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LIMINAL—2: Liminal Mindset, Skillset, and Leadership Feb 28, 2026

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Show Notes When the ground is shifting and the destination isn’t clear, how do you lead? Peter and Jesse explore the mindset and skills required to navigate the liminal moment—when old ways have dissolved but new ones haven’t taken shape. From core mindsets of maintaining situational awareness and striving for balance, to core skills around communication, persuasion and connection to build lifelines, this is a conversation about what it actually takes to lead through uncertainty. More about Jesse: https://jessejamesgarrett.com/ More about Peter: https://petermerholz.com/ 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. This is Liminal. Change is hard. Leading others through it is harder. In this episode, Jesse and I probe what it means to lead through a liminal moment. The mindset you need, the skills and behaviors that will carry you through. Designers have spent decades pushing organizations to embrace change. Turns out that’s easier to advocate for when you are not the one being disrupted. Jesse: Hello, Peter. Peter: Hello, Jesse. So last time you used a metaphor of surfing. Uh,talking about how when you are surfing, you cannot set it and forget it, that it requires this total presence, total attention, constant awareness of what’s going on, constant adaptation to the signals in order to stay on board. And you were saying that as a parallel to the mindset that leaders need in this liminal moment or the liminal circumstances that they find themselves. And I wanted to pause there and then pick it up now, because I think, you know, in that last conversation, we, we set up a lot of the context of why we think we’re in this liminal moment and what it means to be navigating liminality. The Liminal Mindset Peter: But I think there’s an interesting conversation to be had around, I guess two areas, maybe more. The liminal mindset, which I think is your surfing metaphor, addresses, and kind of a liminal skillset, right? What are the practices that you can undertake that enable you to succeed when things are liminal? And so one of the things, you know, you’re pointing out with the liminal mindset is that, vigilance, right? That, that need to maintain alertness, awareness… Jesse: Yeah. Peter: To not be rigid, right, and, and stuck in a particular mode or mindset, but to recognize the context in which you’re operating, the seas on which you’re bobbing up and down and, and to act accordingly. That actually puts me in mind of Ed Catmull’s book Creativity, Inc. Jesse: Mm-hmm. Peter: Where he argues against rigidity and stability in favor of balance and equilibrium, right? He credits Pixar’s success as not doing the same thing every time and not being really rigid around how they do things, but always being able to return to a equilibrium. But, but allowing themselves to bob and weave a bit, and to go with the flow, again, to continue to use that metaphor. And so, yeah, I’m, I’m curious, as I reflect that back on to you where this is taking your brain. Jesse: Yeah. Well, I think that you point out a few important pieces of the puzzle. So first of all, just to think about it as a mindset rather than as a skillset. What that entails is an attitude, a stance, a way of setting your own priorities within your own mind about what you pay attention to, what you give focus to, what you give energy to, and what you don’t. And so that first piece of it, the mindset piece of it, I think is really critical. And then layered on top of that, you have, you used the word vigilance, which sounds to me a little, perhaps a little harsh because vigilance can sound like taking a defensive posture, which I don’t think this is actually what this is. Peter: I’m talking Charles Bronson, Death Wish, here, yo. Jesse: Yeah. But rather, in our conversation with Colt, he talked about the concept of situational awareness, which is very commonly applied in military context, where it simply is about, are you on top of what’s going on right now? Not what was going on five minutes ago or an hour ago or yesterday, but are you on top of what’s going on right now? And are you paying attention to the things in the present moment that are actually the most relevant things. And that is this notion of maintaining situational awareness that I think is really critical. A lot of it is about operating in real time, being able to be in a real time, tight feedback loops, you know, between perception and action. Allowing yourself to kind of iteratively refine your judgment as you go, rather than, you know, committing to the master plan front and then driving that forward no matter what the waves do, because then the waves are just gonna put you under. The Liminal Skillset Peter: Yeah. And it’s, it’s interesting because I always forget exactly how the phrase goes, but, you know, plans are useless and, but planning is essential, right? So you mentioned the liminal mindset, and I agree there is a state of being, a state of showing up that’s important. But I think there’s also a liminal skillset. Jesse: Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm. Peter: And I think designers, design leaders can embrace a set of skills that they are good at, or should be good at, Jesse: Mm-hmm. Peter: And apply them to navigating liminality. And so when you talk about not being beholden to plans, there’s something around the value in having a vision, you know, in these liminal moments, the value of, like, having some sense even in the confusion of where things might be going and, and being able to lean into that. But it’s, I guess it’s not having a vision, it’s having visions. And… Jesse: Well, and it’s interesting for design because of the way in which this kind of pulls against this auteurist view of the designer as the master planner, as the architect, as the orchestrator of every detail, in that the liminal moment doesn’t permit that. It requires you to respond in designerly ways, but not in ways that look like delivering against the master plan. Peter: That reminds me of, you know, a challenge that some designers have and have had for decades working in digital media where you can’t specify to the nth degree exactly, you know, your layout and your typography and your color scheme and all that. And the frustration that many designers would have. But instead to recognize that the role of a design leader is more one of orchestrating elements in a context towards a desired goal or outcome, as opposed to fixing some presentation you know, in some kind of snapshot of time. Jesse: Form, right? Yeah. Peter: I guess a lot of this is getting back to this notion of fluidity, of feedback loops of, well, flow. But, but you want it to be directed, right? And that’s where I think even if you don’t want to be beholden to a vision, a specific point on the horizon that you are death marching to, come hell or high water, I guess what I’m realizing is a lot of the leadership practices that I discuss, you know, generally are highly applicable here. And the one that’s coming to mind is having an agenda, right. You know, having a point of view, having a perspective of, Yes, I don’t know where this is going, but I have a sense of where it should head, based on my experience, my perspective. And just knowing, I’m having a hard time articulating this clearly, right? But, like, by having an agenda, having principles, having a sense of purpose, having a sense of your own value. I think you talked about this last time, the difference between values and value, really, like, having your own value system as a foundation upon what you’re standing, will help you make better decisions as you’re trying to figure out how to navigate this uncertainty, this ambiguity. Jesse: Yeah, yeah. As a leader, especially, because of the volume of information you are consuming and processing and making decisions based on, you have to have rubrics. You