Image generated with AI, which is fitting

This morning I read an email from a safety researcher who left Anthropic. This led me to prompt Claude with a question:

The Prompt

Let's be honest here, human beings filled many jobs where the tasks were both repetitive and easy to learn. While there may be some truth to the idea that some of those jobs would be better suited to AI than a human being, there is the flip-side of that coin where some of those duties are entry-level positions for new graduates to learn on the job. Jobs like junior developers and junior designers. I myself am using AI tools to act as the role of junior designer when I'm starting on any new task, offloading the tedium of designing variations of wireframes based on a set of requirements. I then take those outputs and begin the work of a more senior level designer, gaining alignment and trust as we move toward the finished product.

How are we supposed to be handling this right now? For starters, too many people believe AI is ready to take the role of all positions, not just repetitive and easy to learn roles. And even for people who understand the need for senior leadership, how do we continue to scale our practice if there are no new people to teach? If companies are willing to offload the role of the junior, then there will be nothing left on the other side as senior leaders leave the workforce. How does this play out?

The Response

"This is a really important tension you're identifying, and I think you're seeing it more clearly than most because you're living it, using AI as your junior designer while doing the senior-level thinking yourself.

The letter is striking. Someone at the heart of AI safety research at Anthropic stepping away because they feel the weight of what's unfolding and want to engage with it on their own terms. That kind of departure carries a gravity that's hard to ignore.

But your question cuts to something more immediate and structural. You're essentially describing a pipeline problem. The junior role has historically served two functions simultaneously: getting repetitive work done and being the apprenticeship through which people develop into senior practitioners. AI is increasingly capable of handling the first function, but it completely fails at the second. And most companies are only thinking about the first one because that's where the cost savings show up on a spreadsheet.

The way I see it playing out if nothing changes is pretty grim. Companies eliminate junior roles, current seniors carry more load augmented by AI, those seniors eventually burn out or retire, and then there's a vacuum with no one trained to fill it. You end up with a generation of would-be designers and developers who never got the reps. The tacit knowledge, the judgment, the ability to know why one wireframe direction is better than another, that comes from doing the tedious work under the guidance of someone more experienced. You can't skip that step.

What makes your approach interesting is that you've essentially kept the apprenticeship model intact but replaced the apprentice with AI for the output, while you yourself still hold all the judgment. That works for you because you already did those years. But if a fresh graduate tried to use AI the same way, they wouldn't know which of the ten wireframe variations is actually solving the problem. They'd lack the pattern recognition.

I think the honest answer to "how does this play out" is that it depends entirely on whether organizations are wise enough to treat junior roles as investments in future capability rather than just line items to cut. History suggests most won't be. The companies that do maintain real mentorship pipelines, even if the nature of junior work changes, will have a massive competitive advantage in ten years when everyone else is wondering where all the senior talent went.

The deeper issue you're circling is one that letter touches on too: whether we have the wisdom to match our capability. Cutting junior roles because AI can do the tasks is a capability decision. Keeping them because humans need to learn is a wisdom decision. And right now, capability is winning."

My Take

I feel this conversation is happening everywhere right now. You only need to do a simple search to find post after post after post on the subject. Unfortunately I agree with Claude's conclusion though, modern companies are simply not built to play the long game. In today's world, only the next quarter of financials matter. There is no longer any room for patience or steady growth, or for investing in the people who will eventually need to lead. The jobs lost today will be the leaders we'll never have tomorrow.

note: The bold text within Claude's response are from me.

Steve Jobs introduces "Slide to Unlock" on the original iPhone.

Whatever Happened to Delight?

When was the last time you opened a new app or started using a new product and felt delighted? I mean genuinely surprised by how thoughtful or effortless it felt.

Not "it works," not "it syncs," not "it gets the job done."

The tagline for today's software should be: Functional. Serviceable. Good enough.

We've somehow circled back to the "as long as it works" era of the late 1990s and early 2000s, where usability meant it didn't crash immediately and aesthetics meant someone remembered to add a logo. Back then, no one expected great design from software. It was a mess of gray windows, beveled buttons, and UI patterns invented on the fly. And for a while, that was fine. Software was new. We were still figuring it out.

The Rise of Care

I keep coming back to Steve Jobs because of his status within the tech world. Without him caring about the experience, I'm not sure anyone ever would have. Jobs refused to ship something that wasn't great. Not "good enough." Not "done." Great. That kind of obsessive standard was exhausting to everyone around him, but it worked. The success of Apple's products forced the entire industry to start paying attention to the people who actually used their software. And from that, an entire field, User Experience Design, exploded into relevance.

Suddenly, care mattered. You could feel it in products like the early versions of Gmail or Google Maps, or the original iPhone, or even the click wheel iPod. You could tell that someone gave a damn. Design became a differentiator. A product wasn't just about what it did, but how it felt to use it.

But somewhere along the way, we lost that.

The Pandemic Stripped the Veneer Away

When the pandemic hit, the priorities of tech companies shifted hard, and for the worse. The glossy veneer of "customer first" was replaced with the cold reality of shareholder value. It became growth-at-all-costs mentality. Long-term product vision got cut down to "next quarter," and everyone, from the CEO to the customer, could feel it.

