Enduring the Storm

The design industry is loud right now. Everyone has a take on AI, and is either panicking or evangelizing. My LinkedIn feed has become a battleground for an insufferable war between AI cynics and AI native gurus. Perhaps it’s just how the almighty algorithm reflects my own internal conflicts with AI back at me. Either way, most of what I read sounds the same, which has taught me to tune most of it out…not because real issues and opportunities aren’t being highlighted, but because the noise makes it harder to see anything of substance.

We cannot ignore the business reality. There is serious energy and capital driving the rapid changes we’re all experiencing. No one knows how all of this is going to play out. We are still very much in the storming phase, which has lead to rapid organizational change and a lamentable number of jobs eliminated based on speculation. I will say that I expect some of what we do as product designers (and tech workers as a whole) will evolve, but AI will not eliminate design and experience problems worthy of addressing.

Perhaps ironically, the core tension of product development won’t change at all from what I can tell. I’ve been working through it my entire 10+ year career: there is friction between what a product ships and what a user can do with it. More features and faster releases don’t ease this tension. Neither does a beautiful prompt generated interface over a broken core flow. I’ve watched this play out inside enterprises shipping to satisfy shareholders and inside early-stage startups shipping to impress VCs or validate bets they haven’t confirmed yet. Different pressure systems, same failure mode. The experience can become a casualty of the urgency around it.

When everything else is pushing toward speed and velocity, we hold ourselves accountable for the quality of our customers’ experience. At the same time, taking an Ivory Tower Designer™ approach slows progress to a crawl by failing to incorporate some of the best experience advocates on a product team, simply because their title is Developer, PM, or Data Scientist.

As I’ve grown as a product leader, my focus has shifted toward shepherding the whole product team toward the best experience outcome we can deliver, taking business needs, constraints, trade-offs, and timelines into account. That’s the role I’ve played for over a decade across products at IBM and Xbox, in organizations where the cost of getting it wrong showed up in the data, customer feedback, and quarterly finance reports.

I’m confident that there will always be a place in our industry for the curious, capable, and resilient. Some things have changed and will continue to do so for a time. Others will never change, as at our core we are still human. The things we do evolve on a consistent basis, but what we are has remained consistent for millennia. This isn’t the first technological disruption we’ve experienced, and won’t be the last. History doesn’t repeat itself, people do.