have to have heuristics. You have to have rules of thumb that can guide you through these situations where the data is imperfect and the picture is ambiguous. And if you don’t have that, you are very easily led astray by red herring signals. So you need to know what you’re kind of listening for, especially as a leader, because of the multiplier effect that you have in your role, because of the ways in which, not just the levers that you have your hands on that other people don’t that influence the way entire organizational structures move, but also because, when it comes to mindset, the leader sets the tone for the entire organization. And the mindset that you instantiate in your role ends up becoming what the people on your team model themselves on, and what you end up creating. AI Tooling Forcing Change Peter: Since our last discussion, I’ve had a few conversations with design leaders around embracing AI tooling… Jesse: hmm. Peter: …that feels relevant here. Well, and it feels relevant here, especially as you’re talking about modeling the mindset, because I think, you know, this uncertainty is opportunity. And it’s a positive opportunity. This is a, you know, we can charge into this breach and come out the other side having made a positive impact. But only if we approach it with some spirit, if we have an agenda, have that point of view of what to make, how to make sense of, of the mess that, that we’re maybe currently operating in. Whereas I was talking to one design leader and, and reflecting on how, you know, in a near term future, her team might no longer need Figma, right? Put a design system inside an LLM and, and design right out of that in production-ready prototypes that use live data that collapse the distance between what design is doing and what engineers receiving. And as I said this to this design leader, they reflected how it was triggering them to think about how their team would not be working within that tool. Even though this particular design leader is rarely themselves in that tool, right? The team’s identity has been aligned with this tool. And, you know, what does it mean when this thing that has been our identity is taken away from us. Now, on the other side, was this other design leader I was speaking with, I told this last time, where it took two to three months to get this design team comfortable not using Figma and going straight to the AI tools. And it was two or three months of misery for this design team where they’re like, we don’t like this, this isn’t what we signed up for, we didn’t expect this to be our job. But then once they came out the other side, Jesse: Yes. Peter: They, they embraced it. And I think in part that leader, because again, they weren’t a craft leader, they were this ops leader, there was something about that relationship that allowed this leader to see these people through this challenge, without getting caught up in their own identity getting caught up in it as well. Jesse: Right, right. Well, I think that this is one of those situations where success requires optimism about change. It requires the leader especially to go, You know what? We don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t know how we’re going to get there. It’s a mess right now, and it’s going to get messier. But I believe there is a place that we can get to, that is a more positive place for everybody. And you know, as we talked about last time, I think it comes back to, what do you think the value of design actually is in your organization, and how do you optimize for that with this new tooling and with these new processes and new ways of thinking about what a designer’s job is day to day? Because again, if you think your designer’s job is to be hands-on with a mouse in Figma every day, you might be looking at a really different future. Peter: Well, and it was funny ’cause that first design leader I was talking about we, we had this conversation ’cause on, on one side, there’s this expectation to embrace AI in their workflow. Jesse: Sure. Peter: And then this kind of, resistance or almost dismissal of that within the design organization. But then, as we were talking about what we were going to cover in our session, another topic was how do we elevate design, and how do we help design really be seen as a force to be reckoned with within the organization? And I’m like, these two things are connected. Jesse: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Peter: Right, right. And one of the places we ended up was, like, you need to define design on the impact and the outcomes it’s driving, not on the artifacts it’s producing. Jesse: Yeah. Peter: That’s going to be how you elevate it, but that’s also how you’re going to then be comfortable embracing, you know, other kinds of tools to solve these problems because you realize it’s not about the tool so much is about the nature of the change that you’re trying to drive. Jesse: Right. Yeah, I think that’s really true. And I think that also it points to something, going back to having an agenda and taking a stand, which is that these things are gonna get defined for you because of the collaborative nature of your work. So if design teams are not, and design leaders are not, taking the initiative to define for themselves what a design process looks like, that both leverages these tools and leverages the value of what the humans bring to the process, if they are not able to put forward ways of doing this, that advance the human-centered values that they, as teams, say they stand for, they’re gonna get lapped by product, by engineering. If you continue to define what you’ve done in the terms that you always have, you’re gonna stay in the box you’ve always been in. Responses to Liminality Peter: Well, right. Getting back to this concept of liminality, right, there’s maybe three, kind of, outcomes. What you’re talking about is, is people who, when they engage in the liminal moment are like, oh, hell no. And just back out. They’re like, not for me, don’t wanna deal with it. It makes me uncomfortable, makes me uneasy. And those folks are gonna be the ones left behind, right? I suspect a significant number of the designers who have found themselves disempowered these past few years, you know, who had maybe been in executive roles, had been promoted, had been given opportunities, and who are no longer, I think many of them it was a self-induced circumstance because when offered this way potentially through, they’re like, Nope, not me, and, you know, maybe unintentionally inadvertently, but found themselves getting rolled back, ’cause they did not embrace that moment. There’s a second response, which is you kind of remain in the liminal moment… Jesse: mm-hmm. Peter: And, I think there could be a type of, like, chaos adjacent design leader who doesn’t mind the discombobulation or maybe they are just getting, it’s like they’re in the clothes dryer. They’re just getting tumbled around and, like, every time they try something, they’re just getting kind of knocked around and knocked around and knocked around. And that’s a space to be in for a period. You don’t want to dwell there. That’s, that’s gonna lead to burnout. That’s gonna lead to, as I’ve heard from some friends of mine, heart troubles or other kind of, you know, problems as they can’t figure out Jesse: Just sort of Peter: kind of how to, how to na-, how to, how to surf it. Jesse: boiling pot. Yeah. Peter: Yeah. I mean, to use your surfing metaphor, they’re just getting tossed repeatedly by those waves. They, they can’t get on top of it. And then the third, right, is surfing that liminal moment such that you’re finding yourself on top of the wave and leaning into a bit of that chaos, but in a way that that ends up being, I don’t wanna say productive, but positive, you know, with some positive outcomes. You mentioned the positivity earlier. This is something I think a lot of design leaders actually struggle with, is maintaining positivity for, for many reasons. But, you kno…