The result? We now live in a world of product slop.

Half-finished features, endless redesigns, every app demanding subscriptions for basic functionality, all wrapped in generic sans-serif optimism. The care is gone. And the users know it.

The Cult of the Next Steve Jobs

What makes this whole thing more frustrating is the number of leaders who genuinely believe they are the next Steve Jobs. They think what made him great was his ability to trust his gut, skip research, and tell his teams to "just build it." They think his genius was that he knew better.

But that's not what made Steve Jobs great. He wasn't a prophet. He was a showman. His genius wasn't in how much he knew, it was in how much he cared. He understood why customers rejected modern solutions to their problems. He demanded perfection not because he was controlling, but because he knew how hard it was to earn someone's attention, and how fragile that trust could be once you had it.

If he couldn't show someone why a product was worth their time, it wasn't worth his time to build it. His true brilliance was in what he said no to.

Even the Greats Got It Wrong

Of course, even Jobs wasn't immune to his own blind spots. The Power Mac G4 Cube? A triumph of engineering that didn't fit in the market. The Apple Hi-Fi? A speaker system no one asked for. These were technically brilliant products that still failed because they weren't validated.

His hits came from listening, testing, and simplifying until the product could speak for itself. His misses came from skipping that process. Sound familiar?

The Chicken and the Egg

So here we are again, stuck in a cycle where investors want faster returns, and companies want to skip the hard parts to deliver them. Research takes too long. Discovery is too messy. Validation is too expensive. "Just trust your gut," they say. "Ship it."

And what we end up with is the modern product landscape: a graveyard of forgettable apps, clones, and "AI integrations" no one asked for. Everything feels like it was designed by committee, or worse, a carbon copy, of a copy, of a copy.

Software today works, but it doesn't delight.

How We Can Fix It

It's easy to get cynical about where things are headed. But this isn't hopeless. We have tools and knowledge that didn't exist in the early days of UX, and if we use them right, we can fix this.

Use new technology to improve discovery, not replace it.

AI isn't the enemy of good design. It can help us move faster without skipping the thinking. Finding participants for research used to mean begging people to come to an office or sit through an awkward screen-share. Now we can use AI to uncover relevant studies, identify real pain points, and synthesize insights that would have taken weeks to dig up. Discovery doesn't need to disappear, it just needs to evolve.

Bring clarity and honesty back to leadership.

Leaders need to state their product vision as something that will happen, not something that might happen if the metrics cooperate. But that confidence should come from real understanding that is grounded in research, validation, and time. Quarterly reporting shouldn't distort the reality of how long it takes to build something meaningful. The best leaders know that lasting products are a long game.

Return autonomy to the teams.

If you want better software, trust the people building it. The endless Jira boards and metric dashboards don't make things faster, they make teams anxious, more cautious, and less creative. Give your designers, engineers, and product thinkers real ownership again. They don't need to be micromanaged, they need to be believed in. Most of them got into this field because they want to make something great.

The fix isn't revolutionary. It's a return to care, clarity, and trust. The same ingredients that made great software great in the first place.

Conclusion

We used to talk about "user delight" like it was the pinnacle of design. Now it feels like a relic. When everything is optimized for speed and quarterly wins, delight is the first thing to go. But that's exactly when it matters most.

Delight isn't about surprise and whimsy. It's about care. It's about empathy. It's the signal that someone on the other end of the product still gives a damn about how it feels to use. And until companies start caring again, we're going to be stuck right where we are, living in the "good enough" era of software all over again.

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A silhouette of a person with data flowing into their mind. Made with AI

AI has already proven to be a powerful tool. I use it daily for tasks like creating to-do lists based on my energy levels, writing introductions to potential clients, and even getting feedback on my YouTube thumbnails. It can feel like having a personal assistant who's always on-call. But as impressive as it is, something about the experience still feels a little strange.

As a designer who thinks a lot about user experience, I've started to ask myself a few very real-world questions:

• Is AI really helping me get things done?
• When I collaborate with AI to form a plan, how much of that plan do I actually implement?
• And when I do take action, how much of the AI output am I truly using?

In other words, am I really saving time with AI, or does it just feel like I am?

My Tools

ChatGPT

The tool I use most is ChatGPT. I have a Plus subscription and it's easily my most reliable assistant. I use it to help shape ideas, structure my thinking, and push my writing forward.

For example, most of my blog posts start with a rough draft that I've written and then drop into ChatGPT. I ask it to build out the idea more fully, and what I get back is a sort of written wireframe. It's a rough but structured version of what I had in mind. Then I go through and revise it in my voice. UX designers should recognize this approach. It's the same process we use to go from wireframes to high-fidelity mockups. ChatGPT is like a very capable design partner who doesn't mind putting the polish on my rough idea.

I also use it to help plan my content releases. I'll drop in everything I'm hoping to get done and ask it to create a strategy for the week. That output helps me time-box my tasks and focus on what needs to happen right now, not what needs to happen tomorrow.

