organization, and how do you optimize for that with this new tooling and with these new processes and new ways of thinking about what a designer’s job is day to day?

Because again, if you think your designer’s job is to be hands-on with a mouse in Figma every day, you might be looking at a really different future.

Peter: Well, and it was funny ’cause that first design leader I was talking about we, we had this conversation ’cause on, on one side, there’s this expectation to embrace AI in their workflow.

Jesse: Sure.

Peter: And then this kind of, resistance or almost dismissal of that within the design organization.

But then, as we were talking about what we were going to cover in our session, another topic was how do we elevate design, and how do we help design really be seen as a force to be reckoned with within the organization? And I’m like, these two things are connected.

Jesse: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Peter: Right, right. And one of the places we ended up was, like, you need to define design on the impact and the outcomes it’s driving, not on the artifacts it’s producing.

Jesse: Yeah.

Peter: That’s going to be how you elevate it, but that’s also how you’re going to then be comfortable embracing, you know, other kinds of tools to solve these problems because you realize it’s not about the tool so much is about the nature of the change that you’re trying to drive.

Jesse: Right. Yeah, I think that’s really true. And I think that also it points to something, going back to having an agenda and taking a stand, which is that these things are gonna get defined for you because of the collaborative nature of your work.

So if design teams are not, and design leaders are not, taking the initiative to define for themselves what a design process looks like, that both leverages these tools and leverages the value of what the humans bring to the process, if they are not able to put forward ways of doing this, that advance the human-centered values that they, as teams, say they stand for, they’re gonna get lapped by product, by engineering.

If you continue to define what you’ve done in the terms that you always have, you’re gonna stay in the box you’ve always been in.

Peter: Well, right. Getting back to this concept of liminality, right, there’s maybe three, kind of, outcomes.

What you’re talking about is, is people who, when they engage in the liminal moment are like, oh, hell no. And just back out. They’re like, not for me, don’t wanna deal with it. It makes me uncomfortable, makes me uneasy. And those folks are gonna be the ones left behind, right?

I suspect a significant number of the designers who have found themselves disempowered these past few years, you know, who had maybe been in executive roles, had been promoted, had been given opportunities, and who are no longer, I think many of them it was a self-induced circumstance because when offered this way potentially through, they’re like, Nope, not me, and, you know, maybe unintentionally inadvertently, but found themselves getting rolled back, ’cause they did not embrace that moment.

There’s a second response, which is you kind of remain in the liminal moment…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

Peter: And, I think there could be a type of, like, chaos adjacent design leader who doesn’t mind the discombobulation or maybe they are just getting, it’s like they’re in the clothes dryer. They’re just getting tumbled around and, like, every time they try something, they’re just getting kind of knocked around and knocked around and knocked around.

And that’s a space to be in for a period. You don’t want to dwell there. That’s, that’s gonna lead to burnout. That’s gonna lead to, as I’ve heard from some friends of mine, heart troubles or other kind of, you know, problems as they can’t figure out

Jesse: Just sort of

Peter: kind of how to, how to na-, how to, how to surf it.

Jesse: boiling pot. Yeah.

Peter: Yeah. I mean, to use your surfing metaphor, they’re just getting tossed repeatedly by those waves. They, they can’t get on top of it.

And then the third, right, is surfing that liminal moment such that you’re finding yourself on top of the wave and leaning into a bit of that chaos, but in a way that that ends up being, I don’t wanna say productive, but positive, you know, with some positive outcomes.

You mentioned the positivity earlier. This is something I think a lot of design leaders actually struggle with, is maintaining positivity for, for many reasons.

But, you know, it’s a non-negotiable for a leader to have a positive affect. It doesn’t mean wearing rose colored glasses or being pollyannish or saying things are fine when you know they’re not.

But it does mean having a relentless optimism, having a point of view that there is a way forward. It’s James Kirk-ian, right?

Like there is a third way, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the Kobyashi Maru is telling you the only result of this is death. But you have to help people, you have to believe, and then you’ll bring people along by being able to articulate potential positive outcomes that you all can move towards, right?

And having…

Jesse: If you don’t believe that, if you don’t believe that, then that just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for yourself and the team. Like you, as the leader, have to be the one, even if you’re the only one, who can see a path forward toward some elevation of the team’s value I think is probably what’s the long term result of that, right?

Peter: And kind of perhaps to that point, something that I’ve, you know, thinking about the liminal skillset, right? So you have a liminal mindset of positivity, [garble], liminal mindset of, if not vigilance, at least awareness and, and iteration and, and you know, kind of checking your priors every

Jesse: Yeah.

Peter: so often.

Peter: The liminal skillset, as I’ve thought about this separate from our conversation here…

One of the keys to liminality is, is the same as, as keys to leadership. Two really come to mind actually.

Relationship building, right? You are going to get through this liminal moment by having advocates throughout whatever organization you’re in.

That there are people that you are connected to in different places in different functions such that as these seas are roiling, you have lifelines or however you want to think of them, to someone in finance, someone in HR, someone in product, someone in marketing, that, that you’ve set up your own shadow network, support network, whatever, of folks who you’re aligned with, who have similar thoughts in terms of where things can go, and through those relationships, you can better together, as a collective even…

Jesse: right.

Peter: …make your way through to the other side.

And to that something I find myself returning to, and it’s one of the skills, leadership skills that I’ve let go of when I do my teaching, that I think I need to bring back, which is communication.

Being a really good communicator. The leaders who will be followed during these liminal moments are those who can articulate a compelling story of where this is going, right? And then getting people excited by that compelling story to then help you realize, actually realize this story, right?

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Peter: It might start as a story, but that story is what’s gonna capture interest and engagement and want them to come along to make that story real.

And so to really hone those communication skills that in a way that allows you to communicate a compelling narrative that people are excited by.

Because they’re looking for it, right? And when you’re in a liminal moment, it’s all chaos. It’s all confusion. People are looking to hold onto something that feels real and exciting, energizing.

Jesse: Yeah, yeah. And this actually connects back to something from the surfing metaphor that I wanted to call out, which is, you might be really good at reading the wave. But you’re still gonna fall off the board if you don’t know where you stand.

Which is to say you have to feel a sense of connection to the board that’s holding you up. And in that case, it’s the leader and the team.

And the sense of how you position your feet and how you, you know, maintain your center of gravity, and all of those kinds of things on the board are choices that you’re making moment to moment, but they’re all based on your internal sense of who you are and where you stand.

And so if you wanna get your team excited about a vision, it has to be something that they genuinely believe in, which means it has to be resonant with their values. It has to be resonant with their intentions. It has to be resonant with their own dreams of what this product could be, what their own careers could be.

And if you can’t connect any of those things, you’re trying to get people excited about a bunch of things because they’ve got a whole bunch of important business outcomes attached to them, that’s probably not gonna go far enough.

Peter: I am wondering, as you were talking about the team, I’m wondering your thoughts on what to do when team members just aren’t getting on board.

They’re the board, but now I’m gonna have them get on board.

Jesse: Yeah.

Peter: Right. You’ve done the work. You’re articulating a positive future. You’re trying to provide some space so that they can get from wherever they are to this future in terms of, you know, maybe some re-skilling, new tools, we’re gonna try different ways of working.

You’ll likely face some resistance within your team, you know, that’s not what they thought they were setting up for. They don’t believe in it for whatever reasons. It doesn’t align with their individual value systems that they’re bringing into this conversation.

What do you say to the leader who’s, who’s, I’m now thinking, so you were talking surfing. I’m now thinking rafting, right? And I’m thinking rafting because the raft is made up of a set of pieces of wood and maybe not everyone in your raft is aligned. You’ve got a piece of wood that’s not willing to be quite tied together to the others to create the raft.

Like how do you just jettison that piece of wood? What do you, what do you do with folks?

Jesse: It’s really hard. It’s really hard and it’s not yet the crisis that I think it will be in 12 months, 24 months.

I think that as these teams processes continue to evolve… Right now, there’s a lot of permission to do things a lot of different ways. So again, I’m talking about AI transformation here specifically, but I think that the example is more broadly applicable to other kinds of liminal moments where what you have is: new technology comes in, everybody looks at it, and it’s very clear that this is going to be in some way useful to how we do our work.

And I think about other kinds of major workplace transitions that happened in the late 20th century when PCs came into the workplace. And all kinds of processes suddenly were done on screens in ways that they previously were done with paper and pencil, and sometimes a knife and a bottle of paste, right? Like, we continue to keep those metaphors because that was the work that was being replaced, the cutting and the pasting.

And so similarly, I think that we’re in this space now where maybe not right away, but somewhere down the line, you’re gonna find yourself in the same position, as a designer in 2026, 2027, as an accountant might’ve found themselves working inside an accounting firm in 1979 or 1981.

Where, you know, this new technology is rolling out that is going to vastly change how you do your work. You gotta decide whether that is something that works for you.

And then to compound that we have the particularly problematic history and ongoing practices associated with this technology. As we talked about in our conversation with Christina. Where, like, there’s no like good guys in the AI space, there are only degrees of malfeasance.

And the question for you as a practitioner is, like, can I still use this tool and feel okay about who I am and what I’m contributing to the world? And on some level, ultimately that has to be a personal decision and a personal choice. Meanwhile, the processes are going to continue to evolve around you.

I imagine that there will continue to be this overlap period. I worked in publishing during the overlap period where publishing was partly done digital and partly done through manual paste-up work. And so I got exposed to both of those practices back in the nineties.

I’m imagining that this is gonna be a very similar kind of thing where there’s gonna be some overlap, and teams that continue to produce results on the timelines that are expected of them are gonna continue to be able to do things their own way. But that is going to continue to evolve.

And for leaders, I think it is a matter of hearing those concerns with genuine sensitivity and grace, while also acknowledging where the whole raft ultimately has to go, in your metaphor.

Peter: Yeah, the reason I ask that question goes back to the conversation we had with Kaaren Hanson a few years ago now when, shortly after she had started working at Chase Bank, and when we asked her order of operations when she inherits a team…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

Peter: When she moves into a new executive role,

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Peter: At the very top of her order of operations is getting the team right.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Peter: Because as a leader it’s really difficult to advance whatever agenda you have and to see through your plans if the team isn’t capable of that, right? Isn’t ready for it, isn’t skilled for it, et cetera.

And it calls into question, what does it mean to have a “team right,” when you’re in these liminal moments, right? When she was talking about it, at the time, she joined Chase Bank in 21. And it was just at the end of that, just, like, we kind of had a sense of where things were going, right?

And so you knew what the team looked like that you wanted to grow because it’s the same kind of team you would’ve been growing for the last 15, 20 years.

Whereas right now, it’s unclear… you know, as a design leader, and we’re now primarily talking about kind of on the management track. So, you know, hiring managers, design executives, people with responsibility for recruiting and hiring and resourcing and all that, what does it mean to be a design leader in a liminal moment when the role that you’re hiring for today,

Jesse: Right,

Peter: the nature, the shape, the work of that role could be quite different in definitely two years, possibly one year.

We talk about the blurring of roles between design and product management, and do you need designers who are more product-y or not? There’s still this weird, on many leaders part, kind of, fetishization of craft.

Where is that going? Is that actually valuable, increasingly valuable, come what may, because there’s a longevity to craft, right? Craft has been with us for hundreds of years.

Like, is that actually the right thing, or is it part of that rigidity that creates a kind of brittleness that, you know, you get somebody who’s really good, I mean, kind of, to use the metaphors, that maybe they were really good at paste-ups and mechanicals. They were the high end of their craft there, but, you know, they couldn’t translate it into a computer paradigm when the desktop publishing revolution came.

So yeah, how, what are we looking for as we’re staffing up teams that can be resilient through these liminal moments?

Jesse: Yeah. So the people who are gonna come along are the people who are already embodying some elements of that liminal mindset that we talked about.

They demonstrate a kind of an ability to maintain a broad awareness of a situation and not just kind of, like, execute against a brief. They demonstrate an ability to, honestly, to be fluid with their tooling, to be flexible in their approaches, to have more of a tool kit than a rote process that they follow in the work that they do.

And who embody that optimism that, like, whatever the change is, we together are the right people to see it through.

Peter: That’s interesting. ‘Cause that’s, I guess, not necessarily difficult to hire for, but it’s a different process, I think, to identify those types of candidates, then, at least, what I see most teams are using to figure out who to hire,

Jesse: Hmm.

Peter: …right? They’re doing a lot of looking at case studies and portfolios and what did you do on this and what was your process?

And it’s a different set of questions and a different set-up…

Jesse: mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Peter: …to understand how someone bobbed and weaved.

I think so often, like, the portfolio presentation skews towards what sounds like a happy path. Like you don’t often hear of the blind alleys that someone went down, especially when they only have 30 minutes to talk about it or whatever, right?

They’re gonna give you the high notes, they’re gonna give you the highlights, and it’s gonna sound like one thing just led to the next, that led to the next, and it was all good.

Jesse: Right.

Peter: Whereas what you want to hear from your candidates is how many blind alleys they went down, how many difficult conversations they had,

Jesse: show me the failed concepts

Peter: What it took to overcome,

Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Peter: …obstacles, resistance on the way to get to a solution that was good. Might not be the best, but that was pretty good. And, given what was thrown at them throughout the process, that they got to a generally positive outcome should be seen as like a huge success.

But I can tell you for certain our recruiting and hiring processes would filter out someone whose end result was good, not great, but that they got to good, given the process they had to go through is a sign of their…

Jesse: competence.

Peter: fortitude, alacrity, ability, right?

But that’s kind of, you know, thinking about it, that’s the reality that, that so many people, so many designers are operating within.

Jesse: Yes. Yeah.

Peter: Along with some of the stuff that we talked about when we did the conversation about organizational health, my research and report that I did, where so many senior designers, probably even lead designers, are operating from a stance of disempowerment, right?

They are one or two levels below the people that they are partnering with and all that kind of stuff. So, so any success they have should be, you know, confetti should be thrown if they’ve made it out the other side with something that’s good.

Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It’s interesting to think about the skillset separate from craft.

So, like, just asking the question, what is the non-craft skillset that, ’cause if we assume that the craft is a bit of a moving target in this liminal moment, then what do people bring if the rug is pulled out from under them and the organization suddenly goes, you know what, we don’t need Figma anymore. We’re covered with Gemini or Codex or this or that, or whatever the thing is.

How many of your people can adapt to that circumstance, and what did they bring that isn’t their ability to find a particular command in a particular menu that continues to deliver some value?

Peter: Well, when I’ve thought about liminality and in my frame as an org designer, and thinking about how we define roles and responsibilities and skills, it feels to me like we’re getting very fundamental when it comes to skill sets.

Like, like the skill sets that matter most are communication.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Peter: You know, that ability to connect with others to clearly articulate what’s in your head in a way that other people can receive it.

Kind of related to that, some persuasion. How do you bring them along towards a direction that you think matters, right? So very basic communication skills.

Relationship skills, as we were saying before. How do we connect with others? Bring them along, demonstrate care? Demonstrate that trust or build that trust that allows us to connect with and align with a group of people.

So, trust building skills, communication skills.

Some, for lack of a better phrase, business skills, right, strike me as foundational.

You know, a little bit of what Leslie Witt talked about. You know, just what are the fundamental business mechanics in the space that you’re operating in, and some awareness of that, and how they work, the knobs and dials that your particular company cares about, and that you can be able to speak to that, because that will be kind of the lingua franca, thinking back to communication, right?

The common language of that organization will be likely rooted in some probably simple business realities. But still, whether or not they’re simple, you still need to have some familiarity and a nimbleness with them.

And then when I think about it from, okay, so, those are like, everything I’ve been saying is just kind of like core professional skills. And I think there’s a lot of value in design and user experience people bolstering those core professional skills.

Peter: What makes design and user experience interesting is we think about those craft skills. It’s not can I choose the right item in a menu in this tool? You know, this is something we talked about, I think, when we were first thinking about AI and its impact on design and user experience. And sometimes the word taste is used. I’m not a huge fan of taste ’cause there’s a, not just subjectivity, but a luxury quality to that that…

Jesse: It’s is a snobby word, isn’t it?

Peter: It can be a little snobby.

Though the word I’m about to say also can be construed as snobby, but there’s a snobbiness to it. The word that comes to mind is, and I think this is something that you talk a lot about, yeah, when you gave your talk on AI and IA, is discernment, right?

I don’t know if that’s a skill. It’s a bit like what Christina talked about. She gave one of the best explanations of product sense of anyone I’ve heard, right? And it’s, you’ve done a lot of reps, you’ve seen a lot of things. You’ve witnessed what works and what doesn’t over the course of career…

Jesse: A highly informed intuition that you apply…

Peter: And, and that gives you this informed intuition that allows you, regardless of tool, whatever that tool is producing, you have an ability to understand and appreciate how that tool will perform, in a heightened way and better than those around you.

So again, is that a skill? It’s hard to articulate that as a skill. But it’s, it’s something you can develop, right?

It might not be a skill, I was gonna say a manual skill, but, you know, it might not be something with like process and methodology and practice and whatnot, a craft behind it that you are developing in a very conscious way, like you are piano playing, right? Or, or something like that.