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LIMINAL—1: The Liminal Moment Feb 22, 2026

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Show Notes When the old ways no longer hold and the new hasn’t taken shape, you’re in a liminal moment. Peter and Jesse explore what it means to lead through that in-between space—navigating uncertainty without retreating to the past, letting go of what defined you, and finding opportunity in the chaos rather than being consumed by it. More about Peter: https://petermerholz.com/More about Jesse: https://jessejamesgarrett.com/ 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: This is Liminal. When the old ways no longer hold sway, but the new have not yet taken shape, you find yourself in the Liminal Moment. On today’s show, Peter and I build on some of the themes in our recent conversations to ask, what do you do when you’re caught in between the past and the future, and how do you lead others through it? Peter: So Jesse, Jesse: Hello Peter. Introducing “Liminal” Peter: I wanted to have a conversation… and the conversation starts with an episode that we recorded about a year and a half ago now, maybe a little more called, The Phase Shift, where we recognized that changes are afoot in how design is showing up in businesses and how leaders are able to lead. There had been this set of assumptions around design and it’s kind of steady growth for quite a while. And then a few years ago, those assumptions have been convulsed, even before AI. Things like layoffs and other discombobulation. AI has further exacerbated that, such that it’s not clear where things are headed. I was just at an event last night with a bunch of design leaders and that’s still the conversation we’re having. It’s like, where is this all going? And everybody has their own thoughts on what’s next for design. And then, you and I, three months ago, gave a keynote for the Service Design Global Conference that was drawing from our experiences on Finding Our Way, where we were exploring this thing that we had called “The Phase Shift.” And we talked to a bunch of people and we distilled those conversations. And coming out of that, we had identified a set of, like, conditions that we’re moving from and heading to as design leaders: moving from kind of an over-reliance on craft and towards things like a business readiness, moving from being so rooted in our identity and towards, a multidisciplinary engagement. And then this concept just kept not going away. And in fact, I had an insight. I was teaching my masterclass where I have this idea of “mediate the membrane.” And the concept there is that design leaders sit in between these two spaces. One of the design team that they’re leading, which is a very generative, creative, ambiguous, emotional, human-centered space. And then the rest of the organization that they’re operating in, which tends to be bureaucratic, tends to be very corporate, tends to be business-centered, tends to be data-driven and business-oriented. And I realized there was a parallel in my mind between that kind of navigating this uncertainty between how design has been and where design is going, and then navigating these spaces as a design leader. And I said to you, there’s something about this idea of “liminal” that feels right. We’re operating in a liminal moment, and we’ve then off-mic, but now on-mic, been unpacking that. And I’m curious, I’ll stop my little monologue here, but hand it over to you to pick up, kind of as we’ve been having these conversations, what have you been picking up on in terms of these threads? Jesse: Well, I think there’s the practical reality of the liminal moment that we find ourselves in now. And then there is the kind of the broader concept of how we approach liminality generally. So if the liminal space is the space between contexts, it is the corner that we turn from one way of seeing things to a different way of seeing things, in a lot of ways, this hearkens back to some of the ideas in the book that you and I worked on many years ago for Adaptive Path called Subject to Change, where the subtitle was “creating great products and services for an uncertain world.” And in a lot of ways the thesis of that book had to do with practical guidance for managing uncertainty when you don’t know what’s going to change and when. And I think that this space that design leaders have found themselves in over the last couple of years has been this kind of lingering liminality, where it’s clear that the old paradigms are kind of falling away. That the ways of thinking about and structuring and approaching and valuing this work that used to hold sway, don’t hold sway anymore. And we are at a bit of a loss for what replaces that. But in the meantime, we’re just kind of swimming toward the new together. And I think that one of the things that comes to mind for me in this is the particular stress, strain, burden that this places on leaders specifically. Obviously you and I talk a lot about leaders and their needs and the challenges of that role, and I just notice how for the leaders that liminality is felt at an extra acute level because of the scale of their responsibility, because of the people under their stewardship, under their care that they need to take into account in their choices. They’re not choosing for themselves the way that an individual practitioner might be, in the face of changing expectations, changing value propositions, changing tool sets, and so forth. Hunkering Down Peter: Well, I mean on that front I’ve actually heard from a few folks recently, the conversations with design leaders where one of their primary objectives right now is to quote, protect their team, save their team. Primarily in the face of potential layoffs or other things, right? And they’re losing sight of whatever it is that the business they are part of is trying to achieve, which might be why layoffs are happening, right? There might be some broader business challenges or a different strategy or whatever. And they’re finding themselves almost like hunkering down and like, how do I protect this group, you know, that they feel some responsibility to, they’ve hired them up, they’ve been working with them. It’s their team. It’s their it’s guys and gals or whatever, which is, as I think about it, not a healthy kind of approach to this. You start to sacrifice yourself. You start to twist yourself in knots, often around forces larger than your control. Jesse: Martyrdom complexes. Peter: Exactly. You’re kind of taking on your team member’s burden as your own or something in this martyrdom way. None of which is healthy. I think one of the things, as I’ve been poking at this concept of liminality, it evidently causes anxiety, right? There’s a lot of people we talk to, there’s a lot of dialogue out there that folks are… Jesse: Stressed. Uncertainty is Opportunity Peter: Stressed. Upset. Angry. Whether they are responding directly to the circumstances, or you can read it into however they’re talking about whatever it is they’re talking about, whether it’s AI or the job market or other things. And understandably so. But, you know, you mentioned the Adaptive Path book, And, where the thesis of that book is, Hey, when you’re in these moments of uncertainty, there’s a set of tools that you can use that we in design have developed to help navigate, make sense of, even perhaps take advantage of or thrive in this uncertain space, right? Design tools are great for de-fuzzing uncertainty and bringing clarity and navigating ambiguity. Like, sit with that ambiguity, but don’t just wallow in it. And one of the themes of that talk that you and I gave in Dallas, right in the middle, was “uncertainty is opportunity,” right? We often feel as uncertainty is a negative, is this thing that… A lot of people retreat from uncertainty. Like, when they approach that liminal moment, when they realize liminality is happening, they try to go back to the