It also helps me run the business side of my UX consulting. From drafting intro emails to refining service descriptions for my website, ChatGPT helps me find the tone and clarity I'm after. And when it comes to social media, I use it to help me figure out which messages should come from my personal voice versus my brand voice.

UX Pilot

UX Pilot is another tool I rely on. I started on the free plan and immediately saw value, so I upgraded to the annual Pro plan. That might surprise some people. I'm a UX and product designer after all, shouldn't I be able to do this stuff without a tool like UX Pilot? And doesn't using it put me out of a job?

I don't think so.

Every design I've generated from UX Pilot has been a starting point. I never use the output as-is. I treat it like a napkin sketch. Something to respond to and iterate on but not the final concept. The generated output sparks conversation, and that conversation leads to better ideas. And each time the design shifts or a new idea is introduced, I can go back to UX Pilot and use it to generate more refined starting points.

V0, Replit, and Loveable

These are tools I'm still exploring. I haven't committed to any of the paid tiers, but I'm intrigued by the potential.

The most exciting possibility is that these tools could allow me to bypass Figma in some scenarios. If I can sketch out a wireframe on paper or iPad, feed that into UX Pilot, and generate a high-res layout that follows the company's design system, then hand that off to V0 or Replit for production-level code, that's a game changer.

It means I could go from rough concept to developer-ready handoff in a much tighter loop. These tools also make it easier to generate interactive prototypes that are more realistic than what Figma's prototyping tools typically offer.

In-App AI

I do most of my writing in Craft, which has built-in AI features. Sometimes I use those. Other times I use Apple's writing tools. They're fine for first drafts, especially if I'm stuck.

Figma's AI, on the other hand, has been a letdown. The marketing promises a lot, but in reality it feels more like Siri, useful if you say the magic phrase exactly right, but useless in most other cases. I'd love it if Figma could generate realistic placeholder content or use real-world sounding text to ground layouts, but it rarely delivers.

The Dangerous Illusion of Skipping the Process

One of the biggest red flags I've seen as AI becomes more accessible is the way it enables bad leadership habits.

Some leaders already treat design like a vending machine. Insert idea, get a pretty mockup. They don't engage with the problem or the process and they just want execution. Now with AI, those same leaders feel validated. They don't need a designer anymore. AI will give them exactly what they asked for.

The problem no one seems to see is that when you eliminate the thinking part of design, you also eliminate the challenge to your assumptions. You eliminate discovery. You eliminate context. And you eliminate validation.

Now your blind spots go from small cracks in your vision to full-on blinders. You skipped over the messy part where ideas are questioned and refined, and now you're shocked when your product doesn't resonate.

And before someone chimes in with, "We put it in front of some users and they said it was good," let's be honest here, asking someone what they think after the thing is built is not feedback, it's politeness. No one's going to tell you your crayon drawing is ugly.

The real test comes after launch. That's when you find out whether your product actually fits a need or if you just built something fast and loud.

Conclusion

AI is powerful. Sometimes it feels like it's launching you into space. But after the excitement fades, I often stop and ask: how much did I actually get done today?

It's easy to confuse planning with progress. It's easy to live inside these tools and feel like you're covering miles of ground, only to look down and realize you're on a treadmill.

I don't see AI as a threat to good design. I see it as the ultimate multi-tool. But like any tool, it's only as valuable as the person using it. Skipping the hard parts of creation isn't streamlining, it's sleepwalking.

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A conference room table. Created with AI.

Part of the Table

Design is often treated like a department. A silo. A team that owns a specific stage in a process, typically after decisions have already been made.

This isn't another "seat-at-the-table" blog post. I'm as tired of that phrase as you are. What I'm trying to say is that design should be within the structure of the table itself, not just present nearby. Design thinking is not a tool that only designers can wield. It's a foundational way of recognizing problems and validating solutions.

In this new era of productivity gains, where the everyday minutiae of creating solutions can be offloaded to AI, the role of the design department is shifting. Most people in an organization don't truly understand design thinking, which is where designers can step forward as guides.

Design isn't a handoff point. It's part of the way the organization thinks and works. A good designer isn't threatened by AI. They see it as a gift. It's another way to elevate the function of design, and embed its value more deeply into the collective thinking of the company.

Good design doesn't happen in isolation. It happens when everyone (product managers, engineers, marketers, and leadership) is thinking about how their decisions affect the user's experience. When design isn't boxed into a single phase, but woven into every conversation. The designer's role then shifts from execution to guidance. The designer is now tasked with helping the team think through tradeoffs, behaviors, and flows with the user in mind.

From Execution to Integration

Historically, organizations have viewed design as this kind of blocker, a step that seems necessary but feels excessive. The strategy is already in place, the roadmap has been decided, why is design trying to validate our great ideas? Can't we just move? And when designers object to the compromises and tradeoffs requested by engineering, it can seem like they're standing in the way of progress.

This is where people across the organization start to feel like design isn't executing. The job's not getting done, and now the timeline is in jeopardy.