But it’s something you can get better and better at.

Jesse: Yeah. It’s interesting because I do think this comes back to one of the things I said in that elements of UX AI talk which is that by definition, because it is a probability machine, what it will always be best at is mediocrity, which means that you cannot rely on the system itself to tell you what good enough looks like.

You have to be the one to say what good enough looks like, which means you have to have a point of view on it. And that point of view needs to be informed.

And as we talked about last time or the time before that, a lot of the bad stuff that gets out there in the world right now, in terms of people’s AI projects, is bad because the person who was doing it didn’t know what good looked like.

And the more people we have who know what good looks like, who are working with these systems, the better the quality of the results we’re gonna get.

Peter: Related to that, because what bad and good look… bad and good are subjective-ish. You can create assessment frameworks that help you understand what bad and good are, but in order to tune those frameworks, I think another skill would be, I’m trying to think of a way to, to put it that isn’t wonky, but it’s, it’s, okay, understanding humans.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Peter: Right? From a sociological, anthropological, psychological standpoint. Having a robust understanding of people, how they behave, what motivates them, their abilities, how they process information, all those things, will be useful regardless, right, of whatever’s coming, right.

Because, at least until it’s just robots talking to robots, you know, the things we are involved in, there are humans using them.

It does, you know, beg a separate question, which is, if what I’m saying is true, why is it that UX researchers continue to, it feels like they continue to be increasingly marginalized.

Jesse: Yeah, we’ll have to see how that plays out.

I mean, I think the question of, to what extent UX research has proven itself in a lot of these organizations, I think is a big one. They may be producing all of the insights in the world, but unable to get traction around them because of the way they’ve been set up.

But, you know, all of that notwithstanding, I agree with you.

I think that it does come back to the ability to bring a level of discernment that the robot can’t bring, right? So if it’s always trying to hit the middle of the bell curve, you gotta go upstream if you want to deliver some additional value.

And so that’s what this is gonna turn into.

What I’m imagining in the future, is much smaller design teams in which most of the production work is being done by one kind of a robot or another. And you have humans who are engaged in setting up those requirements as robustly as they can, and reviewing the results to fill in those gaps in terms of actual human behavior and actual human psychology and the things that the robot doesn’t know.

And then, you know, those things eventually finding their way to the light of day. But I think that that gap will always be there to close.

Peter: So you, you are putting forth a hypothesis, maybe a speculation, right, of much smaller design teams. And I want to, I don’t know if challenge is the right word, but maybe interrogate it in the context of the conversation around liminality…

Jesse: oh, sure.

Peter: …right? Because a supposition of liminality is that we don’t quite know where this is going.

Jesse: Yeah. That’s fair.

Peter: Right. And, and I don’t mean to say you’re wrong. I’m just like, you, you put forth a, this is where things are headed..

Jesse: Trajectory…Well, I didn’t say that.

Peter: And, something that we’ve discussed and I feel is likely of use, and I guess it’s a skill. It’s definitely a practice.

There aren’t that many liminal practices, and one of the few that I could identify is scenario planning.

There’s a company from ye olden times called Global Business Network that created an approach to figuring out where the future was going, that they called scenario planning.

There’s a book called Art of the Long View by this guy Peter Schwartz. They tended to work with, like, oil and gas folks who need to make 30 year plans, often involving geopolitical uncertainty because oil and gas is in places that are uncertain themselves. At a crossroads.

And so this practice of scenario planning is born to help companies think about what are, you know, I think usually around three potential futures, right.

And the word scenario, meaning you’re telling stories, right? You’re like gathering a bunch of information, all the wisdom that you can. And then you’re looking at three futures, n number of years out, 10, 20, 30 years out, where different things are kind of dialed up and down, you know, in going back to the oil and gas, right?

And one you might have oh, that’s, anything I say is gonna be politically fraught,

Jesse: Ooh. Yep.

Peter: right? But you know, what if there is a war, you know, a, a war is in play. And that would be one turn of the knob. But what if peace is in play? That would be another turn of the knob, right? Like, it doesn’t have to all be doom and gloom.

But you want to prepare yourself for these various exigencies and unknown outcomes.

And then when you do that mapping, when you do that scenario planning, sometimes what you can find is like, oh, there’s a way that we can behave today that will kind of set us up come what may…

Jesse: right.

Peter: …and that’s what I’m trying to get at is, like, you made a hypothesis of small design teams.

You can make a different hypothesis theoretically of larger design teams, or you can make a hypothesis of the evaporation of product management and its designers and engineers working together, and tooling is doing what most people who have the title product manager or product owner are doing. What is that future?

You could make a future of no designers, or people with that title, and instead, you know, it’s product managers working with engineers.

And so, what does that mean?

I guess, given these possible futures, I’m curious, as I’m reflecting on that, what does that suggest to you, in terms of the moment we are in now, not knowing exactly where this is…

Jesse: Yeah, yeah. No, you’re absolutely right. I don’t think it’s inevitable that every design team is gonna get boiled down to three people.

I can see situations in which you’ve got design teams getting larger, potentially a scaling up of certain kinds of design activities that involve more customer engagement, design activities that involve deeper exploration, design activities that involve other kinds of things that design teams don’t have the time or space to do right now because they are on the hook for production work. So I think all of these possibilities are on the table.

Coming back to what this asks of leaders, I think it is about keeping the possibilities open and not letting yourself be paralyzed by that.

You know, when you were talking about the leaders who find themselves kind of tossed about on the waves stuck in the liminal moment, I was thinking about how, you know, the animals have the instinct when under threat to fight, flight, or freeze. And that freeze response is often, you know, a, a natural place for people to go when there’s nothing to fight and nowhere to run to. So what do I do? And just kind of like sit still until something changes in a way that I feel like I can take action on.

But then you have to be able to take that action. So it comes back to our old friend “strong opinions, weakly held,” right, that you want to have a point of view that you feel really confident about, that you feel is the most informed point of view you can muster at this moment, and then be willing to shift it.

Peter: I’m curious what you think of the responsibility of the leader, ’cause they have some usually greater influence, authority, and leverage. What’s their responsibility to define that future? To put shape to the ambiguity, to be the engine of de-liminalizing, right, and bringing clarity.

Or is the liminal moment outside of their control, right? Is it about navigating forces beyond your ability to have that kind of impact? And so it’s about readiness and resilience. And then as things become clear, being able to lean into that.

I’m, I guess I’m trying to, I’m curious your thoughts on, on the responsibility of leaders and their agency in this moment.

Jesse: Right, right. Well, yeah. So last time I talked about how I felt like for a lot of leaders, this was kind of the shoe on the other foot, in that instead of being the instigators of change and the creators of disruption within their organizations, they now find themselves having to respond to change and respond to disruption from outside.

But you’re absolutely right. It’s a balancing act. It’s a dance.

You know, you can’t necessarily shape the wave, but you can shape the trajectory of your board on the wave, and that’s where the surfer’s agency comes into play.

Otherwise you’re just floating.

It is I think, an ongoing question for leaders as to what they can push, and how far and how hard they can push, their own agenda within the liminal moment, because it always has to respond to the liminal moment, so…

Peter: There’s a Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Like, like as you push on it, it’s going to affect it and you have

Jesse: Yeah. You can’t measure the velocity and the position at the same time, so Yeah.

Peter: Your action on it will have some effect on the system.

Jesse: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. And needs to therefore be responsive to the system. And this might bring us to what might be actually an interesting stopping point for this conversation, which is, how do you get out of the liminal moment? How do you know you’re out of the liminal moment? What is the leader’s responsibility to try to drive the liminal moment toward closure? And how do you set yourself and your team up for what comes after the uncertainty, you know?

Peter: Hmm. I like that. Let’s see where that takes us.

Jesse: All right. Fantastic. Thanks Peter.

Peter: Thank you, Jesse.

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.

If you’re looking for help with AI transformation or you just need a private advisor to help you solve your hardest leadership problems, visit my website at jessejamesgarrett.com to book your free one hour consultation.

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.

When the old ways no longer hold and the new hasn’t taken shape, you’re in a liminal moment. Peter and Jesse explore what it means to lead through that in-between space—navigating uncertainty without retreating to the past, letting go of what defined you, and finding opportunity in the chaos rather than being consumed by it.

More about Peter: https://petermerholz.com/
More about Jesse: https://jessejamesgarrett.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: This is Liminal.

When the old ways no longer hold sway, but the new have not yet taken shape, you find yourself in the Liminal Moment. On today’s show, Peter and I build on some of the themes in our recent conversations to ask, what do you do when you’re caught in between the past and the future, and how do you lead others through it?

Peter: So Jesse,

Jesse: Hello Peter.

Peter: I wanted to have a conversation… and the conversation starts with an episode that we recorded about a year and a half ago now, maybe a little more called, The Phase Shift, where we recognized that changes are afoot in how design is showing up in businesses and how leaders are able to lead.

There had been this set of assumptions around design and it’s kind of steady growth for quite a while. And then a few years ago, those assumptions have been convulsed, even before AI. Things like layoffs and other discombobulation. AI has further exacerbated that, such that it’s not clear where things are headed.

I was just at an event last night with a bunch of design leaders and that’s still the conversation we’re having. It’s like, where is this all going?

And everybody has their own thoughts on what’s next for design. And then, you and I, three months ago, gave a keynote for the Service Design Global Conference that was drawing from our experiences on Finding Our Way, where we were exploring this thing that we had called “The Phase Shift.”

And we talked to a bunch of people and we distilled those conversations. And coming out of that, we had identified a set of, like, conditions that we’re moving from and heading to as design leaders: moving from kind of an over-reliance on craft and towards things like a business readiness, moving from being so rooted in our identity and towards, a multidisciplinary engagement.

And then this concept just kept not going away. And in fact, I had an insight.

I was teaching my masterclass where I have this idea of “mediate the membrane.” And the concept there is that design leaders sit in between these two spaces.

One of the design team that they’re leading, which is a very generative, creative, ambiguous, emotional, human-centered space. And then the rest of the organization that they’re operating in, which tends to be bureaucratic, tends to be very corporate, tends to be business-centered, tends to be data-driven and business-oriented.

And I realized there was a parallel in my mind between that kind of navigating this uncertainty between how design has been and where design is going, and then navigating these spaces as a design leader.

And I said to you, there’s something about this idea of “liminal” that feels right. We’re operating in a liminal moment, and we’ve then off-mic, but now on-mic, been unpacking that.

And I’m curious, I’ll stop my little monologue here, but hand it over to you to pick up, kind of as we’ve been having these conversations, what have you been picking up on in terms of these threads?

Jesse: Well, I think there’s the practical reality of the liminal moment that we find ourselves in now. And then there is the kind of the broader concept of how we approach liminality generally.

So if the liminal space is the space between contexts, it is the corner that we turn from one way of seeing things to a different way of seeing things, in a lot of ways, this hearkens back to some of the ideas in the book that you and I worked on many years ago for Adaptive Path called Subject to Change, where the subtitle was “creating great products and services for an uncertain world.”

And in a lot of ways the thesis of that book had to do with practical guidance for managing uncertainty when you don’t know what’s going to change and when.

And I think that this space that design leaders have found themselves in over the last couple of years has been this kind of lingering liminality, where it’s clear that the old paradigms are kind of falling away. That the ways of thinking about and structuring and approaching and valuing this work that used to hold sway, don’t hold sway anymore. And we are at a bit of a loss for what replaces that.

But in the meantime, we’re just kind of swimming toward the new together. And I think that one of the things that comes to mind for me in this is the particular stress, strain, burden that this places on leaders specifically.

Obviously you and I talk a lot about leaders and their needs and the challenges of that role, and I just notice how for the leaders that liminality is felt at an extra acute level because of the scale of their responsibility, because of the people under their stewardship, under their care that they need to take into account in their choices.

They’re not choosing for themselves the way that an individual practitioner might be, in the face of changing expectations, changing value propositions, changing tool sets, and so forth.

Peter: Well, I mean on that front I’ve actually heard from a few folks recently, the conversations with design leaders where one of their primary objectives right now is to quote, protect their team, save their team. Primarily in the face of potential layoffs or other things, right?

And they’re losing sight of whatever it is that the business they are part of is trying to achieve, which might be why layoffs are happening, right? There might be some broader business challenges or a different strategy or whatever. And they’re finding themselves almost like hunkering down and like, how do I protect this group, you know, that they feel some responsibility to, they’ve hired them up, they’ve been working with them.

It’s their team. It’s their it’s guys and gals or whatever, which is, as I think about it, not a healthy kind of approach to this. You start to sacrifice yourself. You start to twist yourself in knots, often around forces larger than your control.

Jesse: Martyrdom complexes.

Peter: Exactly. You’re kind of taking on your team member’s burden as your own or something in this martyrdom way. None of which is healthy.

I think one of the things, as I’ve been poking at this concept of liminality, it evidently causes anxiety, right? There’s a lot of people we talk to, there’s a lot of dialogue out there that folks are…

Jesse: Stressed.

Peter: Stressed. Upset. Angry. Whether they are responding directly to the circumstances, or you can read it into however they’re talking about whatever it is they’re talking about, whether it’s AI or the job market or other things. And understandably so.

But, you know, you mentioned the Adaptive Path book, And, where the thesis of that book is, Hey, when you’re in these moments of uncertainty, there’s a set of tools that you can use that we in design have developed to help navigate, make sense of, even perhaps take advantage of or thrive in this uncertain space, right?

Design tools are great for de-fuzzing uncertainty and bringing clarity and navigating ambiguity. Like, sit with that ambiguity, but don’t just wallow in it.

And one of the themes of that talk that you and I gave in Dallas, right in the middle, was “uncertainty is opportunity,” right?

We often feel as uncertainty is a negative, is this thing that… A lot of people retreat from uncertainty. Like, when they approach that liminal moment, when they realize liminality is happening, they try to go back to the way things were and they’re hunkered down and try to not move forward.

Whereas the opportunity in this liminal moment is to figure out how to use the tools you have at your disposal, how to be resourceful, and how to make sense of this uncertainty that’s coming.

Because, I guess the other thing is, it’s not just designers, right? Many… Everybody seems to be in a moment like this.

And again, I think designers, when they’re not operating from that stance of fear or anxiety, can actually be leaders, can be facilitators. I don’t wanna say guiders, I don’t wanna suggest we know the answer, but we can bring people along towards whatever that new reality is.

Jesse: Well, design ideally has a different stance, a different relationship to uncertainty than a lot of other functions, because design’s role in many ways is to drive clarity and to drive cross-functional understanding of what’s actually going on with users and what actually constitutes the patterns that lead to product success.

One thing that I find interesting within this is the way in which for design leaders, you know, it’s kind of like the shoe is on the other foot now, because, you know, you and I have had a lot of conversations with design leaders on this show over the last several years in which they talked about the need to advocate for change and the need to push organizations beyond their current ways of thinking, beyond their current ways of doing things to introduce new paradigms, to create liminality for their coworkers and for their stakeholders and for their cross-functional partners.

And now when that liminality is coming from outside, suddenly it’s a leadership challenge. So I mean, there are some ways in which, yeah, what we’re talking about is kind of change management, but it’s also change management from the perspective of someone who maybe doesn’t have as much direct control over the change as designers are used to having in terms of what they advocate for inside organizations.

Peter: Yeah, we’ve talked at length about change management in the past and something that helped me understand perhaps a bit about what’s going on now and what mindset to bring actually comes from work I did a number of years ago at Kaiser Permanente and, a colleague, I had Sami Packard who studied change management.

And something she pointed out to me is there’s a difference between change management and transformation management that I think is perhaps relevant here, right?

Change management is when an organization goes from one way of being or working to a new way of being or working, that is pretty well understood, right?

They call it agile transformation, but it’s really agile change because we know how agile works. We know that structure of the teams and the processes and rituals and behaviors and the tooling and all that. And it’s a matter of kind of getting everyone off of one way of doing things and into a new way of doing things.

Transformation management is more applicable though because it’s what we’re dealing with when you’re dealing with liminality, which is you don’t know what’s coming, right? When you’re transforming, you don’t know into what, necessarily.

You might have some idea of the kind of impact you want to have or something, but the shape, the behaviors, how it works, that’s what you’re needing to discover.

Which again, is one of those areas where design should be a great practice to lead through that because design is about making sense of that opportunity space.

Something else that’s occurring to me when you talked about the shoe is on the other foot. I was hanging out with a bunch of design leaders last night and one of them used to be very active in leading sprints at Google 20 years ago. And something he pointed out in his current experience that he’s witnessed is the degree to which designers have trouble diverging before they converge. Like we have to remind ourselves.

So when we think of the double diamond, right, people have been in the last year or two, to my taste, a little too willing to throw out the double diamond. “Process is over, we’re… new ways of working.”

And to me that was a misread of the double diamond. ‘Cause the double diamond’s very simple. And it basically states before you decide what to do, you give yourself an opportunity to think about a lot of options, and you choose from them as opposed to whatever that first idea you had you ram through.

That’s all the double diamond is about, is make sure that you provide your own optionality. And I think, maybe as a reaction to velocity, as a reaction to pressures, or whatever, we’re losing sight of that divergent step. But when you don’t know what your future holds, you want to give yourself a as many potential futures as possible that you can start trying to choose from. And then identify which seems to be the most enabling, productive, helpful way forward.