way things were and they’re hunkered down and try to not move forward. Whereas the opportunity in this liminal moment is to figure out how to use the tools you have at your disposal, how to be resourceful, and how to make sense of this uncertainty that’s coming. Because, I guess the other thing is, it’s not just designers, right? Many… Everybody seems to be in a moment like this. And again, I think designers, when they’re not operating from that stance of fear or anxiety, can actually be leaders, can be facilitators. I don’t wanna say guiders, I don’t wanna suggest we know the answer, but we can bring people along towards whatever that new reality is. Jesse: Well, design ideally has a different stance, a different relationship to uncertainty than a lot of other functions, because design’s role in many ways is to drive clarity and to drive cross-functional understanding of what’s actually going on with users and what actually constitutes the patterns that lead to product success. One thing that I find interesting within this is the way in which for design leaders, you know, it’s kind of like the shoe is on the other foot now, because, you know, you and I have had a lot of conversations with design leaders on this show over the last several years in which they talked about the need to advocate for change and the need to push organizations beyond their current ways of thinking, beyond their current ways of doing things to introduce new paradigms, to create liminality for their coworkers and for their stakeholders and for their cross-functional partners. And now when that liminality is coming from outside, suddenly it’s a leadership challenge. So I mean, there are some ways in which, yeah, what we’re talking about is kind of change management, but it’s also change management from the perspective of someone who maybe doesn’t have as much direct control over the change as designers are used to having in terms of what they advocate for inside organizations. Transformation Management != Change Management Peter: Yeah, we’ve talked at length about change management in the past and something that helped me understand perhaps a bit about what’s going on now and what mindset to bring actually comes from work I did a number of years ago at Kaiser Permanente and, a colleague, I had Sami Packard who studied change management. And something she pointed out to me is there’s a difference between change management and transformation management that I think is perhaps relevant here, right? Change management is when an organization goes from one way of being or working to a new way of being or working, that is pretty well understood, right? They call it agile transformation, but it’s really agile change because we know how agile works. We know that structure of the teams and the processes and rituals and behaviors and the tooling and all that. And it’s a matter of kind of getting everyone off of one way of doing things and into a new way of doing things. Transformation management is more applicable though because it’s what we’re dealing with when you’re dealing with liminality, which is you don’t know what’s coming, right? When you’re transforming, you don’t know into what, necessarily. You might have some idea of the kind of impact you want to have or something, but the shape, the behaviors, how it works, that’s what you’re needing to discover. Which again, is one of those areas where design should be a great practice to lead through that because design is about making sense of that opportunity space. Something else that’s occurring to me when you talked about the shoe is on the other foot. I was hanging out with a bunch of design leaders last night and one of them used to be very active in leading sprints at Google 20 years ago. And something he pointed out in his current experience that he’s witnessed is the degree to which designers have trouble diverging before they converge. Like we have to remind ourselves. So when we think of the double diamond, right, people have been in the last year or two, to my taste, a little too willing to throw out the double diamond. “Process is over, we’re… new ways of working.” And to me that was a misread of the double diamond. ‘Cause the double diamond’s very simple. And it basically states before you decide what to do, you give yourself an opportunity to think about a lot of options, and you choose from them as opposed to whatever that first idea you had you ram through. That’s all the double diamond is about, is make sure that you provide your own optionality. And I think, maybe as a reaction to velocity, as a reaction to pressures, or whatever, we’re losing sight of that divergent step. But when you don’t know what your future holds, you want to give yourself a as many potential futures as possible that you can start trying to choose from. And then identify which seems to be the most enabling, productive, helpful way forward. Jesse: That’s an interesting perspective because if I reflect back to when we were back in Adaptive Path and we were offering a lot of these things into the market for the first time as consultants… So, I was the head of our strategy practice, and one of the things that really came to mind for me was that we had to have a way of demonstrating why you would hire a designer to do strategy work. And for me it always came back to that designers can imagine possibilities to a different degree, to a different depth potentially, across a broader range of possibilities than you might get from somebody who has a different kind of a background. And as I think about how that applies here, it suggests that design strategy may have more to offer now than it has in recent years because we’re moving beyond the most recent batch of best practices into new territory that requires a return to that kind of exploration. You know, when I think about the pressure that’s put on these teams to just kind of, like, skip that first half of the diamond and just power through the convergent thinking toward a solution, what that suggests to me is that somebody’s already decided that the front half of that diamond is already a solved problem. That you’re operating in a problem space where you feel like the constraints are relatively known. And now that we’re moving into these deeper unknowns, especially with AI technology, but also with the evolution of business models and other kinds of things that are going on all around us, design might have a value proposition now that is much closer to what design had to offer in 2005 than it had in 2020. Is the Time for Vision Over? Peter: So this puts me in mind of the conversation we had with Peter Skillman, who is the chief design officer at Philips Design, and who in some ways said the opposite, right? And we had this conversation with him about a year ago. It was January of, 2025. And something he believed is like the time for vision, and you could infer the time for strategy, is maybe… not over, but is diminished. To paraphrase what he said, we’ve done a lot of work developing visions. Now we need to start executing against them and with this new set of AI tools, and the access to execution that is just more prevalent, like, let’s lean in and make and create and, not quite define the future, but deliver the future almost directly. But, where I’m coming to this now is, and I think it holds with liminality in some way… What you’re saying about strategy, you know, is in some ways, I don’t wanna say in conflict, but in some opposition to what Peter was arguing around the work of design right now. And I wonder if we’re in like a bifurcated moment to a degree that we’re not quite recognizing, right? Because design, and this has been true, you mentioned back at Adaptive Path and people didn’t know that design could be a lever for helping you with strategy or whatever. But design maybe being a slippery word, a slippery concept that you are always having to define it, because when you say the wor…