But when design is integrated earlier in the process, during discovery, and in decision-making, it becomes something else entirely. And notice I didn't say when a designer or the design department is integrated earlier. I said design. Once this happens, it stops being reactive and starts becoming strategic.

Designers can help shape that conversation. They can be brought in during early development to begin to lend their experience and speak for the user. They can explain how user impact translates into business impact.

Integrated design aligns the work across teams. It prevents wasted effort and, more importantly, reduces the perception that design is standing in the way. It surfaces human needs sooner. And perhaps most critically, it makes the entire team better at thinking from the outside in.

The Hidden Cost of Isolation

When design is treated as a separate track, a few predictable problems emerge.

First, you get fragmentation. Product is chasing business goals. Engineering is solving technical puzzles. Marketing is crafting brand narratives. And design? Design is stuck trying to connect all the dots with a clean UI. That's not collaboration. That's damage control.

Second, you get friction. Designers are asked to revise work that was built without their input. Research insights are ignored because they came in too late. Teams fall into endless cycles of feedback and rework. It's not because people can't execute, but because design was kept at arm's length until it was too late.

And finally, you get burnout. Designers who are passionate about creating meaningful experiences get worn down by having to fight for every decision. When design is isolated, it becomes exhausting. When it's integrated, it becomes energizing.

Design as Shared Responsibility

Design thinking shouldn't live only with the design team. It should be part of how your entire organization approaches problem-solving.

Product managers should think in terms of user flows. Engineers should be empowered to flag interaction issues, not just bugs. Executives should understand that UX debt is just as real as technical debt. And designers? They should focus on enabling this kind of thinking across the organization.

This is how design scales. Not just by hiring more designers, but by building more design awareness into every corner of the business. The goal isn't to make everyone a designer. The goal is to build a culture where design is understood, respected, and practiced as a shared language.

Conclusion

Design isn't just a department. It's a way of thinking.

This doesn't mean giving design final say. It means giving design influence. It means treating the user experience as a team-wide responsibility. And it means empowering designers to act as guides, not just executors.

The next era of product development will belong to companies who understand this, and then put it into practice. The ones who stop treating design like a service, and start treating it like the structure of the organization.

That's where the real work happens. That's where better products begin.

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An open letter, created with AI

UX contains UI, but they are not one and the same.

If you're considering a move into product design, I want to offer some context, a few lessons I've learned, and some guidance as you find your footing in this field. This isn't a step-by-step how-to. It's a letter, from someone who's been doing this a while, to someone who's just starting out.

Quick Background

I started as a graphic designer in print. First for a newspaper, then a magazine, and eventually a book publisher in the education space. As the internet started becoming more mainstream, I knew I wanted to make the shift to web design. But back then, print experience didn't carry much weight in digital, and everyone said I needed web design experience.

I would eventually learn that they were wrong, but I needed a way in, so I learned HTML and CSS. You won't need to learn code to be a UX designer, but knowing what's possible (and what isn't) can make you a stronger one.

Eventually, I landed a web design job working on sites with 1px lines, Flash animations, and lots of 'mystery meat' navigation (hover effects that revealed hidden actions). Fancy stuff that caught the attention of other designers. It was fun, creative, and unlike anything print could offer.

But then something changed.

The User's Experience

We hired an Information Architect who introduced us to a usability lab, complete with 2-way glass and a seating area for observation. We watched real users interact with our designs. And I watched, horrified, as people struggled to do even basic tasks. They blamed themselves. "I must be stupid," one person muttered. But they weren't. I was the problem. My design did that to them.

That moment stayed with me. It made me realize that design isn't just about the aesthetics. It's deeper than that. In order to help people use software, you needed to design the structure, the pathway for them so that they could be successful.

"Information Architect" felt like a better fit than "Web Designer" for the direction I was heading. It was a more accurate description of what I actually wanted to do. Think of it like being the architect for a home. You're not the builder or the decorator, but the person drawing up the blueprint for how people will live in that space.

That's my interpretation of UX design. Unfortunately, with a title as subjective as "UX," you'll find many interpretations. But this one is mine.

Blueprints of a home, created with AI

User Interface Is Crucial

Let's stay with the home-building analogy.

Once the blueprint is finished and the structure is sound, you still need to make the space feel like home. That's where interior and exterior designers come in. They choose colors, materials, textures, lighting, and all the details that make a house feel inviting and personal.

It's just as important. Good UI design makes someone want to live in the space. It's what they see and interact with first. But it comes after the foundational thinking, after you've figured out what someone needs and where things belong.

One Can't Work Without the Other

Here's where the conversation around UX and UI tends to break down. People act like these are interchangeable roles, or worse, that one is the other. But in practice, they're deeply connected and entirely different.

Back to the home analogy. The homeowner's experience doesn't stop at the blueprint or the paint color. It's the whole thing. How the house looks and how it functions. Whether it feels intuitive, comfortable, usable. That's the experience.

I feel like I cannot stress this enough. The experience a person has relies on all aspects of the business. UX and UI are part of a shared goal. Along with product, engineering, marketing, and leadership, the goal is making something people use without thought, that helps them, that gets out of their way. UX and UI, however, require different skills, different tools, and different forms of empathy. Lumping them together into a single title doesn't make the work easier or better. It just means you get less of those skills when you force people to straddle the lines.