Jesse: That’s an interesting perspective because if I reflect back to when we were back in Adaptive Path and we were offering a lot of these things into the market for the first time as consultants…

So, I was the head of our strategy practice, and one of the things that really came to mind for me was that we had to have a way of demonstrating why you would hire a designer to do strategy work.

And for me it always came back to that designers can imagine possibilities to a different degree, to a different depth potentially, across a broader range of possibilities than you might get from somebody who has a different kind of a background.

And as I think about how that applies here, it suggests that design strategy may have more to offer now than it has in recent years because we’re moving beyond the most recent batch of best practices into new territory that requires a return to that kind of exploration.

You know, when I think about the pressure that’s put on these teams to just kind of, like, skip that first half of the diamond and just power through the convergent thinking toward a solution, what that suggests to me is that somebody’s already decided that the front half of that diamond is already a solved problem. That you’re operating in a problem space where you feel like the constraints are relatively known.

And now that we’re moving into these deeper unknowns, especially with AI technology, but also with the evolution of business models and other kinds of things that are going on all around us, design might have a value proposition now that is much closer to what design had to offer in 2005 than it had in 2020.

Peter: So this puts me in mind of the conversation we had with Peter Skillman, who is the chief design officer at Philips Design, and who in some ways said the opposite, right? And we had this conversation with him about a year ago. It was January of, 2025.

And something he believed is like the time for vision, and you could infer the time for strategy, is maybe… not over, but is diminished. To paraphrase what he said, we’ve done a lot of work developing visions. Now we need to start executing against them and with this new set of AI tools, and the access to execution that is just more prevalent, like, let’s lean in and make and create and, not quite define the future, but deliver the future almost directly.

But, where I’m coming to this now is, and I think it holds with liminality in some way…

What you’re saying about strategy, you know, is in some ways, I don’t wanna say in conflict, but in some opposition to what Peter was arguing around the work of design right now.

And I wonder if we’re in like a bifurcated moment to a degree that we’re not quite recognizing, right?

Because design, and this has been true, you mentioned back at Adaptive Path and people didn’t know that design could be a lever for helping you with strategy or whatever.

But design maybe being a slippery word, a slippery concept that you are always having to define it, because when you say the word design, people have different thoughts in their heads, and perhaps people are talking past each other, where there’s a group of people who are like, yes, it’s about designers working in code, skipping Figma and LLMing their ways to prototypes with live data, and that’s design.

But I think what you’re saying is, well, wait a moment, we don’t know where this is heading. There’s an opportunity for design to be even earlier than maybe we had thought design needed to be, in making sense of the space that we’re operating in, at a much higher altitude.

And these maybe are just two very different things that we happen to label design.

Jesse: Well, I think you’re absolutely right that the digital design field is more heterogeneous than it ever has been in our entire careers. There is a greater diversity of design challenges. There’s a greater diversity of design mandates. There’s a greater diversity of design staffing and process models. It’s just a wider field out there than ever before.

You and I tend to gravitate toward the needs of large enterprises because those have been our clients historically. Those tend to be the spaces that you and I work in. One thing I’ll say about what came out of the Peter Skillman discussion is that I think he’s describing a particular kind of vision work that I agree is behind us, because it is this idea of design as spearhead of a singular vision for a product.

And you know, these C-levels will come down to the head of design and say, show me what my product looks like in five years and give us that North Star and then we’ll build our whole big machine toward that as an outcome.

Whereas the strategic need for design right now is less about, tell me what you know is gonna be true in five years time, but rather help me explore what none of us knows about what’s gonna happen in the next five years. And be a facilitator, a partner, a participant in that creative exploration of possible futures that is going to be necessary for these organizations to be able to make strategic bets.

Because ultimately the change that’s happening is not just happening to design, and it’s not just happening to digital. It’s happening to entire business models and entire competitive spaces.

And that’s gonna continue. It’s gonna get worse. And we’re gonna see some big names go down unexpectedly because somebody got caught off guard by a scenario that they didn’t see coming.

Peter: What do you see, though, because you mentioned design strategy, strategic design as a thing we’re tacking back to, but if strategic design is not about articulating a vision of our offering five years from now, which is how it’s often been considered, what do you see as the work of strategic design?

Jesse: I come back to that notion of driving clarity, of answering the answerable, and identifying that which needs deeper exploration.

And, you know, some people would call that product strategy, some people would call that user research. In lots of organizations, design simply doesn’t have permission to even ask these kinds of questions that I’m talking about.

But I do believe that it is within Design’s skillset, within design’s purview to have a point of view on these kinds of questions.

Peter: Well that actually reminds me of a different thing that Peter said that turned into a little, I dunno about argument, but back and forth on LinkedIn, which is whether or not design belongs in the C-suite.

‘Cause something he said on our show, and then he’s reiterated it in LinkedIn is that he thinks design doesn’t belong reporting directly into the C-suite, because that ends up getting design involved in a lot of conversations where design doesn’t belong, around strategic investment decisions. You know, we’ve got billions of dollars to spend, what are we spending it on?

Whereas I thought, and I think maybe what you’re suggesting is, why isn’t design involved in that conversation?

Or rather, why isn’t someone with a design background, a human-centered comfort in ambiguity, exploratory, generative point of view, don’t we want someone with that point of view in that room? When if they’re not in that room, literally everyone else in that room is, going to have a very narrow point of view on how to approach solving that problem.

Which suggests maybe, I dunno if this is liminal, but I guess it’s part of the liminality of a potential path forward for design is to be not quite, you know, the CFO, the CPO, something like that, but closer to it.

Where your, at least, certain design leaders or, very senior design teams helping companies figure out how to expend their resources, right?

Which is kind of the fundamental thing that the C-Suite does, right?

The C-suite has a bunch of resources at hand, and they’re placing bets on what makes sense for them in terms of their future.

And that would be a different role for design, and the designers in that room would need to augment their skillset so that they could be credible.

But I also think their point of view, given all the confusion and discombobulation, I would hope that it would be welcome because they can help that other group of people make better decisions with the toolkit that they can bring into that discussion.

Jesse: Yeah, so what that brings me back around to is where the liminality is actually happening in the digital design space. And honestly, I think this applies in the product space as well.

The areas that we’re talking about, what you and I would define as design strategy, a lot of people would call product strategy. And a lot of people would say, this stuff should live in a product organization, and product people should be driving these kinds of processes.

That aspect of it is much less interesting to me than the forces that these teams find themselves subjected to now.

So one of the big shifts that has happened is we went through this massive wave of layoffs following the pandemic. As interest rates changed, as corporate priorities changed, as the ways of measuring the value of this work changed in a lot of organizations, design became seen as a time sink, a cost center, a friction point in a development process that needed to move more fluidly than that.

In those contexts, you’re looking at one way of evaluating what design is and what design has to offer that may be entirely valid and relevant within that context. You’ve got people thinking about these other parts of the challenge.

But then I think it does become about the value proposition of design as a function itself and what design is there to do.

Again, so what we’re looking at is reduced team sizes, reduced budgets for professional development, reduced tolerance for exploration and experimentation within design process. Fewer opportunities for design leaders to move up in organizations, and ceilings over them that previously weren’t there or weren’t apparent.

Where you have… head of design is not gonna ever be higher than a director level at certain organizations, so there’s a cap on that power.

And then on top of all of this stuff, we’ve now got AI.

And as you know, for the last year, I’ve been doing a lot of work around AI transformation and supporting teams with understanding how to make sense of this new tooling and how to bring it into their processes in ways that are meaningful.

And this is what it comes back to, meaningful to the value that they see themselves delivering to the larger organization.

So the liminal moment then becomes much more than a moment. It becomes a process. It becomes a journey of exploration, reexamination, and potentially reeducation of your cross-functional partners, your executive leadership, your stakeholders about what design actually is and can bring to the table.

Because if they continue to put you in that delivery box, that is increasingly looking like a commoditized offering that doesn’t, to your point, have a lot of strategic traction.

Peter: Two thoughts based on what you were just talking about.

Which actually touches on something we discussed when we had the Phase Shift episode.

Which is, people in design will inhibit their ability to navigate this liminal moment if they are unwilling to let go of their identity as a designer.

And so when you were talking about the ceilings that some folks are hitting, which is happening, it’s not universal.

In some places there’s new VPs of design and in other places where they had chief design officers, now all they have is like three directors reporting into product people. It’s a mixed bag.

But let’s talk about those three directors now reporting into product people. If that design director is willing to sacrifice their identity as a designer in order to advance… Okay, you can’t advance as a designer, but perhaps like Leslie Witt at Headspace when we interviewed her, right? You start showing up as a product person and designer, you start demonstrating that you belong…

Jesse: Claim a larger scope.

Peter: …in a certain set of conversationsm and you’re okay letting go of that designer background.

Does that let you grow? Right? I think that’s key.

How is your relationship to your identity potentially tethering your ability to navigate this liminality and come out the other side?

Better, faster, stronger.

But when you were talking about big organizations, it struck me that there’s another aspect to the liminality that these leaders are facing that’s similar to mediate the membrane, but different, which is that designers, design leaders in particular, have to be able to function both horizontally and vertically in these large organizations.

And there’s a liminality there. I just literally this morning on a Slack with a design leader who’s new in their organization was having this conversation because, and it’s one I’ve been having recently, a lot of companies, I think in an effort to embrace this velocity moment, are getting rid of the head of design and having design directors report up through product teams and having those product leaders have more direct control…

Jesse: Yes.

Peter: …in some effort to, like, keep the decision making closer.

Some organizations are doing that, but keeping design centralized which I think leans into the power of design, right?

Design is great for thinking through a coherent experience across a bunch of organizational silos.

But, and I faced this problem myself as a design leader, right, when literally every other part of your organization is thinking vertically, but you’re this thin layer trying to create an an integument that coordinates and organizes all this effort, even with encouragement from your leadership that this is what it’s about, you run up against heads of product and heads of engineering, and even your own designers who are IC designers who are all thinking very vertically, and they’re incentivized vertically, and they’ve got these blinders on.

But one of these liminal challenges that we’re navigating is, particularly in scaled organizations, navigating between this recognition that end-to-end experience matters, right?

There’s a reason that a company has built out these silos or acquired other companies or whatever, they think that there’s a whole greater than the sum of the parts. That’s the only logic behind it.

But there’s these practices in place that thwart that, and design finds itself square in the middle of trying to make sense of that and getting pulled in all these directions.

Which I think if you don’t have a certain resolve, you’re just gonna get drawn and quartered, right?

Jesse: Yeah, yeah. Knowing what you stand for.

You know, when I talk about the evolving value proposition of design, there was a time in which you could have framed design purely in terms of asset delivery. You could have said the way that I measure the success of a design team is in terms of the volume of PSDs shipped for slicing and, you know, rendering out to production.

And that’s not to say that that was ever wrong because in some organizations that was exactly the right thing that was needed.

But if the tooling is changing under your feet, you can’t define your value in terms of your tools. You have to define the value that the team is delivering against some larger influence that it’s having on the organization.

And I think part of that does have to do with value delivery, but part of it also has to do with values and the values that a team advocates for, or that a leader advocates for within the process that creates guidance through uncertainty for a group of people.

For somebody to go, you know what, we should lay low when the sun is high in the sky, and we’ll wait until late afternoon to cross the desert because we don’t wanna, you know, give the whole team heat exhaustion. Somebody’s gotta be thinking about that kind of stuff.

And that is actually what I think of as being more of the liminal skillset, as it were, for a leader, is to see the opportunity in the chaos, to be able to assess alternatives and choose a direction and advocate for a direction and advocate for that according to some kind of underlying principles that are gonna guide ongoing action that will eventually turn into best practices.

Peter: Thoughts here resonate with a different conversation I had last night with a different design leader whose design team, which is about, I wanna say, 30 some people, has, in the last four months, basically gotten off of Figma and all into their design system is basically baked into some tool, some LLM-y tool.

And they just kind of build designs directly through the tool. They don’t need Figma. To the degree, if they use Figma, it’s to do some like wireframing, sketching, but they’re not doing the detailed design work anymore in Figma. There’s no value in that.

And one of the things that I asked about, because I’ve gone to Config and there are a lot of designers whose identities aren’t just as a designer, but as a Figma user. They wear Figma swag ’cause that’s who they are. And as we were talking about this, I asked like, what was that like getting these designers to adopt this new approach?

And she’s like, oh, it was miserable. they fought it every step of the way.

But there had been an executive mandate, as many companies have, in terms of embracing AI tooling. So, they needed to demonstrate it.

And I wonder though, because the person who I was talking to, the person who led this organization through it, was not a typical design leader, was not a designer, but was the head of design operations.

And I wonder, someone having a slightly removed point of view, someone who can see the process, see how it all works together, isn’t invested in the practice through a tool, was able to bring, maybe, a clarity to this change that would’ve been hard for someone steeped in the tools to bring, stuck with it, wasn’t thrown by the pushback that they received, but also as an ops leader, knew how to guide people through this.

So made sure everyone got the training, like, created a space for the team to get to the other side, such that now the way this person was talking about it, the designers in their org would never go back.

But had to go, you know, you talk about the desert. Like this was not quite a death march, but no one died, but there was months of uncertainty and misery where they don’t quite know where this is going to lead, that someone needed to shepherd this group through to get to that other side.

And I find myself wondering if, all of my connection to the design ops community notwithstanding, not that ops will be the ones to necessarily see us through, but being able to approach this with some degree of remove, as opposed to woven investment in how things currently operate.

Jesse: That’s interesting to think about. We’ve talked a lot on this show over the years about how one’s craft background can influence prejudice, sometimes put blinders on you as a leader and cause you not to be able to see possibilities that might be right in front of you, because you’re so steeped in your own craft that you had to hone in order to get to that leadership place that you’re bringing your own sense of what design is there to do and what design delivering value at its highest level looks like.

Again, like if you had defined your team’s value in terms of Photoshop files shipped, you need to really rethink things.

Peter: Definitely. Yeah.

Another conversation I’ve been having, and it came up a little bit last night, but is a general theme in the last, I don’t know, few weeks of discussions I’ve been having with folks, is how, in many organizations, design has been reduced to production, to, you know, if not Photoshop files shipped Figma files maybe not even shipped, right? Collaborated on.

And you know, we primarily operate in digital product design, but both of us are old enough to have worked in a kind of design, in a before times.

And I remember my first job at a design agency. I was a web developer there. This was an agency that still did a lot of traditional graphic design, print and packaging and that kind of stuff.

There were the designers, but then there were the production artists. And these were two different roles. In an architecture firm, you’ll have the architects and you’ll have the draftspeople, where you distinguish between the more conceptual thinky systems-y work of solving the design problem, and then there’s another role that’s like, how do I take that solution and make it work in detail. That’s the production artist, right?

And so production artists would take the designs that a graphic designer created and figure out how are we going to get printers and Pantone and all that to ship, to produce what the designer intended.

The designers were not the ones having to do that. That was a different function.

And I think what we lost, in digital product design particularly, you know, in the years say, between like 2005-ish and 2020-something-ish, is the concept of those two roles. And instead we’re assuming all the designers are going to be producing their final assets in order for people to build those.

And then what’s happened is the work just kind of kept moving farther and farther right, ’cause that was the obvious output. And all the left work, you know, was getting lost.

Left, as in shifting left or first diamond or whatever type of work, was getting lost.

And now, in a world of generative AI, that production work is the first to go, right? That just evaporates. As it probably should, right? In the same way that desktop publishing meant we didn’t need certain professions anymore. And that’s okay.

Jesse: Yeah. I mean, you shouldn’t have an army of people solving crossword puzzles with your design system all day, you know?

Peter: One of the things it does is it shines a light on how, for many teams, many in-house teams, because their value was seen as their ability to produce comps, when that value is now captured by machines, many of these teams don’t have the understanding, wherewithal, the muscles, in terms of how to do, I think what you were referring to earlier when you were talking about kind of the more design strategy, strategic design, that different kind of thinking to help an organization navigate that ambiguity.

They just don’t even know where to begin.

Jesse: Yeah, and one of the big things that has come up in the AI transformation work I’ve been doing over the last year is there’s this dimension to it that has nothing to do with process, has nothing to do with tooling, and has everything to do with what people think their value is in the process.

And I think it’s going to be a period of evolution, especially for these larger scale teams, to reframe what a designer does, and what the voice of the designer means in here.

I think that in a lot of these situations where you’re built on layers of internet best practices, you’ve got layers of industry best practices, you’ve got layers of some of these companies have had live apps in the field for 20-plus years now at this point, right? They’ve got their own internal best practices to draw on.

And it feels like the problems are pretty well solved in a lot of ways. And so then the value that you deliver as a designer, it necessarily is about how you work within those layered sets of constraints that define the problem that you’re there to solve.

This shift means that that value proposition no longer really applies because a great deal of that mapping the constraints and working within them is going to be able to be done programmatically. So then, kind of by necessity, the designer’s role in the process has to be to address the ambiguity that the system can’t, that the larger processes and organizational systems that you’re a part of can’t address, and the pieces that the new tooling can’t address, and to be the one to kind of fill in the gaps that make it all still human somehow.