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65: Design—Stuck in the Middle with AI (ft. Christina Wodtke) Feb 03, 2026

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Show Notes Stanford professor Christina Wodtke joins Peter and Jesse in exploring the real contradictions of AI in design and product work: revolutionary prototyping speed versus the need for critical thinking, efficiency gains versus cognitive loss, and loving the technology while hating the exploitative companies building it. She shares exactly what designers and PMs must vigilantly protect. Christina’s blog: https://eleganthack.com/ Peter’s website: https://petermerholz.com/ Jesse’s website: https://jessejamesgarrett.com/ 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, founder, author, tech industry veteran, and Stanford professor Christina Wodtke, joins us to talk about the sweeping impact of AI on design and product management, including shifting team roles, shifting creative processes, and shifting definitions of value in our work. Peter: Hi, Christina. Thanks for joining us. Christina: Hi Peter. Thanks for having me. And hi, Jesse. Jesse: Hi, Christina. Introducing Christina Peter: So, in preparing for this conversation, I’ve been thinking about how I believe I’ve known you since, I want to say 1998 when I believe you were at Red Envelope as… Christina: Nope. E-greetings. We were… Peter: E-greetings, sorry, upstairs from Red Envelope, back in the late nineties when there was all kinds of tech going on in San Francisco. Sorry, E-greetings. And I’ve known you as an in-house UX practitioner, a consulting UX practitioner, a product manager, a game designer, a teacher, an author. you’ve had a multi-layered, multi stage career. But what I don’t know is how you think of yourself today and how you introduce yourself. So please… Christina: [laughs] Peter: Who is the Christina Wodtke of today? Christina: You missed a couple. General manager and of course founder. Multiple time founder. But, you know, I keep busy. What can I tell you? Most of my time is spent at Stanford teaching. I’m a core lecturer there, which means I have a full-time appointment in which I teach product management and design, interaction design mostly, and game design as well. So describing myself is never easy. I contain multitudes. But other than hanging out at Stanford with the kids, I write books on the odd occasion. I think I’m up to five now. And I also blog like a maniac, still. You and I are some of the original bloggers from back in the day. And then I help companies every so often when they come by and say, help, help. And I say, what you got? So the helping companies have been interesting. It tends to be a type of coaching that’s less life coaching and much more about how do I get my business sorted out. I work with CEOs mostly helping them figure out what’s my product strategy, what’s my business strategy, what’s my hiring strategy? The word strategy tends to come up a lot. Peter: Are these startups or more mature companies or all kinds of companies that you’re working with? Christina: All kinds of companies. When it comes to the OKR work, I get a lot of big companies, you know, your Pepsi’s, et cetera. But for the more hands on coaching, those are almost all startups. I’m a startup person. I always have been. I always feel funny when I’m talking to a company and they’re like, we can’t do that because we’re cross-matrixed in these 15 different ways, And I’m like, Ooh, that sounds unpleasant. So I’d much more prefer, the startups. Stuck in the middle with AI Jesse: So we were interested in having you join us because I’ve been reading a bunch of your writing lately around the topic of AI, and you’ve been doing some interesting explorations, and it’s been really interesting to see you sort through the implications of this stuff in your writing. And I’m curious where you would place yourself right now on the sort of skeptic-to-booster spectrum when it comes to AI. Christina: Yeah, the doomer versus the booster. I like to think I’m stuck in the middle with you guys. There’s clowns on the left of me and jokers to the right. Peter: Sure. Christina: Yes, indeed. Jesse: I’m keeping my ears covered. Christina: Sorry, But it’s really maddening because it feels like if you say anything critical about any of the current generative AI companies, you’re somehow an idiot and backwards and a Luddite. And if you say anything positive, you’re a lunatic, an overhyped, bubble loving fool. So I say both things and I can be all those things at once. If I was gonna nail it down and say, this is an extraordinary piece of the technology. I kind of doubt it will change the world the way the internet did. It doesn’t seem to me to be as deep as the internet, which really did change how we do almost everything. But it is incredibly powerful and it’s amazing when you use it. You just become supercharged. It also is not easy to learn. Everybody makes it sound like you just spend five minutes and all these amazing things happen. And I don’t find that to be the case at all. I would say I was using it for six months before I got my head around starting to get value out of it. But of course I do have a day job, so maybe that might’ve been faster. But the hardest part of AI is that the companies suck so hard. It’s