Suggestions

If you're just getting started, it's tempting to focus entirely on tools like Figma, which you should learn. But here's something that might surprise you, Figma is built on web technology. You don't need to be a developer, but knowing a little about how software works will help you understand what's possible when you design.

You are not your user. Never forget that most basic rule. You have knowledge and biases they don't. You know how to look for buttons and interpret icons. But many users don't, and they shouldn't have to. Your job as a designer is to build something for them, not for yourself.

Ask questions. Can someone with color blindness see your button? Would a person using a screen reader understand your layout? Are your choices helping people, or just satisfying your own sense of visual style?

Final Thoughts

If you're thinking about moving into product design, that's great. We need more people who care. The user experience isn't about perfection, it's about empathy. It's about being curious enough to understand how something breaks, and then thoughtful enough to make it better.

You don't have to have a coding background. You don't have to be the best visual designer. What you need is the willingness to keep asking, "Is this working for someone who's not me?" And then care enough to fix it when the answer is no.

UX is a career for people who are okay with being wrong, as long as it leads to something better.

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A well designed, but empty office. Photo by Chris Freitag

The Final Thread

To complete my series around perceived performance in design and at work, I want to talk about leadership. This one's tricky. I've been in the workforce for over 30 years and I've worked under some great leaders, and some truly baffling ones. So this isn't an indictment of leadership as a whole. It's a reflection on the kind of leadership that quietly corrodes the value of the people they manage.

It's something I've noticed in creative fields like design, though it applies to all fields. These poor leaders, many of whom hold titles they've grown into but never earned, seem to carry a quiet resentment toward the very people they've hired. They don't see specialized staff as partners in solving problems. They see them as resources to be replaced the moment a cheaper or more convenient option presents itself. And more often than not, that "convenient option" is whatever new technology is trending at the time.

The Diminishing Role of Design

A tweet from Carl Rivera at Shopify, explaining why designers are just designers.

Take Shopify's recent decision to consolidate their design roles into one generic title: Designer. No more UX Designer, no more Content Designer, no more UI specialization. Just "Designer." The justification? With AI tools, anyone can create a competent site structure. It's the final design, the polish, that separates good from great. The craftsmanship.

On the surface, that sounds reasonable. But buried in that logic is a troubling message: research, testing, content strategy, accessibility, etc., are all implied to be secondary. Optional. Disposable. What matters now is aesthetics. Make it look good and let the AI take care of the rest.

This isn't a new problem. It's just the latest version of the same old misunderstanding. Time and again, we reduce the role of design to surface polish. In the name of efficiency, we cut out the work that makes a product usable, inclusive, and sustainable. But what we're really doing is rewriting the narrative to justify replacing deep, collaborative work with shallow shortcuts.

Leadership Without Understanding

It's hard to follow a leader who doesn't understand what you do. And yet, it's alarmingly common, especially in larger companies, for leaders to operate with minimal understanding of the departments they oversee or influence. I'm not talking about knowing how to do the job. I'm talking about knowing what the job is, what its purpose is, and what good work actually looks like.

I've lost count of the number of times I've watched a CTO dismiss a thoughtful design process because "it's just a button," or "can't we just add a dropdown?" The assumption is that their idea is obvious and correct. Anything taking longer than a few minutes must be unnecessary overhead. It's not just frustrating, it's damaging. It reduces design to a checklist item and tells the team their expertise doesn't matter.

But it goes deeper than design. A good leader should be able to describe what each part of the company does. Maybe not in exhaustive detail, but with enough fluency to advocate for those teams. If a CTO can't speak to how marketing works, or what sales needs, or what product is trying to achieve, then they're not leading a business, they're managing a silo. Worse, they're sending a message that only their domain is worthy of real understanding.

Leadership isn't about being the smartest person in the room. It's about making sure the smartest people are in the room, listening to them, and empowering them to do their jobs. The moment a leader starts believing they could easily replace the team they've hired or worse, that they could do it all themselves if they just had the time, they've lost sight of what leadership is actually for.

Promises, Promises

There's a recurring pattern I've seen throughout my career where a new technology comes along, and leadership decides this will finally be the thing that replaces the expensive, complicated, unpredictable human workforce. And design always seems to be one of the first targets.

In the early 2000s, it was Java. "Write once, deploy everywhere!" they declared. Then it was Flash, promising smooth, scalable interfaces without all the messy front-end engineering. Later, it was Electron apps, with the allure of building cross-platform products faster and cheaper. And now, of course, it's AI. It's always the same promise that these leaders keep falling for, that surely this tool will replace complexity with automation, and the company will save time and money.

But that promise never really delivers. Because while tools change, the underlying complexity of the work remains. Replacing thoughtful design with prebuilt frameworks or generated outputs doesn't eliminate any problems, it just moves it downstream. It creates more tech debt and more friction that someone eventually has to clean up.