Peter: interesting. As you were talking about the value that you deliver what it made me think of is the book Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal, which is, have you read this, Jesse? Are you familiar with this?

Jesse: I’m familiar with the ideas, but I haven’t read the book.

Peter: Okay. So I can’t say I’ve read every word in the book, but I did read it early on in my kind of organization design journey, and it’s actually an appropriate book for thinking about the liminal moment because the insight that the book addresses is McChrystal being a general at the beginning of the global war on terror, and realizing that the command and control, top-down ways of the American military were not working in the face of a essentially networked resistance, where it’s a lot of small cells and pockets doing very small focused attacks. It wasn’t one coordinated army operating against another coordinated army.

But the rules of engagement had changed.

And what he talks about in the book is this recognition, the reason it’s called Team of Teams, is that instead of having one superstructure that just operates, you’ve got a bunch of little nodes. I mean, it’s, a book that’s very much a source of inspiration for things like Scrum in the Agile community and Spotify squad models and all that kind of stuff in terms of how do you create wholly self-sustained teams that are able to be effective on their own. Two-pizza teams at Amazon.

But to the point that you were making about the value you deliver, one of the key issues, and it was a journey that he had to go on, is, he’s like, but my value as a general for however many years, 20 years or 30 years, was to be a decision maker and was to know, and now that can’t be how it works anymore.

And he had to reframe his value is that of a connector, of an informer, of a motivator, of someone who made sure that everyone had what they needed in order to succeed, but that the decisions are gonna need to be made by people closer to the problem than someone back at command.

And so, you know, this questioning of your value, given the moment we’re in, is probably a healthy sign, right?

Like, again, it’s another one of those things like, don’t fight it. That’s not going to do you any good. But instead wrestle with it, and think really hard about what is it, what is that distinct thing that you bring in the environment you’re operating in to address the challenges that you and your team are facing?

And it might not be what it has been for the last however many years.

Jesse: Right. And you know, for years we’ve seen people in design circles on social media who’ve been adamantly advocating for an old value proposition, a classical view of user experience design that they’re all out there going, you know, we have to go back, we have to go back to the ways that we were doing things 10, 15, 20 years ago, to reclaim something that, in their view, has been lost.

But at the same time, every liminal moment represents moving towards something new, which also necessitates letting something old fall away.

And that difficulty that we have releasing old ways of framing our challenges, old ways of framing our value, old ways of framing the nature of the work that we do itself can be limiting our ability to engage the liminal.

Peter: It is funny because I’m sympathetic to some of that intent of going back, because I think there are valuable practices that for no good reason have been, if not lost, at least, again, kind of atrophied or, downplayed, that would be relevant today.

I think about this in terms of some strategic design and ways of vision setting or whatever, but I think you’re right, it’s not about doing things the way we used to do them in the grand old days when, well, I don’t want to get into that.

There’s a lot of people our age who liked it better when they had a full head of hair and you know, didn’t have the mortgages or whatever hanging over their heads. And they think that life was better then.

But I think some of those practices warrant being brought forward. Probably, I don’t wanna say repackaged, but, integrated in new ways, right?

Like, some of those ways of working are perfectly fine. We don’t have to abandon them, but the overarching assumption of how to do things, you’re right, is probably worth calling into question in favor of adopt, adapt and improve. Adopting and adapting to whatever that context is you’re operating in.

And I mean, this was something we used to think about a lot at Adaptive Path, which… we never had a, a process. We never started at the same place and ended at the same place from a process standpoint.

We had a big methodological toolkit.

You were a director of strategy or whatever. I was kind of the director of practice and I thought a lot about all the kit of parts that we used to do the work and how do you assemble them in this context to solve that problem, which would be different for a different client and different in a third way for another client.

Actually this is reminding me of something that has been burning my britches, which is some talks I’ve seen where people are like, we’re throwing out the design process and doing things the new way. As if there is one design process.

And what I realized is, I think, for many people, again, who’ve maybe been doing this 10, 15 years, there was an orthodoxy of how to do design that they were taught that they are now having to free themselves of in order to be more relevant to current context.

But, and this is gonna sound, I don’t know, self-aggrandizing or something, but I think for folks who’ve been doing this for a longer period of time, in the pre-orthodoxy, before we knew what we were doing and we were figuring it out, I never assumed there was one way to do design.

And it always surprised me when I would hear that people thought there was one way, and I think maybe we’re, just revisiting some of that kind of late nineties, early two thousands vibe of…

Jesse: Nobody knows anything.

Peter: Nobody knows anything. We know little things. We know a lot of little things.

We don’t know how they add up. So we’re gonna try combining these processes together or those two things together, how about that? And that’s fine. Like, that’s healthy.

Jesse: Well and I think that’s the skillset. If we think about what a designer, what a product manager, what a design or product leader might take away from this conversation, I think one of the big things is that ability to assess and make choices. And not to assume that the whole process has been laid out for you already, but to embrace the experimentation and embrace the improvisation that’s necessary here.

You know, one thing that’s been coming up for me a lot in this conversation, you know, I grew up on the Atlantic coast. I spent every summer out at the beach surfing and a lot of time out on the water. And one of the things about surfing is there’s nothing about surfing that is set it and forget it.

You know, it requires total presence, total attention, constant awareness of what’s going on, and constant adaptation to all of those signals in order to stay on top of the board.

And I think that for leaders as well as for the members of their teams, it’s that kind of ability to stay flexible and not get too attached to any particular course that ends up serving them in these liminal moments.

Peter: Well, I think this is a good place to hit pause in our conversation because I do want to explore broadly the skill sets that can allow you to navigate liminality, but I think that that’s a can of worms, that will take us into another episode.

But I like your talking about surfing, because I think a way to think about it is as you are approaching this ambiguity and operating in this liminal space, how can you be riding the wave instead of being kind of overtaken by it or have it crash upon you? And let that be the tease for the next episode of this little liminal… I’m trying to think of the…

Jesse: exploration…

Peter: …liminal exploration, liminal side path, liminal mission.

It’s like a side mission, side quest

The liminal side quest within Finding Our Way.

Jesse: I love it. Peter, thank you so much.

Peter: Thank you, Jesse.

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.

If you’re looking for help with AI transformation or you just need a private advisor to help you solve your hardest leadership problems, visit my website at jessejamesgarrett.com to book your free one hour consultation.

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.

Stanford professor Christina Wodtke joins Peter and Jesse in exploring the real contradictions of AI in design and product work: revolutionary prototyping speed versus the need for critical thinking, efficiency gains versus cognitive loss, and loving the technology while hating the exploitative companies building it. She shares exactly what designers and PMs must vigilantly protect.

Christina’s blog: https://eleganthack.com/

Peter’s website: https://petermerholz.com/

Jesse’s website: https://jessejamesgarrett.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, founder, author, tech industry veteran, and Stanford professor Christina Wodtke, joins us to talk about the sweeping impact of AI on design and product management, including shifting team roles, shifting creative processes, and shifting definitions of value in our work.

Peter: Hi, Christina. Thanks for joining us.

Christina: Hi Peter. Thanks for having me. And hi, Jesse.

Jesse: Hi, Christina.

Peter: So, in preparing for this conversation, I’ve been thinking about how I believe I’ve known you since, I want to say 1998 when I believe you were at Red Envelope as…

Christina: Nope. E-greetings. We were…

Peter: E-greetings, sorry, upstairs from Red Envelope, back in the late nineties when there was all kinds of tech going on in San Francisco.

Sorry, E-greetings. And I’ve known you as an in-house UX practitioner, a consulting UX practitioner, a product manager, a game designer, a teacher, an author. you’ve had a multi-layered, multi stage career. But what I don’t know is how you think of yourself today and how you introduce yourself.

So please…

Christina: [laughs]

Peter: Who is the Christina Wodtke of today?

Christina: You missed a couple. General manager and of course founder. Multiple time founder. But, you know, I keep busy. What can I tell you? Most of my time is spent at Stanford teaching. I’m a core lecturer there, which means I have a full-time appointment in which I teach product management and design, interaction design mostly, and game design as well.

So describing myself is never easy. I contain multitudes. But other than hanging out at Stanford with the kids, I write books on the odd occasion. I think I’m up to five now. And I also blog like a maniac, still.

You and I are some of the original bloggers from back in the day.

And then I help companies every so often when they come by and say, help, help. And I say, what you got? So the helping companies have been interesting. It tends to be a type of coaching that’s less life coaching and much more about how do I get my business sorted out. I work with CEOs mostly helping them figure out what’s my product strategy, what’s my business strategy, what’s my hiring strategy?

The word strategy tends to come up a lot.

Peter: Are these startups or more mature companies or all kinds of companies that you’re working with?

Christina: All kinds of companies. When it comes to the OKR work, I get a lot of big companies, you know, your Pepsi’s, et cetera. But for the more hands on coaching, those are almost all startups. I’m a startup person. I always have been. I always feel funny when I’m talking to a company and they’re like, we can’t do that because we’re cross-matrixed in these 15 different ways, And I’m like, Ooh, that sounds unpleasant.

So I’d much more prefer, the startups.

Jesse: So we were interested in having you join us because I’ve been reading a bunch of your writing lately around the topic of AI, and you’ve been doing some interesting explorations, and it’s been really interesting to see you sort through the implications of this stuff in your writing. And I’m curious where you would place yourself right now on the sort of skeptic-to-booster spectrum when it comes to AI.

Christina: Yeah, the doomer versus the booster. I like to think I’m stuck in the middle with you guys. There’s clowns on the left of me and jokers to the right.

Peter: Sure.

Christina: Yes, indeed.

Jesse: I’m keeping my ears covered.

Christina: Sorry, But it’s really maddening because it feels like if you say anything critical about any of the current generative AI companies, you’re somehow an idiot and backwards and a Luddite.

And if you say anything positive, you’re a lunatic, an overhyped, bubble loving fool.

So I say both things and I can be all those things at once.

If I was gonna nail it down and say, this is an extraordinary piece of the technology. I kind of doubt it will change the world the way the internet did. It doesn’t seem to me to be as deep as the internet, which really did change how we do almost everything.

But it is incredibly powerful and it’s amazing when you use it. You just become supercharged.

It also is not easy to learn. Everybody makes it sound like you just spend five minutes and all these amazing things happen. And I don’t find that to be the case at all.

I would say I was using it for six months before I got my head around starting to get value out of it. But of course I do have a day job, so maybe that might’ve been faster. But the hardest part of AI is that the companies suck so hard. It’s very, very painful.

Like, to use AI is to be complicit in this way that’s intensely unpleasant. I’m currently trying to stick only to Claude, but that puts me in a place where I don’t necessarily know what’s going on across the board. So occasionally I’ll use, OpenAI’s offerings, or I’ll use Gemini, but I can’t bring myself to touch Grok or Meta because I feel slimed if I do.

So I’m kind of trying to find a path forward through that. And I think the piece that I’ve written that most people are most familiar with is the one where I said I love AI, but I hate the companies who make it.

And of course I hate them. I’ve written five books. They have literally built their business on the back of mine, right?

I would say that I sell fewer books now. I will say, that I get less consulting engagements now, which in a strange way, I don’t mind.

When I go into do OKRs, people all have the same problems and I kinda wanna just go, just do a close reading of the book. But I love the really hard problems that I get from the people who want me for my mind instead. That’s really fun.

But how can I like a technology that’s built on my effort without paying it for it? It’s kind of, difficult in its heart.

And then of course, it’s the fact that they’re acting like colonizers as Karen Hao says in her wonderful book, The Empire of AI.

They’re exploiting people in poorer countries for both their work.

I didn’t know until I read Empire of AI that they were doing the same mistakes, … mistakes… the same cruel, active choices that Meta made around content moderation. They’re doing it all over again, causing deep trauma in people who can’t afford to get food. And so if you choose between trauma and food, you tend to pick food.

And of course there’s the energy contribution, which isn’t as bad as concrete, but it’s still kind of bad. I can go on for a really long time, the lack of any oversight.

Gee, you think if people talk to AI that maybe suicide might come up? Oh no, that would never happen.We don’t have be prepared for any negative consequences.

But two days vibe coding with Claude Code and then all of a sudden there’s an app and it’s working and it’s beautiful and it’s magical. And I’m like, yay. And then I deploy it and I’m like, I haven’t, yelled deploy, deploy, in such a long time. Maybe not since my startup, and it just feels good.

So yeah, it’s hard. Anybody who thinks it’s simple is somebody who doesn’t need to have AI in their life. And I don’t really have a choice because now it’s going to be a standard technology, so I have to figure out how to teach it, or I’m not a good teacher anymore. It’s hard.

Peter: I want to, I guess, kind of start with where you just ended off with teaching, but I’m going to, perhaps take an unexpected route, which is: you teach at Stanford, which means you are in the heart of the belly of the beast of tech and some of the bad acting that you were just identifying.

Christina: And I’m in computer science. I’m not over in the D School. I am in the heart of the AI planet.

Peter: And I’m curious from that point of view, I mean, many of the people who are these bad actors are Stanford graduates, but I’m curious what you’re hearing from your students. And if you teach undergrad, grad, that would be helpful to understand as well.

What are you hearing from your students around some of these things that you’re talking about? What is your sense of how are they seeing things?

Christina: Absolutely. I mean, the first thing to realize is that Stanford is not a monolith. It’s sort of like when people talk about Google, Google’s like a bunch of city states. Stanford’s a bunch of city states.

The people in the business school, GSB, they’re very different than the people in the design school, which is not a truly a school,but we won’t go into that. But the D School folks are very different from the people who are in HCI inside of computer science which is where I’m living.

So what I find is my students are not as fiercely bottom line, money, money, money as some of them. And when they do tend to care a lot about money, it’s usually because they’re first generation low income students who have never had any money and would like to eat.

Once again, eating comes up a lot.

But I’m lucky because I became part of a program, oh gosh, I wanna say, four or five years ago, that was started by our chair Mehran Sahami called Embedded Ethics. And I decided to be one of the first pilot projects in which we work with a philosophy postdoc to put in ethical questions that tie into the topics that we’re covering.

So each of my class always looks at things through the design lens, through the technology lens, through the political lens, from the ethical lens. And I feel like because I teach mostly upperclassmen, I tend to teach junior seniors and master students. It’s sort of a odd middle ground. But they’re very influenceable at that age, which is really wonderful.

And so the things I can say, I can make them go, oh, they’re human beings that my stuff will be touching and do I wanna touch them inappropriately? No, we really don’t want to. We wanna do a nice thing. We’re gonna be thoughtful, we’re gonna think about the end possibilities that happen.

So I like my job ’cause it’s a little bit of a mission is to help them do the hard thinking through the complexity of what they’re facing.

And every once in a while I get the, you know, money, money, money types. And then we, yeah, enjoy lots of fine arguments about, you know, how much of your soul do you really wanna sell when you’re thinking through this and what does that mean? And I always enjoy those conversations.

I think I answered most of your questions. Did I? Oh, what do they think? What do they think?

Honestly, it could be a self-selection bias, but most of them are struggling with the same thing that you and I and most reasonable people are struggling with, which is, do I go all in in AI?

You know, because it will get them jobs. And there’s no question about that. And because they’re from Stanford, they shouldn’t be worrying about getting jobs, but they still do.

They care deeply about doing good. They often come to me, especially in my game design classes, they come to me and say, how can I be making a game when climate change is going to destroy the earth in the next few years? You know, how can I spend my time thinking about these unimportant things? We need to work on hard problems.

They’re very hungry to create meaning and make a difference. And that makes me really happy. And of course then I can say to them, well, you know, games can make a difference too. You can learn a lot from games, right now.

So I think most of them are really worried about the state of the world, and I don’t blame them. I’m worried.

Jesse: Despite your worries, you’ve chosen to jump in with this technology anyway, and I wonder what has helped you get to that place where you can sort of reconcile yourself to it?

Christina: Well, I tried to figure out who was the least evil. I ranked companies by how much harm are they really doing to the world. I could have gone even further, I suppose, and I could have gone with small models.

I haven’t quite got myself all the way up to running a local model, which is where I’d like to be, ’cause then I can get even more in the world of least evil. But this is the world I work in. This is where I live, you know? And I don’t think that you can ignore AI tech as a viable choice.

And the fact is that my students who I adore are gonna go work in tech and they need to know what AI is. They need to know what it doesn’t do. They need to know how it works. They need the answers to the same questions that I need.

And so helping them think through it, first I had to do the thinking myself is really the short answer to that. Yeah, it gives me some cognitive dissonance.

I realized I’d gone too far in the booster side when one day I was on LinkedIn and there’s a post by Timnit Gebru, who’s this amazing ethicist who’s kicked out by Google for being honest about what she thought in public. Don’t do that.

And she shared a really interesting article about the effect of AI, like I said, in the global south. And my first instinct was like vague nausea. And I said, oh, I know this, this is cognitive dissonance. I need to change what I’m looking at and reading.

And so I started following all the doomers, and, not the people who think AGI is gonna take over the world, but the people who are very worried about the real harms that we’re experiencing right now.