very, very painful. Like, to use AI is to be complicit in this way that’s intensely unpleasant. I’m currently trying to stick only to Claude, but that puts me in a place where I don’t necessarily know what’s going on across the board. So occasionally I’ll use, OpenAI’s offerings, or I’ll use Gemini, but I can’t bring myself to touch Grok or Meta because I feel slimed if I do. So I’m kind of trying to find a path forward through that. And I think the piece that I’ve written that most people are most familiar with is the one where I said I love AI, but I hate the companies who make it. And of course I hate them. I’ve written five books. They have literally built their business on the back of mine, right? I would say that I sell fewer books now. I will say, that I get less consulting engagements now, which in a strange way, I don’t mind. When I go into do OKRs, people all have the same problems and I kinda wanna just go, just do a close reading of the book. But I love the really hard problems that I get from the people who want me for my mind instead. That’s really fun. But how can I like a technology that’s built on my effort without paying it for it? It’s kind of, difficult in its heart. And then of course, it’s the fact that they’re acting like colonizers as Karen Hao says in her wonderful book, The Empire of AI. They’re exploiting people in poorer countries for both their work. I didn’t know until I read Empire of AI that they were doing the same mistakes, … mistakes… the same cruel, active choices that Meta made around content moderation. They’re doing it all over again, causing deep trauma in people who can’t afford to get food. And so if you choose between trauma and food, you tend to pick food. And of course there’s the energy contribution, which isn’t as bad as concrete, but it’s still kind of bad. I can go on for a really long time, the lack of any oversight. Gee, you think if people talk to AI that maybe suicide might come up? Oh no, that would never happen.We don’t have be prepared for any negative consequences. But two days vibe coding with Claude Code and then all of a sudden there’s an app and it’s working and it’s beautiful and it’s magical. And I’m like, yay. And then I deploy it and I’m like, I haven’t, yelled deploy, deploy, in such a long time. Maybe not since my startup, and it just feels good. So yeah, it’s hard. Anybody who thinks it’s simple is somebody who doesn’t need to have AI in their life. And I don’t really have a choice because now it’s going to be a standard technology, so I have to figure out how to teach it, or I’m not a good teacher anymore. It’s hard. Peter: I want to, I guess, kind of start with where you just ended off with teaching, but I’m going to, perhaps take an unexpected route, which is: you teach at Stanford, which means you are in the heart of the belly of the beast of tech and some of the bad acting that you were just identifying. Christina: And I’m in computer science. I’m not over in the D School. I am in the heart of the AI planet. Peter: And I’m curious from that point of view, I mean, many of the people who are these bad actors are Stanford graduates, but I’m curious what you’re hearing from your students. And if you teach undergrad, grad, that would be helpful to understand as well. What are you hearing from your students around some of these things that you’re talking about? What is your sense of how are they seeing things? What the students say Christina: Absolutely. I mean, the first thing to realize is that Stanford is not a monolith. It’s sort of like when people talk about Google, Google’s like a bunch of city states. Stanford’s a bunch of city states. The people in the business school, GSB, they’re very different than the people in the design school, which is not a truly a school,but we won’t go into that. But the D School folks are very different from the people who are in HCI inside of computer science which is where I’m living. So what I find is my students are not as fiercely bottom line, money, money, money as some of them. And when they do tend to care a lot about money, it’s usually because they’re first generation low income students who have never had any money and would like to eat. Once again, eating comes up a lot. But I’m lucky because I became part of a program, oh gosh, I wanna say, four or five years ago, that was started by our chair Mehran Sahami called Embedded Ethics. And I decided to be one of the first pilot projects in which we work with a philosophy postdoc to put in ethical questions that tie into the topics that we’re covering. So each of my class always looks at things through the design lens, through the technology lens, through the political lens, from the ethical lens. And I feel like because I teach mostly upperclassmen, I tend to teach junior seniors and master students. It’s sort of a odd middle ground. But they’re very influenceable at that age, which is really wonderful. And so the things I can say, I can make them go, oh, they’re human beings that my stuff will be touching and do I wanna touch them inappropriately? No, we really don’t want to. We wanna do a nice thing. We’re gonna be thoughtful, we’re gonna think about the end possibilities that happen. So I like my job ’cause it’s a little bit of a mission is to help them do the hard