The real problem isn't the tools. It's how leadership views them. They don't see them as augmentations to human expertise, but as replacements for it. There's a difference between streamlining a workflow and devaluing the person who was doing the work in the first place. And when a leader's instinct is to cut people out rather than elevate them with better tools, it speaks volumes about what they think of their team.

Loyalty, Performance, and Burnout

One of the most demoralizing dynamics I've seen in modern workplaces is the unspoken demand for loyalty from leadership, while offering none in return. Employees are expected to stay committed, go above and beyond, "act like owners." All while living under the constant threat of being automated away, reorganized out, or replaced by the next shiny tool or outsourcing contract.

This imbalance is unsustainable. You can't ask people to give you their best while making it clear they're only valuable until the next budget cycle. And when leaders operate with this mindset, the work suffers. Because instead of focusing on outcomes, employees start focusing on staying safe. They design to avoid critique. They code to avoid risk. They contribute just enough to not fall behind.

We've seen the outcome of this kind of culture before. Microsoft's now-infamous stack ranking system forced managers to rank employees against each other, regardless of actual performance. Even a great team had to have a "bottom performer" because someone had to lose. The result was predictable, leading to toxic competition, withheld collaboration, and high turnover.

When performance is measured purely by visible output, people stop doing the invisible work that matters. They stop mentoring. They stop experimenting. They stop caring about long-term value. They work just hard enough to avoid consequences, and then burn out anyway.

Great leadership doesn't push people to their limits to "maximize productivity." It creates the conditions for people to do their best work sustainably. That means trust, context, and support, not surveillance, scorekeeping, and manufactured scarcity.

Leading Through the AI Shift

There's no question that AI is changing everything. The tools are faster, more capable, and more accessible than ever. Tasks that used to take hours like creating mockups, or generating copy, can now be done in minutes. That's real progress. But how we use that progress is what will separate the good leaders from the opportunists.

The best leaders won't use AI as an excuse to reduce headcount. They'll use it as a reason to elevate the people they've already hired. Instead of asking, "How many people can we replace with this?" they'll ask, "What can we finally unlock now that we don't have to waste time on the repetitive stuff?"

No one wants to spend their day redrawing the same wireframe five different ways just to win consensus. No one studied communication theory just to clean up grammar in an executive memo. No one got a computer science degree so they could fix tedious UI bugs all day. AI can take some of that off our plates and that should be a good thing.

But only if leadership sees it that way. Only if they believe in the intelligence and talent of the people they've hired. Only if they're willing to invest in vision, not just velocity.

AI should be a floor, not a ceiling. It should take care of the basics so that people can focus on the creative, strategic, and human parts of their work, which are the parts machines can't replicate. A good leader knows that the goal isn't to do the same work faster. It's to do better and more meaningful work.

Leadership Shapes the Value System

Leadership isn't about knowing everything. It's about knowing enough to recognize and nurture value in others. It's about creating the conditions for great work that isn't defined by output, but by impact. Not by speed, but by purpose.

When leaders fail to understand what their teams actually do, or see their teams as interchangeable resources to be automated away, they don't just fail those individuals. They fail the entire organization.

The truth is, most people want to do meaningful work. They want to contribute, solve hard problems, and make things better. But that only happens when leadership gives them the time, space, and trust to do it. Not when it replaces thoughtful process with fast results. Not when it trades curiosity for control.

This is the final thread in a larger pattern I've seen over the years. Perceived performance wins out over real progress. We've covered the myth of constant motion, the trap of performative productivity, and now the role leadership plays in distorting or supporting the value of work.

If there's one constant across all of it, it's this: you get what you reward. If you reward speed, you'll get shortcuts. If you reward surface-level output, you'll get shallow work. But if you reward depth and collaboration, then you'll get a team that's not just productive, but truly valuable.

That's the kind of leadership we need right now. And the kind that will actually survive what's coming next.

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A shark is constantly in motion. Produced with AI.

Some animals must keep moving to survive. Sharks are like that. If they stop swimming, they stop breathing. This is an essential but brutal truth for sharks, that constant motion equals life.

Over the years, I've worked with, and even reported to, a number of people who seem to live by that same rule. Motion, to them, is proof of value. As long as the Slack messages are flying, the decks are updating, and the mockups are flowing, then progress must be happening. The problem is, that's not how real progress works.

I want to be clear that I'm not calling these people sharks in the apex predator sense. This isn't about ruthlessness or power. It's about the reflexive, unexamined need to always be doing something, anything, because standing still feels like death. But what if the most important parts of growth don't happen while we're moving? What if real learning, real change, happens when we slow down?

Perceived Productivity vs. Real Work

In many workplaces, productivity has become a performance. It's something to be seen doing, not necessarily something to be meaningfully accomplished. We've built environments where constant motion is rewarded. Always-on Slack presence, meetings back to back, rapid-fire iterations in Figma, and AI-produced assets to give the appearance of progress. But that's all it is, a facade.

This kind of motion is addictive, and feels so much like you're getting things done. But it rarely leads to innovation because it's not about solving the problem, it's about appearing to solve it. There's very little tolerance for pausing to think and revisit assumptions, or allow a problem to sit long enough to understand it deeply. Those actions are quiet and don't look like progress, even though they are the foundation of it.