And I got myself to a place where I can look at the boosters and I can look at the hype and I can look at the dark side and I can look at the problems. And neither of them makes me wanna throw up any more than any normal person would wanna throw up, I suppose.

And the tech itself is, it’s just so remarkable too.

I mean, the reality is all three of us started in this world at the same time, and then it was the internet. It was making web pages, you know, you could kind of poke at it and you could throw something together, and you got that joy of seeing something go live. You got that joy of seeing people use the things you made, and that’s heady stuff.

And I have to say, I haven’t had this much fun making stuff since, you know, the early two thousands, I think. To sit here and fiddle, paddle around and be able to launch something is just profoundly satisfying for people like us who are makers. So, it has its cost and it has its pleasures.

Peter: You’ve been teaching for about a decade now, like focused on teaching. Is that right?

Christina: A little bit longer, I think, if you count CCA and General Assembly.

Peter: You’ve been teaching for a while, and right now you’re teaching, it sounds like, both a kind of design class and a product management class. And I’m curious how embracing AI has caused you to evolve your syllabus, your curriculum.

What did you used to do? What did you let go of? What are you embracing? What are you recognizing is, like, essential that is not changing? Like, how has that happened for you?

Christina: Well, I started watching AI when ChatGPT first launched, and I didn’t do anything with it for a long time. I was just like, I’m gonna wait and see if it arrives. ’cause you have to remember, we’ve been waiting for AI to arrive for 20 years or longer. So seeing if it was actually gonna be a real thing that made a difference in everyday life and I think this last year was when it really went super mainstream, which is when I started to do with my deep dive, and it was with the desire to bring it into my classroom.

And so this is my first AI enhanced or AI embedded class which is the product management class. Actually, I guess you could argue, I started doing it last spring where I, just said, guys, you can vibe code, you can use AI to make assets for your games. You can use it to make music. You can use it to make images.

Do not steal other people’s work. If you could hire someone that would be better. If you can draw it yourself, that would be better. I built in some extra credit for people who are willing to do the creative work themselves, but…

The quality of the games went through the ceiling. It was just amazing. I was blown away. And they were just much more finished. And I think part of it is they didn’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about Unity and what was Unity gonna do.

They could spend more of that time thinking about how does this game have interesting pacing? How does the game mechanics work together? They were just able to get a lot farther along.

And then this fall, this is when I’m like, okay, you can use AI for this. You cannot use AI for that.

The rule of thumb is, first, what level of accuracy are you going to get? People don’t talk about hallucinations enough. When you realize that it’s 30 to 60% hallucinations depending on your setup, and that you have to do a lot of work to bring it down into single digits.

And there is no such thing as zero hallucinations. Being willing to make business decisions based on an AI “summary,” and I use scare quotes with summary is a scary premise for a business.

So a lot of what we had to do is go, okay, now how are we gonna generate this information? How are we gonna validate this information? When do we do our own research?

I became really interested in product sense, which I think a lot of people are referring to now as taste, which, you can’t fight language, but boy, it makes me want to.

So, I think it’s just really important to remember that when they’re using the ai, they’re not using their brain. And when they’re not using their brain, they’re not creating memories. When they’re not creating memories, they’re not gonna get it better at product sense.

And that’s what I explained to ’em. I just opened it up in the very first class and I said, here’s where you’re gonna use AI. Here’s where you’re not gonna use AI. Here’s why. If you wanna cheat, go ahead, because I don’t wanna play cop, but I will grade you on the quality of your results.

And if you use AI to do the writing, the results will be mediocre. And you’ll get a grade that reflects that because that’s kind of the nice thing right now is AI produces mediocre writing and they do a lot of writing in my class.

And I said I would rather see typos than have to read something boring.

And so far it seems to be going pretty well. I’m enjoying it. So almost everything has some AI and, in fact, this Thursday we’re gonna do a whole class on vibe coding.

The other thing I changed this year was I brought in a lot more guests than I usually do. People who have been doing PM and working with AI for a while, and that’s been really powerful as well.

Actually, it’s nice too, ’cause then I can sit down.

Peter: Ha.

Jesse: I wonder about where the taste issue comes into play in terms of the way that we interact with the technology itself. Because, you know, one thing that has come up for me over and over again in looking at what people get excited about and looking at what people are putting out in the world, is that the stuff that’s not very good that gets out, gets out because the people making it couldn’t tell that it wasn’t very good.

And so I find myself wondering about as practice evolves, how does that intuition get built in a practitioner? And how does the process potentially have to evolve to make sure they have the opportunities to leverage that intuition and not have all the decision making being taken away and given over to the technology.

Christina: Yeah, well, I mean, we’re at war with our own brains. As you guys I’m sure know, our brains have been evolved to be incredibly efficient because they’re huge calorie eating monsters when they’re being used to do thinking. And so there’s always a part of us that really wants to take the easy way out always. And you have to actively fight against that.

I really think that you have to be active in your care and feeding of your brain, so to speak.

So I’ve been referring to the product sense exercises as product sense pushups. So here you’re going to analyze the onboarding flow of these three different companies in three different sectors and write about what you see the differences are, and why do you think the choices they made were made? Those are the kinds of things that you have to do.

I mean, it was the same for me. I started writing a novel and my first instinct was, wow, this is so fast. This is amazing. This is interesting. And then it was like, well, this is sort of crappy. Why is it doing this? I don’t understand. It’s boring…

Oh, okay. Now I wanna go edit it. Oh wait, because I didn’t write it in the first place, I can’t hold the whole plot in my mind. What am I gonna do now? I’m gonna have to rewrite things. It’s been like this ongoing back and forth between, oh my God, it’s so fabulous, Oh my God, I’m not getting smarter.

And that’s part of it, is you have to commit to your own brain. So just like you wanna listen to good podcasts and you wanna read good books because you wanna make sure your brain is in a good shape. You need to do the same thing with AI. You have to be careful what you outsource.

Peter: You’ve used the phrase product sense a few times, which is a phrase I’ve heard since I left UX consulting and went in-house and found myself exposed to product managers who would use this phrase, but no one has ever defined it for me. And I’m assuming since you’re teaching it, you have a definition.

And I would love to hear how you define product sense. Is it a framework, is it a set of tools? Like what, what is that thing?

Christina: So just like when you’re learning an instrument, you’re going to want to listen to lots of music, get a feeling of what makes a good piece, a bad piece, spend a lot of time practicing and doing repetitive activities. It’s all the same.

And what are we really building up? I think we’re building up an intuition about what’s good and bad. Like we often talk about the iPad is really intuitive and all it means is we know how it works and when we pick it up, we recognize the patterns that we’ve learned elsewhere, on our iPhone perhaps.

So I read this book a long time ago called Working Knowledge and they define intuition as compressed experience. And I think that’s what product sense is, is it’s compressed experience. You’ve seen lots and lots of products and you’ve seen lots and lots of data. You’ve seen lots of user tests. You’ve read about the financial changes in a given business.

And out of that body of work that you’ve taken into yourself, your brain has turned it into patterns and you can quickly reach into yourself and plot those patterns when you’re testing something new.

And so the reason I don’t like the word taste as much is because I think taste gets conflated with being a tastemaker, having, I guess, it’s also a feeling for what’s interesting, but that feeling seems to be…

Jesse: fashionability.

Christina: …yeah, it’s, it is too much about fashion and I think taste worries me that way. It’s like, hamburger menus are cool, but do they actually work? And when you look at the stuff that goes down the runway at a fashion show, is that something a real person would wear most of the time, no, but it’s very, very interesting.

So I feel like taste can become experience on steroids where you’ve become so deeply experienced that you’re bored with ordinary things. And I think in our particular business, product management, design, what have you, we can never get bored by the ordinary because ordinary people like ordinary things.

Jesse: I’d like to talk about product management, design, what have you, and especially the what have you, and the blurring of these roles that more and more people are speculating about, projecting is going to happen, as a result of this technology. And I’m curious about your point of view as somebody who has been a designer, has been a product manager, has taught design, has taught product management.

Like what do you see as how the interaction between these roles evolves with the introduction of these technologies?

Christina: Yeah, because I have my feet in multiple different spaces, I have sort of a sense of how people are reacting towards them. And the short answer seems everybody thinks their job’s going to go away which I’m not very convinced of. And actually it’s probably engineers who are in the most danger at this particular moment, especially at the, sort of, crappy low level ones. The very senior ones will be needed ’cause they’re the only ones who know when the AI is lying to them.

But with design and product management they’ve become more and more alike over the years. When I first started, the product manager was firmly in the business space and the designer was firmly in the experience space, in the “how does this software behave?” How do we organize the information that it holds? How do we present it to a user in a way that they can understand and find pleasurable?

But it’s been interesting to see how product has shifted much closer to user experience in that they do their own research and they, they do more research than we used to. I talk to any good product manager here in the Valley and they’re like, yeah, we talk to users every single week, period. We do research, we do testing, we do product discussions. We write, and I can’t think of the word, but quick prototyping exercises with them. Participatory design, that’s my word.

And these are product managers doing this. In fact, we should ask what’s going to happen to the user researchers who seem to be the ones who are probably in the most danger right now. And we often forget to talk about them. I saw something interesting, I saw that there was a new survey they looked at all these job listings across all the different job boards.

And it turns out designer is one of the most highly sought after one. And every time I go on LinkedIn, everybody’s like, nobody listens to me and there are no jobs. I’m never gonna get a job. And then I see a survey like this that says people are looking for good designers and I wonder what’s going on here.

This is an interesting little mystery. I think design and product have always had a tumultuous relationship because they both own the same thing, the user’s relationship to the product. And they both think they own it, and they both think that means nobody else gets to own it, which is problematic.

So the way I think of it is, I love Theresa Torres’ product trio, where you have an engineer, you have a designer, and you have a product manager. The problem I have with that when it’s drawn as a Venn is product managers like to put themselves in the middle.

And I disagree with that. I think that everybody wants to be in the middle, right?

I think that they need to remember that they’re representing the business first and foremost, and a happy customer makes for a good business. Unless you’re United. And then making people profoundly unhappy means rising profits, apparently. But we won’t go into enshittification just now, I don’t think.

But I think that you really wanna think about, as a designer, what do I bring to the table? And it should be your years of training. It should be your experience. It should be whatever product sense or designer’s intuition that you’ve been developing over the years. And the product manager needs to respect that the designer does have a body of knowledge that they do not own.

The best people like Marty Cagan and Theresa Torres talk about how much they adore working with designers and how critical working with a good designer matters. But not everybody is a good product manager. Sturgeon’s law applies everywhere. 90% of everything is crap if you don’t know it.

Peter: Well, I’m wondering if either as part of your teaching or, your consulting, or maybe going back to when you were more active, like directly leading teams, the concept of team. In fact, I think you wrote a book about teams, and that seems to be relevant to this. Now I’m remembering “The Team That Managed Itself”.

Am I remembering the title right?

Christina: Yes, the book that didn’t want a title.

Peter: Yeah. Well, but that I think reflects on this, right? Because I think something that’s often missing in the development of our practices, design, product, et cetera, is this recognition that you don’t do it alone and that you’re likely going to do it with people who are explicitly not like you, and that you need to figure out how to engage with them better.

And some schools, in some contexts try to do, you know, like, let’s have the business school students work with the I-school students. But whenever I’ve actually been involved in those things, like as a, you know, some type of sage, a graybeard, trying to help them out, it’s clear that no one sat them down and helped them figure out what it means to work together.

With this evolution of these roles, teaming seems even more important because we can’t rely on what we thought we knew about these roles. How do you approach that? How do you help coach or guide people through being better teammates?

Christina: Well, product management is my youngest class. I think this is the fourth year I’ve taught it. And I had to think about a lot of this stuff when I offered to start teaching product management because there were no product management classes for undergrads. I think there still aren’t, at Stanford, you have to be a grad to be able to get into a product management class.

And we were having a bunch of students who were graduating and becoming product– PMs. So the HCI group and I agreed that there should be a product management class and I agreed to teach it. And so I had to ask myself really, what is the unique value within design and what is the unique value of product management and how do I make sure I’m not turning out more product managers who think they’re designers.

I mean, I don’t know how many product management conferences you go to like Mind the Product or Product At Heart or whatever. But they resemble design conferences.

Business is incredibly important, right? You really have to understand pricing, you have to understand marketplaces, you have to understand go-to-market approaches. There’s like some very incredibly important business concepts that you have to understand as a PM.

There’s interpersonal dynamics. I have always taught a little bit about how to effectively team in my classes. Everybody works in teams and I figure if you’re gonna work in teams, in my class, I’m gonna teach you something about how to work in teams. How do you give feedback? How do you hear feedback? How do you create norms around the work you’re doing? And how do you decide how you’re gonna work together?

Just like a bunch of really sort of basic, I’d call it interpersonal hygiene, where you’re trying to figure out how not to get into unnecessary fights so you can save yourself for the really good and juicy ones.

And then the last piece was execution strategies. Like they should know what Agile is and they should know what Scrum is and they should know what the lean startup is and they should understand what it means to bring a product to market.

And it’s very different, ’cause when I went to design, yeah, there’s definitely a lot of user research and some of my students do go on and become user researchers. But starting to learn things like you don’t come up with one idea. You come up with 15, you embrace bad ideas, you generate wildly, you refine them, you think with your hands, like there’s just, once again a bunch of skills that I think are profoundly important for design.

And so that’s pretty much how I approached the differentiation and really tried to focus on the thing that brings your unique value forward.

Peter: It is almost reminiscent of Cooper’s paired design where you have one is the generator and the other is the synthesizer.

And they were, yeah, they were, this locked pair. what you’re talking about in terms of design and product management, designers generating and product managers kind of sifting through and synthesizing and distilling and there being a feedback loop there.

Christina: Yeah, a little bit. I like the product trio because I think that engineers are often overlooked for how creative they are. It’s gotta be one of the most creative professions out there. They literally make something out of nothing. The ability to figure out how to bring things into the world using only ones and zeros, I don’t know how we could not say that’s creative.

So when you have these three people together, you could do almost anything. Somebody who knows how to make enough money to keep the thing going, somebody who knows how to make it desirable enough that people will wanna use it, and somebody who knows how to make it actually work. It’s kind of ma– it is magic. It’s something that’s wonderful.

And I think one of the hardest problems about teaching is it’s really, really hard to have a class that isn’t all the same, like designers take design classes and engineers take engineering classes and product manager take, which means if I put together a team for an activity, I’ve got five PMs.

The very first year I taught it, I tried to get them to pick a role. You know, okay, who’s gonna be the designer and who’s gonna be just, it didn’t work. Everybody wanted to do everything. And that could be maybe, ’cause they’re Stanford students and they’re all good at everything as far as I can tell, which is kind of terrifying when you try to go in and teach them.

But it just doesn’t work. So I’m still trying to figure out how to do interdisciplinary training because I don’t think we have enough of it.

Jesse: I wanna come back to the question of what happens to the magic created by the product trio when they adopt a new robot pal. And the implications for how each of those disciplines continues to deliver against its value proposition with this new player in the mix.

Christina: Yeah, I think we’ve identified the first truly valuable use case, which is prototyping. I mean you know, you hear people say, oh, AI can’t do production code, but just the idea that no one ever has to sit there and manually hook together pages in Figma. So you could have some vaguely clickable prototype where half of it doesn’t work and the data is wrong.

And now you could spend that exact same amount of time and have a completely interactive prototype with good data. And of course everybody’s gonna say, oh, it’s done, let’s ship it, which it isn’t. But that’s always been true for every prototype. That seems to be the nature of prototypes, is the higher fidelity they are, the more people think it’s ready to launch.

I can’t believe how much better a designer it makes me, I’m sitting here, like I said for the last couple days, prototyping a new app in Claude Code. I’m a design… ex-sdesigner. I guess, I’m a guess, ex-everything. But I’m an ex-designer making a prototype in a command line interface. It’s like, what, who am I, what is this world I’m living in?

And I can quickly launch it and play with it and say, okay, I see that doesn’t feel right, I’m gonna change these. I remember reading How Designers Think, which I really love, by Brian Lawson. It’s an HCI classic. But it’s really more architects he is working with.

And he talks about how a designer while drawing is in a conversation with themselves. They’re not drawing to explain things, although sometimes they are, but as they draw out these ideas, and you know this very well, Jesse, with your love of diagrams, me too, you’re diagramming as a way of going, does it fit like this? Or does it fit like this? Is it more like that? More like that.

And so if you’re able to prototype something natively in the material that it will eventually be in, which is code, you can get such a good sense of what works. And I think that’s gotta be the biggest winning use case of all. It’s not as scary as trying to synthesize user data where you have problems with getting it wrong.

Like I said, you don’t make decisions off of hallucinations, but you’re not losing anything either. Like if you never planned to learn to code, which I haven’t coded in well over 20 years, then I’m, didn’t think I was gonna start now, but apparently I was wrong.

So, it’s just so satisfying.

And we’ve seen it, like we have all these coding Lovable and Bolts and everybody talk about vibe coding. When people say vibe coding, just replace it with the word prototyping and you can see the value and it’s more testable. You know, if you have something that has more links and real data, you get significantly better feedback from your customers because that you can have them act naturally.