thinking through the complexity of what they’re facing. And every once in a while I get the, you know, money, money, money types. And then we, yeah, enjoy lots of fine arguments about, you know, how much of your soul do you really wanna sell when you’re thinking through this and what does that mean? And I always enjoy those conversations. I think I answered most of your questions. Did I? Oh, what do they think? What do they think? Honestly, it could be a self-selection bias, but most of them are struggling with the same thing that you and I and most reasonable people are struggling with, which is, do I go all in in AI? You know, because it will get them jobs. And there’s no question about that. And because they’re from Stanford, they shouldn’t be worrying about getting jobs, but they still do. They care deeply about doing good. They often come to me, especially in my game design classes, they come to me and say, how can I be making a game when climate change is going to destroy the earth in the next few years? You know, how can I spend my time thinking about these unimportant things? We need to work on hard problems. They’re very hungry to create meaning and make a difference. And that makes me really happy. And of course then I can say to them, well, you know, games can make a difference too. You can learn a lot from games, right now. So I think most of them are really worried about the state of the world, and I don’t blame them. I’m worried. Jesse: Despite your worries, you’ve chosen to jump in with this technology anyway, and I wonder what has helped you get to that place where you can sort of reconcile yourself to it? Christina: Well, I tried to figure out who was the least evil. I ranked companies by how much harm are they really doing to the world. I could have gone even further, I suppose, and I could have gone with small models. I haven’t quite got myself all the way up to running a local model, which is where I’d like to be, ’cause then I can get even more in the world of least evil. But this is the world I work in. This is where I live, you know? And I don’t think that you can ignore AI tech as a viable choice. And the fact is that my students who I adore are gonna go work in tech and they need to know what AI is. They need to know what it doesn’t do. They need to know how it works. They need the answers to the same questions that I need. And so helping them think through it, first I had to do the thinking myself is really the short answer to that. Yeah, it gives me some cognitive dissonance. I realized I’d gone too far in the booster side when one day I was on LinkedIn and there’s a post by Timnit Gebru, who’s this amazing ethicist who’s kicked out by Google for being honest about what she thought in public. Don’t do that. And she shared a really interesting article about the effect of AI, like I said, in the global south. And my first instinct was like vague nausea. And I said, oh, I know this, this is cognitive dissonance. I need to change what I’m looking at and reading. And so I started following all the doomers, and, not the people who think AGI is gonna take over the world, but the people who are very worried about the real harms that we’re experiencing right now. And I got myself to a place where I can look at the boosters and I can look at the hype and I can look at the dark side and I can look at the problems. And neither of them makes me wanna throw up any more than any normal person would wanna throw up, I suppose. And the tech itself is, it’s just so remarkable too. I mean, the reality is all three of us started in this world at the same time, and then it was the internet. It was making web pages, you know, you could kind of poke at it and you could throw something together, and you got that joy of seeing something go live. You got that joy of seeing people use the things you made, and that’s heady stuff. And I have to say, I haven’t had this much fun making stuff since, you know, the early two thousands, I think. To sit here and fiddle, paddle around and be able to launch something is just profoundly satisfying for people like us who are makers. So, it has its cost and it has its pleasures. Peter: You’ve been teaching for about a decade now, like focused on teaching. Is that right? Christina: A little bit longer, I think, if you count CCA and General Assembly. AI in the Classroom Peter: You’ve been teaching for a while, and right now you’re teaching, it sounds like, both a kind of design class and a product management class. And I’m curious how embracing AI has caused you to evolve your syllabus, your curriculum. What did you used to do? What did you let go of? What are you embracing? What are you recognizing is, like, essential that is not changing? Like, how has that happened for you? Christina: Well, I started watching AI when ChatGPT first launched, and I didn’t do anything with it for a long time. I was just like, I’m gonna wait and see if it arrives. ’cause you have to remember, we’ve been waiting for AI to arrive for 20 years or longer. So seeing if it was actually gonna be a real thing that made a difference in everyday life and I think this last year was when it really went super mainstream, which is when I started to do with my deep dive, and it was with the desire to bring it into my classroom. And so th…

