Finding Our Way

Jorge Arango, consultant and author who blends information architecture with AI transformation. He talks about rediscovering fundamentals through AI. He frames work as helping organizations act intelligently. He links well-structured information to better AI outcomes. He urges hands-on practice with AI, clarifying goals before automating, and using AI to lift design to higher-level direction.

Dan Saffer, designer, author, and CMU HCI professor, reflects on teaching design as AI reshapes tools and workflows. He explores which fundamentals still matter, how rapid AI prototyping changes collaboration, and what AI skills designers need. Short takes on team dynamics, quality standards, and emerging interaction patterns keep the conversation lively.

They explore the mindset of leading when old ways fall away and new paths are unclear. Conversation covers vigilance, situational awareness, and flexible visions over fixed plans. They talk hiring for adaptability, core non‑craft skills like communication and persuasion, and using scenario planning to navigate uncertain futures. Relationships and storytelling are framed as lifelines during transitions.

They explore leading through in-between moments when old ways fail and the new are unclear. Conversations cover how design teams navigate uncertainty, the tension between exploration and execution, and why divergent thinking and strategic design matter now. They discuss shifting roles, AI-driven tooling changes, and how leaders can enable teams while letting outdated practices fall away.

Christina Wodtke, Stanford lecturer, multi-time founder and author, discusses AI’s paradoxes in design. She explores rapid AI prototyping, the risk of losing critical thinking, ethical tool choices, shifting team roles, and teaching product sense. Short, practical takes on context engineering, prototyping in code, and when to use AI versus human judgment.

Show Notes 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. Transcript 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? Organizational Health Survey 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? The Internal Contradiction 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. UX/Design Less Satisifed Than Other Functions 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. The Schizophrenia of Design Leadership 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. The Plight of the Senior Practitioner 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. We’re Not Supporting Professional Development 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. The Importance of Empowerment 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? What Condition is Healthiest 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? The Joy of Consulting Services 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. We Forgot How To Do The Future 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.

Show Notes 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. Transcript 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. Civic Tech Product Person 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? Marker 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. From UX to Product 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. Product in different contexts 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. Creating a robot product management associate 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? Working with AI Tools 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? From vibe coding to something realer 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, The complexity of what appears to be simple software 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. Wisdom for those just starting out with AI 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. Applying your hobby to your day job 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. Creating the auto-retro 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. How LLMs try to sound internet hip when they write 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. AI is here to stay 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. Applying UX skills and mindset to AI work 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.

Show Notes 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/ Transcript 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? What Does a Head of Insights 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? Agent of Osmosis 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. Value propositions for design 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. Design is everyone’s business 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?” The challenges of Generative AI 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. AI Wariness 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. How we use AI 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… Agent wrangling 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. Quality and other standards of success 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. The Power of Writing 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.

Teresa Torres, product discovery coach, educator, and author of Continuous Discovery Habits. She talks about shifting from hands-on coaching to curriculum work, who should be on discovery teams and how to build continuous discovery habits. She explores aligning incentives for cross-functional collaboration and the messy realities of organizational change. She also discusses how generative AI will blur roles and speed skill development.

Show Notes Help Jesse and Peter better serve you by sharing a bit more about who you are, what you’re into, and what you’d like to hear from us in this listener survey which should just a few minutes to complete. Thank you! 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! Transcript 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? The Path to Academia 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? Creating Space: The Dean as Co-Designer 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? Embracing Thing-lessness 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. The Importance of Relationships 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. Shaping the Future of Design Education 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. Design as a Tool for Social Change 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… Design Will Always Be Relevant 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? The Role of Design in Positive Change 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.