Jesse: I wonder about the implications of that for the skillset of the person sitting at the prompt and what they need to bring. Because like we’ve talked about what a product person brings, we’ve talked about what a design person brings, and we’ve talked about what an engineer brings. And I wonder what the potential mix of those value props might actually be required to be really good at this thing that you’re talking about, the prototyping work.

Christina: It makes me crazy that everybody on LinkedIn, which is probably a terrible place to figure out what people are talking about. But…

Peter: it’s the best we got.

Christina: Ever since I rage-quit Twitter over Elon Musk, I’m kind of lost in good places to have conversations. So I still held a hope Blue Sky will finally get fun.

Peter: Maybe we can bring mailing lists back. That’s where we all met originally.

Christina: I miss mailing lists. Don’t even get me started. I never feel so old as when I talk about how much I miss mailing lists.

But I think that when people say vibe coding means we don’t need a PRD anymore, or stuff like that, I’m like, no, no, no. Let’s talk about the importance of figuring out who your target audience is, of figuring out what the market is like right now. Figuring out how should it look and how should it feel and how should it behave.

These are things that vibe coding… can’t be done until you get your head around that problem. I think that what’s exciting to me is I can go straight from a piece of paper, which is incredibly fast, to an interactive prototype, without having to work with all these klugy things that we’ve put in between it.

Like, let’s be honest, in a lot of ways Photoshop can be kind of klugy. Figma can be very klugy when you’re trying to do interactive stuff with it. Or you could argue, no, I’m fast with Photoshop, I’m faster with Photoshop than I am with a piece of paper and some colored pencils, and I’d rather do it that way.

But you can do either one and then you can upload it into the vibe code tool of your choice, and then it can make you an interactive prototype without spending hours of putting things together. So I think the thing that made people valuable is not going away even a little bit. I think the way that we realize that value is changing radically.

Peter: Jesse asked a question about this robot member of your team, and it kind of builds on what we were talking about earlier in terms of team dynamics and how teams learn to work with one another. And it made me think about norming.

What does it mean to norm with a robot buddy? Which then made me think about something you wrote recently about context engineering.

And I’m wondering if you could talk about that maybe in the frame of norming, like how you set up your robot buddies to better work with you and extrapolating that to what does it mean to work with the team?

Christina: Well, you know, it’s always a little bit dangerous to talk about robot buddies when we’re really talking about something that’s a probability machine, the most amazing, incredible probability machine that anybody’s built so far. But still, it is, it’s not a human who has feelings.

But on the other hand, the context engineering is a great way to talk about norming because when we come together and we talk about norming, norms are, of course, the often unspoken values that we share.

We have an understanding of, do we interrupt each other? Do we not interrupt each other? Do we raise our hands or do we just speak out? Like there’s a million tiny social decisions that different cultures have come up with different ways to solve for them. And so by spending some time when a team is first assembled to write down those norms, what are we gonna do?

What happens when you and I disagree? Do we take it offline? Do we argue with it right in front of the team, right then, there? If I have a problem with you, how do I handle that? With how we’re interacting? Like these are all the norms.

So the question then becomes, when I interact with Claude, which is as I’ve said, my favorite, I wanna tell Claude, how are you gonna interact with me?

I wanna say, please do not blow smoke up my butt. I’m not interested in your sycophantic ways. Stop using all those exclamation points. You sound like a damn cheerleader. If I wanted that, I’d go to ChatGPT.

You know, I really feel passionately about, here’s how I want you to talk to me. So I went ahead and I put in at the system level the norms of how do we talk to each other. I want you to challenge me.

I want you to, I went through a whole period where I was like. I’m very much a one shot prompter. I just like to write something in the chat box and go and hope for the best. So I had it always asking me questions. I said ask me questions before you do something. And then it would just ask me questions endlessly. So I got to ask me questions when you’re about 70%. You think with 70% confidence that you understand what I’m talking about.

And that seemed to solve the problem for me. So now I do one shot and ask me all these really useful questions, and then it just builds something and it’s really pretty perfect.

And in a lot of ways when we’re working with a team, we design our norms, but then we check in on them every week. We say, okay, are they still working? Do we need to come up with a new rule? Do we wanna get rid of one of our rules? Is it silly? And I think that’s the same thing as you have to think about context as sort of something that you’re continually refining as you work with these.

And it requires a lot of metacognition as a human being. You have to spend a lot of time thinking, what works for me? Do I like the blunt honesty or do I like a little compliment here and there? And be self-aware enough to be able to make those choices. And I think a lot of people aren’t. But it makes a huge difference to have that context there.

The robot buddy. Yeah. I think, I feel, I feel more like a cyborg. It’s like an exo-suit. I put it on and I can do all these things I couldn’t do before. Rather than a different individual, even though maybe it’s like Jarvis, you know, if you think about Iron Man, where there’s a voice there, but it doesn’t really belong to a body, it belongs to the suit.

Jesse: That’s quite the image.

Christina: I love it.

I love putting on my Claude suit and going out and conquering the world.

Jesse: Well, so much of the talk is about efficiency, right? And so much of the talk is about using AI to do more with less and being able to kind of get the most out of your teams and stuff. And I wonder about how you see the tension between kind of efficiency and quality, because you were talking about how AI really raised the quality of your students’ work. And at the same time when we talk about AI processes relative to other kinds of processes, it’s not necessarily that they’re making you more efficient, you’re just spreading your energy around in different ways, right.

Christina: Maybe I think that the question we should be asking ourselves is how are we gonna spend that time? You know, it’s just daylight savings time and everybody got an extra hour and there were endless newsletters going, what are you doing with your extra hour? Which is kind of silly because. We still sleep eight hours a day or eight, eight hours a night and or awake 16 hours a day.

But anyway I think with AI we really are getting back hours. Like something that would’ve taken me three days to write, took me three hours to write. I mean, it is, quite a large jump in certain types of tasks and all tasks. So now that I’ve gotten time back, what am I doing with that time?

And I fear that a lot of executives are going to say, “More, just do more.” But I think the real value would come if we did nothing with that time. Like we need to use that time to go for a walk and think about strategy. We need that time to leave the house and touch grass, to be healthier, to spend more time with our family because it’s been shown over and over again that when we go to a four day work week, that productivity goes up, not down, and that’s before AI.

I was talking to one of my students, my students are so frigging smart, it’s just such a delight to have hard conversations with them. And I said, Hey, it looks like, you know, inference is getting cheaper and cheaper. What do you think they’re gonna do with it? You know? And he goes, oh, they’re just gonna spend all that energy that would’ve been used on bigger models. And I feel like that’s the instinct. And capitalism is just to consume every single thing it can as opposed to stop and take a pause.

And it’s a very shortsighted version of capitalism that’s not science-based. It’s mythology based, I think, where if you leave the office, the, I can’t believe 9-9-6 is back. It’s, it’s, it’s nuts. It’s like, if you’re gonna be successful in AI, apparently you have to work from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM six days a week.

And I’m like, no, no. If you’re successful with AI, you’re working four to six hours a day and you’re spending the rest of the time like reading and thinking and exploring and napping. All of these things have been shown to increase productivity. So I think the question is what are we doing with those hours?

And I would say it’s don’t use your common sense. Use the science instead.

Peter: Big fan of napping.

Christina: Napping is beautiful.

Jesse: He is a big fan of napping.

Peter: I, I am.

Jesse raised again, the work you do in game design and that was a thread I wanted to pursue a little bit, you’ve been working in game design for decades now.

Not necessarily full-time, but you’ve definitely had a foot in it. You’ve attended the Game Developers Conference. That’s a space that you’ve continued to attend to.

Christina: I worked at Zynga. I’m working with some game design companies on and off.

Peter: And I’m wondering, you know, I think Jesse and I have benefited in conversations with folks who are operating in spaces adjacent to the kind of digital product design, UX design, maybe even service design space that we tend to find ourselves in.

We had a great conversation with someone from the consumer packaging goods world and talking about brand and packaging design and those experiences and the challenges that community is facing. And I’m wondering what you are seeing in game design, what trends or realizations are occurring in that space that would be of interest and relevant to, a more kind of UX or digital product design practitioner or leader, like, just breaking us out of our kind of typical modes and, how might we learn from others’ experiences?

Christina: Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, I was saying earlier how AI and actually also VR and AR have been arriving for a very long time and never seemed to actually arrive, but they arrived in game design ages ago, like GDC quickly had an AI summit. Before ChatGPT was launched. And that’s where most ordinary people think of AI as beginning.

And AI has fully taken over all the other tracks as well, there’s a summit beforehand, and then there’s the main conference. And AI is everywhere. Because it’s such a useful tool to allow you to do the onerous work of making a game.

Also games are a hit business. A lot of things fail. People don’t wanna spend much money on creating them because it’s a huge risk every time you make a game. So having AI that can, you know, make your animation go faster, make more sprites more quickly, is valuable.

Then you have things like procedural generation, which is always super interesting. Like how do you automatically create levels or challenges? AI is just very obviously applicable to game design the way it isn’t as clear within UX.

There are many, many winning use cases in game design and it’s often hard to bring that back to UX. Because I think that UX is sort of problem obsessed, but not all opportunities are problems.

And game design is not solving the problem of boredom. It’s instead speaking to a certain longing that’s inherent in us to play. Playing is probably one of the most fundamental human activities that exists. Because through play we develop new technologies. We learn how gravity works and how the world works.

Play is how children learn. And it’s how adults learn too. It’s not just the province of children. So, it is hard to talk about what is game design doing that we should learn from? ‘Cause I did a bunch of that when I was very first, you know, doing my Mechanics of Magic talk, which you were kind enough to host me when you were at Groupon.

Peter: That’s right. That’s right. Well, 15 years ago or something.

Now, one thing I’m picking up on is, and it’s something that we don’t maybe talk enough about in the space of UX and digital product design, which is production.

The three of us have been doing this long enough that UX design, even the production aspects of UX design were innovation. We were creating stuff. We were the first to make shopping carts or checkout flows or, you know, whatever things that are now very beyond rudimentary.

And I think there’s still a little bit of that mindset that like every designer on the team should be doing–like, we need designers to be doing production art and production level stuff.

And we haven’t yet figured out how to gracefully hand this off to a tool the way that it sounds like game designers are like, yes, if you could just like, figure out all the in-betweens between, you know, this version of this character and that version of the character, great. Oh my God, that would be amazing.

Whereas we would be like, no, no man, a human’s gotta draw every single one of those in order for me to feel validated. And, there’s probably some type of production opportunity that’s untapped in the spaces we’re operating in that tools like this could help with.

Jesse: Well, so for our audience, you know, we’ve got a lot of folks who listen to this show are in-house leaders of design teams. They are, in some cases working inside large organizations with a million constraints. They’ve got product partners and engineering partners breathing down their necks, and they’ve got the executives telling them to figure out this AI thing. What would you advise those design leaders as to how to think about and approach this challenge?

Christina: One particular thing that I think AI is incredibly useful for, everybody just goes, AI is good for brainstorming, and they kind of wave their hands around.

But what AI is incredibly good at, because it doesn’t get bored, is variations. So if you wanted to see 20 versions of a certain page, all with a slightly different shade of teal, you could do that in 20 seconds, you know? And immediately go, oh, okay, I think this one’s better than this one. Or this is more on brand for us.

I love going, give me 20 ways that x, y, z you know, give me 20 titles for my blog post. Or things like that. So it’s really good at mass producing choices and then you, senior leader with your marvelous taste and product sense and intuition, can pick which of those is exactly the right one to move forward with.

I think it’s really good for that. It’s so fast. I think the other thing is, so something I saw is speed changes your process profoundly. So while I was vibe coding, the fact that I could go from, you know, changing a task from being a dropdown to being a checkbox or, you know, in, 20 seconds and then go, no, I want this other thing. No, I want this other thing, you know, just very quickly, the speed of its response allows you to quickly tune the interface to something that’s much better and much accurate.

And that was something I had never been able to do before because it’s always so slow. Like, think about it, what it would take to switch out a radio button for check boxes.

I can’t think of any way that takes me less than a minute, except maybe if I’m a pretty fast coder already. But if I’m not a coder, it’s gonna be kind of a pain in the ass. But instead it happens in seconds.

And so you have a freedom to explore things that you might feel, oh, I never have the time to do that. I don’t have time to explore. ‘Cause then you, instead of that, you could explore a completely different checkout process that resembled it. It could be a stupid checkout process, but you have the freedom to do stupid stuff.

I think at the disposability of the stuff that’s made by the tool, ’cause it’s made in seconds, you don’t have loss aversion around them to the same degree.

So you can throw out an entire coded prototype and build a new one in completely different code because it’s no big deal. Maybe you were at it for an hour, but you built this huge, massive thing that you can now look at and go, Ooh, no, no. I think that’s the wrong direction. I can see a lot of potential.

The bad side, the thing that people are gonna struggle with, especially designers, is it isn’t very good at not looking like crap. A lot of these prototypes look like poop. And if you have a vision in your head and you know how it should look, it’s really hard to get the AI to prototype something that looks the way you want it to look.

It’s significantly better to go off to one of the earlier tools, your Figma and Photoshops, make it exactly what it looked like and then say, here, go build this. It can do that. But if you wanna say, can you put four pixels of padding around that, good luck.

Peter: As you were talking, I was looking at my bookshelf and on the bookshelf not too far away, was a book called Information Architecture Blueprints for the Web. You might be familiar with this.

Christina: It’s a good little book. Still quite relevant, strangely enough.

Peter: Yeah, well, I’m sure, for those listening it was written by Christina,

Christina: In 2000.

Peter: 2003 according to the copyright. We came up as IAs, IA Summit talking on the sig-IA mailing list, attending IA conferences. I’m curious…

Because we’ve heard about the death of IA for a very long time, but it never quite goes away. And in fact, from what I’m seeing, it feels like in the last two or three years, even like recently, it’s, there’s something, there’s life being breathed back into that again.

And I’m wondering from your perspective, again as a teacher from that perspective in the classroom or, you know, consultant, whatever, like what is the state of information architecture from your point of view now?

Christina: it’s interesting because you know, we’re mostly talking about AI and so when we talk about AI, a lot of people assume we’re talking about generative AI. However, there are other models for creating stuff. And one of ’em, which could be significantly more energy efficient is based on using ontologies as opposed to just massive quantities of data that get squished.

And I, this is not my space, this is a, space that my friend Madonnalisa Chan, she’s like the superhero that nobody knows ’cause she never blogs or anything, but she’s insanely, insanely, ridiculously, stupidly brilliant. She’s just so good. And she’s been working with Salesforce for years, designing useful AI and machine learning based on her ontology work.

She is your classic library sciences style information architect. So it’s clear that there’s a huge potential in understanding how language is structured. So you’re working with the structure instead of the actual language. And that’s pretty interesting.

I never went down that far. I mean, to be honest, I think I’ve always been much more of an interaction designer than an information architect, if you are fussy enough to worry about what things are called. I’ve kind of given up on the naming thing. I wish the words were more respected, but they aren’t.

So once “literally” stopped meaning “literally,” I just kinda went okay, words, they’re just moving around.

But understanding how things are organized and what classification means and how humans use classifications for shortcuts is gonna be clearly vital to making an AI that’s more effective, more powerful, and significantly cheaper and faster. So yeah, some cool people are doing cool shit with AI and IA.

Jesse: So as all of this stuff continues to evolve what are you most curious about?

Christina: I’m most curious about what’s gonna show up tomorrow, because it feels like every day something wild is showing up. Like suddenly there’s an AI only Instagram. I’m like, what the heck? Okay. Didn’t see that one coming. I feel like I say almost every day, didn’t see that one coming, all the time.

So in some ways, I’m incredibly curious what shape it takes. And I’m kind of thriving in a way that I haven’t felt in a long time because everything is so unpredictable and I just thrive on chaos and unpredictability. It makes me incredibly happy to be just delighted to suddenly go, whoa there’s a use case I hadn’t thought of.

So I’m curious what is going to happen next. I’m profoundly curious about what it’s going to mean to our workflows. I’m sure you saw recently the latest study, which is a proper study. Like, you know, the MIT 95% of AI things fail, was not a study. It was like, it’s got huge methodological problems.

But this one, this one was a proper study and it showed that AI can only do tasks as well as human beings, expert human beings, I should say, 2.5% of the time, more or less. Which is really rare. And so it’s clearly not eating our jobs tomorrow except it’s transforming our jobs today.

So how is it going to transform? What are the superpowers that are gonna be unlocked? What are we gonna do with that?

You know what I’m curious about? I’m curious about when we see the first AI-native product. So, you know how cars originally looked like carriages, right? The horseless carriage business and then, you know, TV looked like plays and internet was just brochures online and then something came along. It understood the medium well enough to be something brand new.

I am so curious what that something brand new is gonna be for AI. ‘Cause I don’t think we’ve seen it yet. It’s gonna be so cool. It’s gonna be so interesting.

Jesse: Exciting.

Christina: Yeah, I know. That’s, that’s the struggle, I’m telling you.