As designers (or developers, researchers, or any creative discipline, really), we know that some of the most valuable work happens offstage. It's the time we spend reviewing research, reflecting on feedback, sketching out ideas that never see the light of day. But in environments driven by perceived productivity, that kind of work is seen as suspicious at best. If there's no immediate artifact to show for it, it doesn't count.

If I design 42 mockups for a new feature, and they all miss the mark with our customers, have I actually been productive? Was that barrage of output more valuable than producing two or three designs that meaningfully get to the heart of the problem? In many modern organizations, the answer is yes. Because more screens equals more progress, regardless of whether those screens solve anything at all.

That kind of thinking is dangerous. It leads us to prioritize the visible over the valuable. The performative over the purposeful. And worst of all, it teaches designers to work for approval instead of impact.

The Hidden Value of Repetition and Failure

The truth is, growth rarely looks like forward motion. In fact, it often looks like failure. You make the wrong thing and then have to sit with it, figure out why it didn't work, and then you try again. That kind of progress is slow, messy, and deeply uncomfortable. But it's also where real skill is developed.

Repetition isn't glamorous, but it's essential. It's how we internalize patterns and refine our instincts. We build a deeper understanding of our craft. The first few iterations of anything are often just us getting the obvious ideas out of our system. The real insight comes later, after we've failed enough times to recognize what doesn't work. That kind of motion matters and has real impact on businesses, even if they don't always see it. It's what a well-run company will develop in their staff and why having senior leaders is important to the health of the business.

Yet in many organizations, failure is seen as a weakness instead of a step. There's no room for it in the timeline. There's no budget for doing something twice. Instead, there's pressure to get it right the first time, which leads to safe ideas and shallow execution, and the illusion of forward motion. But when failure isn't allowed, neither is learning. And when learning isn't happening, neither is growth.

I've learned more from broken prototypes and usability tests than I have from any polished final deliverable. Because it's in that friction between intention and reality where we uncover what actually matters. That's the stuff that endures.

The Role of Stillness and Planning

Stillness is often mistaken for inaction. But in creative work, stillness is where the real breakthroughs happen. It's in the quiet moments that we actually start to think. Not just react, not just respond, but think. Strategically. Critically. Creatively.

Some of my best design decisions didn't come when I was in a flow of creating screen after screen. They came when I stepped back. When I sat with the requirements, stopped designing, cut through all the noise and focused on the problem. Those are the moments that seem the least productive to the outside, but they're the most valuable to the outcome.

Unfortunately, stillness doesn't play well in metrics. It's hard to put "stared at the ceiling for 30 minutes and realized we're solving the wrong problem" on a status update. But that reflection is where clarity lives. That's where you see the forest instead of just the trees. That's where you choose your next step, not just take one for the sake of movement.

Planning, too, is undervalued. We're often told to just start building and figure it out later. And yes, there's value in iteration. But iteration without direction is just chaos. Taking the time to plan, really plan, what success looks like, what constraints we're working within, and what tradeoffs we're willing to make is a skill. It's not wasted time, it's the foundation for good work.

AI Won't Fix Shallow Thinking

Today's workforce is under enormous pressure to move faster. And with the rise of AI tools, that pressure is only increasing. We're told these tools will make us more efficient and more productive. And in some ways, they absolutely can. I use AI tools myself, and I think they're incredibly useful when applied thoughtfully.

But speed isn't a substitute for intention. Just because a tool can generate 42 screens faster than I ever could doesn't mean those screens are solving anything meaningful. More output isn't the goal. Better outcomes are.

There's an unspoken agreement we need to make with ourselves as we begin to integrate these technologies more deeply into our work. We still need to be present. We still need to be thoughtful. AI can assist, but it can't replace discernment. It can't replace human curiosity, empathy, or judgment. If anything, it raises the stakes for those qualities to shine through.

The faster we move, the more intentional we have to become. Otherwise, we're just accelerating toward a dead end.

Redefining What Counts as Progress

So much of what we call "productivity" is just a performance, movement for the sake of visibility. But meaningful work, the kind that creates real value for users and organizations alike, doesn't always look busy. Sometimes it looks like failure. Sometimes it looks like stillness. Sometimes it's just a quiet pause before the next intentional step.

We have to let go of the idea that forward motion is always good. It isn't. Not if the motion is aimless. Not if it's shallow. Not if it's driven by fear of being seen as idle. The real growth and insight come from repetition, from wrestling with uncertainty, and from being okay with not having all the answers on the first try.

This doesn't mean we reject tools like AI or new methods that help us move faster. But it does mean we use them with intention. We stay connected to the craft. We stay curious. We stay human.

Because progress isn't how fast you move. It's what you learn along the way.

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Growing through critique

When I was starting out as a designer, the toughest part of the job wasn't the deadlines or the tools, it was the critique.

I remember how personal it felt. Someone would challenge a choice I made, and I'd rush to defend it with vague explanations like "It just feels right" or "I prefer this color." I was emotionally tied to the work and hadn't yet learned how to separate my preferences from the purpose of the design.