These stupid AI companies are dick wads and they’ve got the coolest toy on the block. It’s painful.

Jesse: Yeah. Christina Wodtke, thank you so much for being with us.

Christina: Thank you for having me.

Peter: Yes. Thank you. This was great. We could talk for another hour easily.

Jesse: If people wanna keep up with you and your ideas online, how can they do that?

Christina: Oh. You know, I still blog an Elegant Hack 25 years later, still putting stuff up there. You can follow me on LinkedIn, which apparently I’m on all the time. Gotta put all that random thinking energy elsewhere.

Peter: Thank you, Christina.

Christina: Okay, thanks.

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.

Peter and Jesse discuss findings from Peter’s survey of 750 UX pracitioners on organizational health. Designers feel good about their work but struggle with quality standards, staffing, and career growth. Senior practitioners are the unhealthiest group. Reporting structure predicts team health. Consulting teams outperform in-house teams, where visionary design capabilities have atrophied and empowerment remains elusive.

Read the 2025 State of UX/Design Organizational Health report, including access to the survey data for your own exploration.

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, our very own Peter Merholz shares with us insights and perspectives from his 2025 survey on the organizational health of digital design teams. We’ll look at where designers feel they’re delivering value, where they’re struggling, and the key indicators that your team might not be set up for success.

Hello Peter.

Peter: Hey, Jesse.

Jesse: Welcome to the show.

Peter: Glad to be here.

Jesse: As always. Today…

Peter: Do I have a choice?

Jesse: Hey, this was your idea.

Peter: The podcast was your idea…

Jesse: No, you’re right, you’re right. This episode was your idea. We’re gonna talk a little bit about the survey that you did last year around organizational and team health for design teams.

And I wonder just to kind of set things up what were you hoping to learn by doing a survey of design practitioners out there in the world?

Peter: So this survey, this research, has been brewing for me for years now. I had created a version of the survey that was specific to individual design organizations to be used to help clients a number of years ago, just as part of my practice.

And I’ve realized, particularly, I think, in that 2023-ish timeframe, as things started getting confusing and discombobulated and disrupted, that it would be interesting to take a snapshot of the state of the industry, and that this survey that I had been using to help specific design teams understand their organizational health, like, how, how well are they performing and, how healthy are these organizations, and organizational health means things like the mindset of the people on the team, how motivated and engaged are they, how supported are they feeling? Are they able to do good work? All those types of things.

I thought, oh, this could be helpful industry-wide, just to get a sense, pulse check. But I’m just one guy. And it laid dormant for about two and a half years until Lenny Rachitsky did his survey of product development teams, one of the findings of which was around burnout.

And within that finding around burnout, that designers are the most likely to be burned out within a product development org, more likely to be burned out than product managers, engineers, et cetera.

And that caught a lot of attention. There was a lot of commentary about it, primarily on LinkedIn.

And so that was the trigger to be like, okay, I gotta get this thing out there. And we need to, by we, I mean kind of the UX design community, we’ll benefit from a look within, right?

The Lenny study was broader. It was not about design, though it included designers.

I wanted to really take that snapshot of what the UX and design industry is feeling about the organizations they’re part of. And so that’s what spurred it. Like, literally weeks after Lenny’s survey, I published mine, which in some ways was perhaps unwise because I did it right at the start of summer.

Like had I, done it in the spring, I probably would’ve gotten, it would’ve been easier to get a, good feedback, but did it in the summer. But I was still able to get nearly 750 respondents from around the world to share what their experience is inside their various organizations.

And I think come up with a decent, informed perspective on the state of the health of the teams that UXers and designers are part of.

Jesse: Got it, and it would seem from the survey results that that health would be approximately 3.28 out of five.

Peter: Yes. Solved. It’s pretty mediocre. Or middling is probably, maybe a better kind of word for it.

You know, there’s some kind of demographic questions just to try to get a sense of the size of the organization you’re in and where is your organization within a larger company? Are you reporting through product and engineering? What kind of industry are you in? Financial services, professional services, retail.

So there’s, a set of demographic questions and then there’s a set of, they’re not questions, they’re statements. Likert statements, right? Where you put a statement out there and then you have someone say whether or not they strongly disagree, disagree, neither disagree or agree, agree and strongly agree. And you can assign those a value from one to five in that order.

And it’s those Likert questions that are really getting at the organizational health. Whether or not people have the tools and resources they need, do they feel good about the work that they’re doing? Are they adhering to quality standards? Are they supported in their professional development?

Whatever it is, writ large, when you look at the industry as a whole, it turns out that the answers are basically, on average, they’re very, or ,like, in the middle. They’re just in the middle.

Which to me actually suggests that the tool is pretty well tuned to get a result like that. it also suggests that, you know, things aren’t great. Things aren’t terrible, but, and I’m sure we’ll get into this, there are circumstances where results shift one direction or another, and it does start pointing to certain environments that are healthier or less healthy.

Certain contexts that correlate with healthier environments. And then you can start inferring why.

Jesse: Yeah. I actually am curious about something a little more granular than that, which is really when you were digging into the data, I’m curious what the process was like for you as you were going through it and what you maybe discovered along the way that caught you off guard, or were there any aha moments in your own journey with this?

Peter: One of the things that became clear very quickly and kind of bore out regardless of how many people answered it, was this interesting dichotomy, this internal contradiction.

By and large, people feel good about their own work and their ability to do good work in their organizations. I have a set of statements: “The work I’m asked asked to do matches my level of experience and expertise,” “I take pride in the work I deliver,” “the work I do has a positive impact.”

Those all ranked very strong. They were among the most positive responses that people had. And that kind of surprised me…

Jesse: hmm,

Peter: The strength of that positivity because in a lot of conversations I have with folks, I find that people are often frustrated by their ability to do great work or, put work out there that has the kind of impact that they want it to have.

And the internal contradiction is you have on one hand people saying, I take pride in the work we deliver. And the work I do has a positive impact on users.

But then when you ask questions that are a bit more, say, systemic…

Jesse: hmm.

Peter: You get what were the strongest negative responses. So that includes a statement, “We only ship experiences that meet our standards of UX and design quality,” ” Our staffing levels are sufficient to deliver on the work expected of us,” and “I have the time and focus to do my work well.”

Those three statements had the strongest negative reactions, which feel in conflict with the statements that had the strongest positive reactions. And it’s one of those results that I would follow up with, if, I were doing this for a client and really wanting to unpack that, I would follow up with like a handful of one-on-one interviews with a range of designers.

You know, try to get maybe 20 designers to see if I can unpack why those two things

are…

Jesse: …telling different stories,

Peter: …so divergent when they seem to be talking about the same thing, which is like, what we’re able to get out in the world.

Jesse: Yeah. I’m curious about this one about quality because it is such a topic of conversation in the design community, and you have a lot of people responding in the negative about their ability to maintain standards of quality in what they ship.

I noticed that the, question about, having standards of quality is much closer to that average. But the gap between having the standards and being able to enforce or implement those standards seems to be one thing that the survey is highlighting here.

Peter: Yeah, and I think that was a surprise that the statement, “we have clear, explicit standards of quality,” ranked, you know, greater than three, because at least in my anecdotal engagement with a bunch of design organizations that are otherwise somewhat mature, they actually rarely have clear, explicit standards of UX and design quality.

And so that leads me to want to better understand what people think that phrase means. What, in their mind, is a clear and explicit standard of UX design quality. Just because I see teams struggle defining quality. Some of the biggest, most mature teams struggle defining it in any clear, systematic explicit fashion.

But even if we assume that yes, we’re doing a little better than middling on teams having these clear and explicit standards of quality, it’s not surprising to me that they’re not shipping to those standards. That tracks with most of the conversations that I have with whether, again, clients or just industry peers, that the quality standards of design are not appreciated or understood by people outside of the design team.

And so teams ship work that the designers are not happy with, though, that then conflicts or contradicts that phrase of, ” the work I do has positive impact on our users, and “I take pride in the work I deliver.”

So I, struggle with, some of this.

Jesse: Yeah. I think it might be a matter of degree. I mean, I think that it is possible to feel like you’re having an impact and feel like that impact is constrained by the environment or the context that you find yourself in. And I wonder about whether there is a story within here, which is basically, it’s not me, it’s you.

You know, that design knows how to do design well. We have standards of quality. We feel like we’re making an impact. We feel a sense of pride in our work, but I don’t have the necessary tools to do my work well, or the time and focus or the staffing investment isn’t there. Or the partner expectations aren’t there. The value alignment isn’t there to actually activate on.

We all know we are good. We’re just waiting for everybody else to give us a chance to show it.

Peter: Right. Right. And I think that’s where I have landed is, that in those very specific areas that design controls, designers largely feel pretty good about the state of things. But the moment they start interfacing with the broader system that includes the elements where they lack control, that’s, where you start seeing the scores tank.

Jesse: I wonder though also about the trap of self aggrandizement in this for designers and design teams to basically.

Peter: You think?

Jesse: Well, well, like how does that play into this you see it, you know, the ego attachment to again, like, we’ve got everything figured out. It’s all of our partners who are the problem.

Peter: I mean that’s probably true of every function, right? Functions are tribal. Those tribes feel like they know what they’re doing and often, I think, feel like the people outside of their tribe don’t know what they’re doing.

I think the part of what’s at issue here is a matter of power, and I think designers tend to lack the organizational weight to insist on, say, standards of quality that perhaps the other functions do or are able to abide by.

And so, you know, long ago I wrote about another trend that I’ve seen, which is when you do internal surveys of product development teams, and then you analyze the results by function, like product manager, engineer, design, data, whatever the functions within the team, designers almost uniformly are, like, 10 points behind the other functions.

And so to the point you were making, I think there’s some greater disconnect between designers and design practice and design expectations, and an organizational reality relative to other functions, where it seems like engineering and product, that disconnect is non-existent or much less.

And there’s just something about, I think, how those functions are better attuned to the broader company that they’re a part of than design is.

Jesse: Is that a gap that design can bridge? Does design inherently need to be a little bit separate?

Peter: So that gets back to the concept you and I have discussed around, this idea of design… I’m wary of the phrase “in a bubble,” and I’ve, something six months ago, seven months ago, or maybe more now, where I refer to it as the membrane, right? Because it needs to be permeable.

But this idea that design is a meaningfully different function than other functions within the organization. Engineering, marketing, sales, finance, HR have, in many ways, more in common with one another in terms of how they approach their work. A more analytical approach, a more spreadsheet-driven approach, easier tie to clear value, than design.

It’s harder to measure. Design’s impact is mediated often through other functions, or it’s realized through collaborating with other functions or facilitating other functions and design effort, instead of being as analytical and as operational as some of these other functions, right?, is more generative and creative and exploratory.

And so design as a function is kind of a misfit in most organizations. That it’s not aligned with whatever the dominant kind of cultural values are, whereas other functions have an easier time aligning with those more, kind of, business-centered values.

And so, yeah, I struggle with this. I don’t want designers to always be frustrated and upset that they can never achieve their ideals. And I don’t want design to think like it needs to operate in a black box in order to protect its work.

But there is something distinct that is worth nurturing with design in these environments that means it’s being treated differently in some ways than the other functions.

Jesse: Well, I guess I’m wondering if it’s having an impact on organizational health, things like burnout, things like people wanting to, to stay in this career then.

I think the question then becomes, how far can we go toward bridging that gap? And honestly, this comes back to leadership and the choices that leaders make in how they structure and organize their teams.

I think also there is something about the cultural expectations of design and designers that may be at play here because of the ways in which those squishily defined standards of quality actually become safe spaces to play in.

You know, if you’re not being held to a metric.

Peter: It feels more than just a dichotomy, of what it means to perform as a designer, and I mean this somewhat broadly–design research content–these practices that are often lumped together.

Creative practices, humanistic practices, social science practices, that just, again, tend to have an engagement mode that is different than other functions.

Peter: I think a lot about the challenge that leaders of those functions have, right? When you’re in it, when you’re a practitioner in it, you can kind of keep some of that noise at bay and just focus on the process in the work.

But the leaders are… they can’t escape it. They’re living in two worlds. And that’s where that’s kind of schizophrenic, kind of concept comes from, right?

They’re spending half their time or whatever in design, being generative, being creative and nurturing this exploration, and that way of working. But then they have to turn around and interpret that mode of working to a broader organization that is more calculating, more business centered, more spreadsheet oriented, whatever. And vice versa.

They then also need to be able to speak that language of the dominating business values, and bring that into their team so that their team is maintaining relevance.

The risk of when you create a bubble as opposed to a membrane, right? The risk of a bubble is that you’ve just become irrelevant. And I’ve seen that again and again. Where design teams kind of just get so disconnected with what’s happening in the organization that they kind of get flushed out.

But the solution isn’t for the design team then to just dissolve itself into the fabric of the organization, ’cause then you lose what makes it interesting and distinct.

Jesse: Right, and potentially, the additional value that can come from unified approaches to process and design principles and stuff like that.

You mentioned how the needs of the leaders or the concerns of leaders might be really different from the concerns of ICs, but you didn’t just hear from leaders in this survey.

You actually hit a pretty broad range of kind of levels in organizations. And I’m curious if there were really any strong divergences that you saw by organizational level.

Peter: I touched on it in the health report, the primary thing that I wrote for my newsletter. The people who are feeling organizations to be their least healthy are senior practitioners.

And there’s an irony there because the senior practitioner, senior designer, senior researcher, whatever, are also often the most sought-after level.

People aren’t hiring juniors. They wanna start by hiring seniors because you can hire a senior and then you don’t have to manage them. They can kind of just get the work done.

But if you look at the data, the senior levels across the board on the Likert questions are anywhere from like… i’m seeing like five to 10% below the average, regardless of what the statement was. And this is a decent population, 135 out of the 740 or so, right?

So these numbers hold water, and they’re just struggling the most.

Whereas what you see is when you get over the hump and you become kind of lead level or staff level, you know, kind of go beyond that, and the more senior you are, the healthier things appear to you.

And I think what happens is it’s essentially survivorship bias. Where those who have made it through some crucible, and come out the other side, and have kind of figured it out, are feeling better about the organizations they’re a part of. And those who are earlier in their career, don’t quite understand how things work, and aren’t being probably coached all that well, are feeling pretty negative about the state of things.

And I think that’s a real concern. Something that I believe to be true, and I’ve seen it ’cause I work with a lot of directors, senior directors and VPs, is that over the last few years we’ve seen a lot of people who hit director level and then just left the industry, right?

There’s something about the organizational realities, the trends that have been occurring, the challenges in finding jobs, whatever it is, that a lot of folks who were like 15 to 20 years in to being a UX design type person are just like, not for me. I am out. This is not working anymore.

Something I am hypothesizing based on this research is that there might be a wave of that happening at that senior moment. You know, someone five, eight, maybe 10 years in who before they’re able to get over that hump into more kind of active leadership roles are evidently feeling frustrated and disconsolate about the state of affairs and might be leaving sooner than I would’ve expected, because it’s just not working out for them.

And, perhaps they’re early enough in their career that other paths available to them, and it’s not as colossal a shift. I do just find myself wondering, what talent are we sacrificing at these earlier stages…

Jesse: oh, for sure.

Peter: …by not enabling the growth and development of these earlier folks.

Peter: And on that front, something we haven’t touched on, but, like, the most negative scores in this entire survey we’re in response to the statements, ” I have a clear growth path for my practice and career,” and “I’m given support in achieving my career goals.”

And given that those are the most kind of negative statements…

Jesse: Was that across all the populations?

Peter: That is across all the populations.

In particular is, I have the statement, “I have a clear growth path for my practice and career,” might have gotten the single lowest score of any statement. It’s tied with the statement, “Our staffing levels are sufficient to deliver on the work expected of us,” which I think actually shows the severity of, that, right?

‘Cause we all know about how no team is staffed to do the work, that is asked of it.

Just as equally, individuals are not being given a path for what it means to grow in their practice and career.

And I would imagine if you’re at that senior practitioner moment and you don’t have that clarity, like, that’s hugely problematic, right? Once you get over that hump and you’re kind of lead level or getting to you know, manager, director level, like, you’re able to, in some ways, kind of make that path in front of you.

But we are doing a terrible job of helping earlier stage professionals understand how they can grow doing this type of work.

Jesse: Well, I wonder if another piece of it is the way that these roles are currently construed. In that it feels like there is, like, this hump that you describe, it’s like this empowerment cliff that you have to scale from the bottom to get to a place where you are actually empowered.

And at these senior IC levels and below, there is increasing competence, but not increasing empowerment.

And so you get to a place where you’re eight to 10 years into your career, you have demonstrated over and over again your ability to do more and take on more and to deliver more sophisticated and, more impactful results. And none of it has translated into any additional empowerment because of the way that these teams are structured and set up.

Peter: Yeah, I mean, so are you saying it’s, not just a matter then of health, but…

Jesse: i’m saying It’s not just a matter of, like, giving people a path up the ladder, but rather pushing empowerment downstream so that they have more in the roles that they’re already in, and they’re not burning out where they are.

Because the truth of it is that for every VP level role in an organization, there might be, you know, potentially like a dozen director level roles available.