Over time, and with the help of great mentors, I learned that design critique wasn't a personal attack. It was an opportunity to articulate my thought process, not my feelings. The more I leaned into this, the better my work became. Explaining the why behind my choices not only made me a stronger designer, it also gave my team a chance to understand the decisions being made. They felt included. They contributed. And with that, I started to earn something more valuable than approval: buy-in.

Eventually, I realized that even well-reasoned design arguments weren't always enough. Some conversations needed more than logic or intuition. They needed data. Research became my ally. Interviews, usability tests, usage analytics, all of it helped strengthen my designs and address concerns before they even came up. With research in hand, I could show (not just tell) why a design worked.

Now we're in a new era.

AI tools have lowered the barrier to creating a design. People with no formal training can spin up entire design systems in minutes. But what's striking is how familiar their growing pains feel. Many of them are going through critique for the first time, and it stings. That same wave of self-doubt I remember so clearly as a junior designer is now washing over people stepping into the process with AI-generated ideas.

And instead of embracing critique as part of growth, some are trying to bypass it. I've heard stories of design reviews being replaced with more "conversational" feedback sessions, meant to ease discomfort. But skipping critique doesn't improve a product. It just delays the hard conversations until after something has shipped, when it's far more difficult to fix.

What's getting lost in this rush is the iterative soul of good design. Real design isn't about finding the first decent answer and shipping it. It's about exploring the space, understanding the problem, testing ideas, and refining them until they're right. AI can help generate ideas, but without critique, without research, without conversation, we risk launching work that hasn't truly been designed. It's just been drafted.

We don't need to avoid critique, we need to protect it. That's how we elevate ideas, build alignment, and ultimately ship better products.

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Agile scrum board from before Jira

I'm not afraid of a process. In fact, I prefer one I can rely on. A framework that helps me explain where I am, where I'm going, and why things are taking the shape they are. But that's not the kind of process today's leaders want. Their process is a loop of presentation and approval, a machine that requires continuous fuel in the form of mockups and updates, one that grinds through design without ever questioning why it exists in the first place.

The irony is that while they demand speed and output, they often stall true progress. They avoid the harder, slower work of discovery and understanding. They'll reject the idea of spending a few hours talking to users but will spend weeks fine-tuning a button color. They'll skip the step where we define what success looks like but be first in line to measure whether we've hit it. They'll claim to be agile, but they fear any suggestion that the roadmap might need to change, because real agility requires the uncomfortable work of listening, adapting, and letting go of ego.

The result is design that pleases everyone in the room but no one in the real world. Features ship, deadlines are met, decks look good, but the end user is left dealing with the mess. It's not that they don't care, they do (at least on paper), but their version of care is built on performance, not on patience. They want proof before curiosity, speed over insight, and results they can measure without having to feel anything.

But feeling is part of the job. And it's not fluff, it's how we gauge intuition, reaction, and behavior. It's how we read between the lines of what a user says and what they actually need. It's how we know when something feels right, even if we can't yet prove it with numbers or clicks. Design is a practice of sense-making, and sometimes that means leaning into discomfort and ambiguity before arriving at clarity.

So no, I don't reject process. I reject performance masquerading as process. I reject the idea that doing good work must always look like being visibly busy. I reject the notion that the faster path is always the better one. Because the truth is, if you want design that actually solves something, you have to be willing to slow down, ask better questions, and trust the people who feel their way toward the right answer.

This is where we get to AI

In a recent post on LinkedIn, Jared Spool shared a series of AI-generated screens with the caption, "Let me show you this new AI-generated UI!" His takeaway was clear: none of these designs would survive even a basic design critique. And I agree with him. But here's the thing, it's not just AI-generated work that wouldn't pass critique. A lot of the work coming out of real design teams wouldn't either.

Corners are being cut. Context is being ignored. Craft is being deprioritized in favor of speed and output. It's not just the fault of the tools we're using, it's how we're using them. Whether the screens are made by humans or machines, they're often being shaped by the same broken incentives: deliver more, faster, with less friction and more "wow."

I think we're in for a rough patch. There's going to be a lot of noise, a lot of gimmicks, and a lot of products that look polished but fall apart in the hands of actual users. But I also believe that if designers stay grounded and if we keep pursuing our craft, asking hard questions, insisting on understanding the problem before proposing a solution, then we'll make it through. The pendulum will swing back. Bold leaders will emerge who remember that product development is for solving real problems, for real people.

AI isn't the villain here. It's a tool. A very powerful one. It can help speed up some of the more mechanical parts of the process, like creating variations or exploring directions quickly. But like any tool, it needs to be wielded with care. By people who understand the discipline. People who know when to move fast and when to slow down. People who aren't afraid to feel their way to the answer.

Because at the end of the day, AI can't feel. It can't see the nuance in someone's frustration, or understand why a design doesn't sit right even though all the elements are technically there. It can't walk into a critique with a gut instinct and defend it with context. That's our job. And if we do it well, we can help shape a future where tools like AI support the work and not replace the craft.

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