So there’s gonna be a natural sort of cutoff when you go from director to vp. And there’s a similar kind of thing, like for every director there are gonna be n number of senior managers and ICs underneath them.

And so while there are never going to be enough higher level roles for people to move up into, there are always more opportunities to drive empowerment down the stream.

Peter: Right, right. And yes, I see what you’re saying. And so those senior practitioners, yes.

Typically, we hire them because they have the craft skills. They’re usually quite competent in doing the work. They’re self-directed. They don’t need a lot of management. You can give ’em a problem and they can figure it out.

But, yeah, so we’ve got these requirements for their ability, but then we’re not matching it with, the word you put was empowerment, or an agency or that ability to have a say in the work equal to their ability, and particularly relative, I would think, to their cross-functional peers, right?

Also, you know, one of the things that often happens is that design is one level lower in an org chart than product and engineering, right? So you’ll have a VP of Design, but their peers will be SVPs of product and engineering, or you’ll have a director of design who is working with VPs throughout the organization and that cascades down.

And if we think about it at that senior level, that means that your senior designers are likely working with manager level, senior managers. And I know some of them are probably working with director level PMs or engineer.

And they’re just not gonna win those arguments, right? They’re asked to show up as peers to be a three in a box, to have that kind of standing. They’re hired in a process that has required them to demonstrate a level of craft and ability, but then when they are placed in the work, yeah, they find themselves just being told what to do.

Jesse: Mm-hmm. right, right.

Peter: I think that’s, I think that’s fair.

Jesse: So, you know, you touched on something earlier on that I think it’s time for us to get to, which is what did you notice in terms of patterns for what sets teams up for success, for health?

Peter: So probably the strongest signal coming outta this entire report was that the more senior your head of design is, the healthier your organization is. And the proxy for that is, how many levels is your head of design from the CEO? Are they reporting right into a CEO? Are they two levels, so, reporting into someone who reports to the CEO. Three levels, four levels, et cetera.

And you can chart just kind of the lower down that the senior most design person is, the less healthy their organization is. So that was, again, the single most salient result.

There’s an interesting correlate to that that I was actually just looking at, which is related to reporting structure.

So if you’re reporting to the CEO, your organization is the healthiest, but we know that design often reports through other functions. And so I had a question, are you reporting up through some type of digital function? Are you reporting through IT? Reporting through product management, which was the most common reporting. Through engineering, or reporting through marketing.

And those signals were, to me, surprisingly strong in that, again, if you’re reporting right into a CEO or I said kind of a GM of a business unit, if it’s a really large company. And so, you know, imagine… I’ve worked with Chase Bank. Chase Bank has business units that have like mini CEOs that lead them. If you’re reporting right into them, that’s the healthiest.

One of the things that surprised me is that the next healthiest reporting line was digital. So you see this in, these legacy enterprises where they’ll have a digital function, a chief digital officer, and that digital team will be responsible for websites and mobile apps and that kind of thing.

And it’s interestingly different, it can be a little bit confusing because there’s digital and then there’s IT and then there’s engineering, all of these sound very similar, right? IT is reporting up through information technology because, oh, look turns out we’re building things that are distributed through computers.

A very legacy structure is to put, Design in IT, often with product people as well. I still see that in some organizations.

And then you have engineering functions. Sometimes design is reporting up through engineering.

Now I have a hypothesis is that the reason digital is ranking stronger than any of these other reporting lines is that digital is seen as a business channel, right? And so there’s a more strategic kind of business-aware…

Jesse: Yeah. It seems to sit on the other side of a line. Somehow in terms of that business orientation as opposed to a sort of delivery or product building orientation.

Peter: IT and engineering are typically more delivery functions that often aren’t, and I’m gonna use the word, empowered again, but I mean it in the Marty Cagan sense, written this book Empowered, right?

But IT is often, and teams within engineering are often not empowered.They are getting requirements from the business that they have to execute on.

Digital is a business and so it’s generating its own requirements. And so design in that context can have a bit more of a business flavor to it and inform the strategy.

Perhaps the biggest surprise, I dunno if it’s a surprise, but just something worth noting was that product, which is the team that more designers report up through a product management function than any other, almost half, it was like 300 I think in the survey. Yeah. 335.

Product trends slightly negative. So that probably, because it’s so many, needs some unpacking, right?

Because there are product teams that are delivery teams, that are feature factory teams, and then there are product teams that are empowered.

I guess I would hypothesize if you were able to distinguish between those different types of product teams, you would probably see something similar to what we discussed with digital being healthier because they’re more strategic and more empowered and things like IT and engineering being less healthy because they are just seen as service functions and delivery functions.

Jesse: So what this brings to mind for me is the notion of almost like cascading value propositions where the value proposition that you’re able to fulfill as a design function has to nest within the value proposition of the next level function up…

Peter: yes.

Jesse: and so on, right?

Peter: How Saarinen of you. Chair in a room? Room in a building? Building on a street? Street in a city. Sorry.

Jesse: Yeah. Design team in a product team. Product team in an engineering team. Engineering team in an IT organization. Yeah.

Peter: Totally.

Jesse: I’m wondering, it may not be so much about levels from the CEO as it is about that cascading value proposition. I think levels from the CEO is potentially a proxy. Obviously, once you get to the highest levels, it’s definitely a proxy for a higher level value proposition.

Peter: I see. So, yeah. There’s gonna be some conflation because if you are multiple levels from the CEO, it’s interesting… If you’re second or third level from the CEO and then reporting up through what function…

Jesse: exactly.

Peter: That intersection is going to be very important.

Jesse: Yeah. So, yeah, exactly, because if you have a chief product officer and you’re reporting to that person, that’s gonna be a different story than if you have a VP of product who reports to a CTO or something like that, right?

Peter: Mm-hmm. I think that’s right.

Jesse: is there anything interesting about industries?

Peter: There was. There was.

In the initial report, that was one of the areas I highlighted because I had one of my biggest surprises.

Now, you know the respondents to the survey were those that are in my network and I didn’t, you know, try to find people myself and spend a lot of money identifying survey respondents. I posted it to LinkedIn and then just kind of kept hammering away on it and asked people to, you know, spread the word.

But,so, it kind of, it’s sciencey, it starts with me and ripples out.

And because of that, the two industries that were most strongly represented were enterprise software and services and financial services and insurance services because that’s just kind of been the space I’ve been playing in. I think they frankly do dominate a lot of design and UX hiring. You know, I worked with Chase Bank. There’s a thousand UXers on the team that I worked with, right? So, these industries have large teams.

Or enterprise software and services think, you know Salesforce or, whatever, right? We know these types of companies have sizable design organizations. Microsoft, even Google, much of it is now enterprise software and services, right? And they have thousands of UXers.

And, you know, perhaps to be expected, those industries were kind of in the middle. They were average when it came to organizational health. And probably kind of like what we were talking about with product, you know, you could do some unpacking in there and find some interesting, like two or three variables that would suggest like, oh, you know, enterprise software mixed with these things is gonna lead to a great health. Well, enterprise software mixed with those things is gonna lead to poor health.

The industry that came out strongest and kind of with a bullet, and it aligns with something I believe to be true, is that the industry that had the healthiest organizations was professional services.

So consulting, design firms, management consulting.

Now, I don’t know what kinds of professional services, but I’m expecting some combination of consulting services and design firms. Yeah.

But where design is a thing sold to clients and where design has some, frankly, if it’s a design firm, right, like, special standing, obviously.

And, what intrigued me about this is that it actually aligned with some research. There’s this gentleman, John Knight, who did some research and I linked to it in my report. He had done some research on his own that found that designers operating in these consulting contexts have much greater job satisfaction and engagement than designers who are working in-house, right?

And that kind of tracks because if you’re a designer working in a design firm or even a management consulting or it consulting firm, but where they’re selling your design services, you are getting to practice design.

That is the value that these companies are selling to their clients is good design.

And so they are set up to enable good design, which is not true of many in-house teams.

A change that has occurred for me in the last just two or three years…

For the longest time, I was largely encouraging people coming out of college to go in-house. That seemed to be where the energy and the juice was. And it felt like the state of design agencies and consulting services was precarious and at times perilous.

But in the last couple of years, not that the business has been super healthy for design firms, but if you, as a designer, especially coming out of school or earlier in your career, if you as a designer can get a job in a consulting environment you will feel better about your work.

I just think that has now become true again. You’ll feel better about your work. You’ll be able to do better work. You’ll be able to engage in your practice with more depth and rigor. On the flip side, you’ll probably get paid less,

Jesse: Hmm.

Peter: right?

There’s a reason a lot of designers go in house. Salaries tend to be better. The economics of consulting are such that practitioners in those environments tend not to get paid as well as practitioners in in-house teams.

But if you’re getting paid enough, you will feel better about the work you’re doing in those environments.

Jesse: You know, you and I, you and I ran an agency together for a long time, and I actually wonder what this whole turn potentially means for design agencies and their value propositions.

You know, the thing that you’re talking about, about depth and rigor and looking at the way that the respondents to the survey have struggled with quality and feeling like they can be successful in those environments, I wonder if this suggests an opportunity down the road for design agencies to make a different case for the value that they bring to client engagements.

Peter: it’s a good, not just question, but subject to investigate, because there’s, there’s something amiss, broken when it comes to design in a lot of organizations and, the word that comes to mind is reckoning.

I think about that… it’s a Judd Antin article about user research reckoning, but I think we’re seeing reckonings all over the place, and there’s some reckoning that is happening with design and it’s relationship to business, to capital, to the organizations.

I think you’re right. I think there’s an opportunity for external design agencies to, I was about to say recast, reorient, reframe the value that they’re delivering.

You mentioned Adaptive Path. I realized sometime around the time that Adaptive Path was getting acquired by Capital One and there was this existential time for Adaptive Path, like, do we get acquired? Do we figure out a way forward?

We couldn’t figure out the way forward if we stayed as is. And we felt a little stuck with Adaptive Path. And I wasn’t an employee at the time, but based on the conversations I was having, Adaptive Path was who it says it was, and as it was, could not bloom again.

And so the path of acquisition was a way for Adaptive Path to evolve.

And I actually think from what everything I heard and witnessed around Adaptive Path and Capital One, it did get a chance to evolve.

That said, if the path not taken potentially, was for adaptive path to say, you know what, we’re not an experienced design firm, but we are a management consultancy, right?

And there’s some companies that have gone that path. SY Partners kind of notably, I think some other design firms, went that path.

And it would’ve been a fundamental reframing, half the team probably would’ve left, it would’ve caused a fair bit of emotional fraughtness.

But I believe that it could have worked, right? It could have found a way forward and remade itself.

Now, it wouldn’t be a design firm. It would’ve lost touch with a certain set of things, et cetera, et cetera.

But could it have found a way to bring a human-centered approach to doing work through this Trojan horse of management consulting? ‘Cause the value, and I believe this to be true of many design firms I interact with today, the value that these design firms are offering is commensurate to the value that management consulting offers at three times the price.

So there’s an opportunity there.

But yeah, I wonder what it looks like to take advantage of it while still maintaining some, somethin; somethin’ about design, and not just, again, kind of dissolving into looking just like a boutique management consultancy, which wouldn’t be the goal.

Jesse: Yeah. Well, I guess I find myself wondering if it is a bit of a reversion to where we were when Adapted Path started, which was that organizations didn’t know how to build internal design teams. Most of the organizations that we engaged with had very limited internal design functions. They were used to partnering for design and it took them a while to figure that out to start building their own teams.

Now, 20 years later, those teams are reaching a certain sort of plateau, a certain ceiling in their effectiveness and their ability to deliver against the promise of having an in-house team in the first place way back when. And so then I start to wonder if that gap that you identified in the survey data between the health of in-house teams and the health of consulting teams points to an opportunity for design firms to deliver a different kind of design or a different level of design than organizations can achieve on their own internally.

Peter: Well, that puts me in mind of a client organization of mine where they, they brought on a new head of design and that new head of design realized that what his team needed to deliver was a vision of a future state experience.

You know, kind of a very classic, like what do we look like three to five years from now, as a way to rally not just the design organization, but a broader product development organization.

And this new head of design looked around at their team and realized that no one in their current organization had the capability to do that work. That was not what these folks had been developing over the last 10 to 15 years, as they were focused on incremental improvements, and shipping, and not to suggest that wasn’t what they should have been focused on, but that imaginative visionary muscle had atrophied.

And so this head of design, brought in a consultant, you know 25, 30 years in industry person who knew how to do visionary design work as an individual, right?

Didn’t bring in a consulting team, brought in this individual to drive doing some vision work, and then handed over one or two team members to this person to create a small team.

But, the head of design realized they needed an external person to kind of teach and train this group how to do this type of work.

And it’s the kind of work you’re not gonna do a lot of, you’re not making visions all the time.

I think back to our conversation with Peter Skillman, where he’s like, the time for visions is passed, now we’re on execute, execute, execute. And there’s some truth to that, right? Like, like you make your visions and then you gotta deliver on those visions.

But I think we have a generation of in-house designers who don’t know how to do…

Jesse: …they’ve never been asked to…

Peter: …a kind of valuable design work, a more strategic, a more visionary design work that doesn’t feel unrooted.

Like, anybody can, like, do a concept car type thing. And it’s kind of shiny and glossy.

It’s important that these visions feel achievable. There’s a rationale behind ’em.

And I think we have a generation of digital product designers for the last 15 years, yeah, they’ve never been asked to, and now they’re being asked to, their leadership is being asked to, and, no one knows quite how to do it.

They just don’t know the process by which you develop a coherent, practical vision.

I think there are opportunities like that for design firms to elevate certain aspects of internal team’s practices.

Less, maybe, from a project standpoint, is kind of one of my takeaways from this. And more in a very hands-on, not even coaching or mentoring, I mean, the person was doing the work,

Jesse: Right.

Peter: but through the work was also coaching and mentoring.

Jesse: Mm-hmm. So I think one last question for you, which I’m curious what you see within this data that gives us some reason for celebration or perhaps even some optimism.

Peter: That’s a tough one. Not because it’s so dour, but just because the results were so in the middle.

Jesse: Hmm.

Peter: And part of me wants to believe the reason for optimism is a little bit of that, you know, name it to tame it, right? Like, I think there’s a lack of awareness of how these elements that are called out in the survey contribute to health.

And by highlighting those and by being aware of them, we can encourage investment, right, and investment in that which needs investment in, right?

So we need to figure out how to better invest in articulating growth paths and professional development. We need to figure out how to teach designers and design leaders how to advocate for and defend quality standards.

I guess a positive lens on this is, I think, with applied effort at a few key points of articulation, you can get a pretty significant gain. You don’t have to try to solve all of it at once, but focus on these few areas and you’ll get a kind of an outsized return relative to if you were to focus on other areas.

Something else, again, however much I scratch my head at the positivity based on some of the commentary that’s out there, just around the frustration that designers have, some foundational or fundamental core of satisfaction that UXers and designers are bringing to their work, that I think if appropriately nurtured and cared for, is an energy, a momentum that can be capitalized on.

I think most people who do this work do it because they love it. They love this work, they want this work to be great.

And, again, around the things that they can control, they’re feeling pretty good about it. And, how do we enhance that, elevate that, maximize that so that they can then feel, I’m gonna go back to the word you used, empowered.

‘ Cause I think that power and empowerment is probably a hidden theme underlying a lot of this, I don’t ask any questions about power. Power is not mentioned at all in this organizational health survey, but I think your insight that empowerment is a condition that is affecting how people are responding to this.

And I think you see that when you look at things like the reporting functions, right? And, those who are reporting into functions that have more agency and power are feeling better, and those who are reporting into marketing and engineering, where you tend to do what you’re told are feeling worse…

Jesse: mm-hmm. Yeah.

Peter: …and now I want to do a follow up bit of research and try to unpack the power dynamic and see how that plays out in this. So, I think there’s that opportunity then to taking, again, that core that is healthy and good, empowering those folks to do the things we’ve hired them to do and allow them to do them well, and we will realize even greater health, the conditions are almost there to enable it. But we need to activate it to make it happen.

Jesse: Can we look forward to more surveys from you in the future?

Peter: I have nothing planned specifically in that regard. Though, I do think given the response to this one I would like to field it again this year and, see what the difference is. I think there’s value in it.

Maybe work with others. So anyone listening to this who wants to collaborate, I did it all on my own this first time around and it’s why it took months to publish the results and stuff like that. But yeah, I think there’s value to field, to have this awareness. So I would like to keep it going.

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

Peter: Jesse, thank you for having me. Thanks for, humoring me or engaging me in this.

Jesse: So if people wanna read your report or get a look at your survey data themselves, how can they do that?

Peter: I’ll put links in the program notes for that. So if you’re listening to this podcast in your reader or go to the website and I’ll put links to it. The report I published it as part of my newsletter, The Merholz Agenda. It’s a free subscription, but I do ask that people subscribe to read it.

Usually you can read my newsletter without subscription. This is something I am asking people to subscribe for. And with that, you’ll have access not just to the report, but to the Survey Explorer and all the data. You can go ham and come up with your own insights and findings.

Jesse: Right. Thanks Peter.

Peter: Thanks, Jesse. Take care.

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 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.