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64: The State of Design Orgs—Growth Paths, Quality Standards, and Empowerment Gaps Jan 24, 2026

Show notes

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…

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63: AI Means Product Needs UX More than Ever (ft. Christian Crumlish) Nov 01, 2025

Show notes

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. Christ…

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62: Design as Differentiator in a World of AI (ft. Andrew Hogan) Sep 14, 2025

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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 impor…

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61: The Paradoxes of Product Discovery (ft. Teresa Torres) Aug 09, 2025

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Show Notes Product Discovery coach, teacher, and author Teresa Torres joins Peter and Jesse to explore the messy reality of organizational change and cross-functional collaboration. She discusses why external coaching has limits, how individual contributors can drive change within resistant systems, and what the rise of AI means for blurring roles between product, design, and engineering teams. Learn more about Teresa Torres and her teaching at https://producttalk.org/Learn more about Jesse James Garrett and his coaching and consulting at https://jessejamesgarrett.com/Learn more about Peter Merholz and his new digital book “Design Org Dimensions” at https://petermerholz.com/ 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, Teresa Torres, product discovery coach and educator, and author of the book Continuous Discovery Habits, joins us to look at the changing landscape of digital product development from the product side. We’ll talk about what a coach can and can’t do for organizations and leaders, where product and design leaders get off track in driving meaningful outcomes, and what the new wave of generative AI means for the relationship between product and design. Peter: Hi Teresa. Thank you so much for joining us. Teresa: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to do this. Peter: So I’m gonna start with a very easy question. Well easy to ask. I dunno how difficult it is to answer, which is: just how do you introduce yourself these days? I’ve known you now for 15 years, and so I’m curious how you’ve evolved since we first met. Teresa: Yeah, I mean, I still introduce myself as a product discovery coach. I’m now an author, so that’s new in the last 15 years. But you know what’s funny is I don’t do a lot of coaching anymore. I mostly do a lot of curriculum design. I still do coaching through our office hours and things like that, but it used to be, my primary mode of engaging with people was I coach teams in depth over time. And that’s kind of changed. I now do a lot of curriculum design and we, our primary delivery mechanism is courses. Peter: Say a little bit more about that. When we worked together I was embedded within design teams and, you know, you were coaching us through these product discovery engagements at both OpenTable and then again at Snagajob, and there was a curriculum component to it at that time, I remember, but I’m curious how that’s shifted or evolved for you and, why more focus on curriculum than maybe the kind of hands-on coaching? From Coaching to Curriculum Development Teresa: Yeah, a few reasons. So yeah, I started out as a coach. What that meant was I worked with a cross-functional product team for roughly 12 weeks, sometimes a little longer for the teams that needed it. But our goal in those 12 weeks was just to build really strong discovery habits. It was everything from: how do we collaborate as a cross-functional team, what does a good customer interview look like, how do we run quick assumption tests that we can rely on, h ow to start with clear outcomes, kind of the all the habits you see in Continuous Discovery Habits. And I think just ’cause of the nature of my personality, I get bored when I do the same thing over and over again. And so I started creating a formal curriculum behind my coaching practice, ’cause I just got sick of telling teams the same thing over and over again. So then they would basically go through a content module. They would try to apply it in their own practice and then they would come to coaching. And what I found eventually was that the things that we would cover in coaching were more like, here’s what’s hard in my unique organizational context, and not, here’s what’s hard about the skill of interviewing. And that’s because the content was getting good enough that it was helping them build their skill, but it didn’t help them with the messiness of, like, but my sales team doesn’t want me to talk to a customer. And so I realized that one of the challenges with coaching is you need a leader who’s willing to invest in it. It’s kind of a high value, which means high cost, service. And I just wanted to get some of the skill development out to more teams. And so with online courses, you can offer it at a much lower price point. A lot more people can engage. We still do, I say we ’cause me and some of my instructors still do, coaching with some of the organizations that we go a little bit deeper with. But I would say primarily I do curriculum design to support our suite of courses. The Product Discovery Mindset Jesse: So tell me a little bit more about what you mean when you talk about product discovery and who you work with inside these organizations to support the development of this practice skillset. What would you call it? It’s almost a mindset, isn’t it? Teresa: it is a mindset. There’s several mindsets. There’s several skills… I mean, there’s like the academic term of like knowledge, skills, and abilities, KSA. It sort of spans a lot of things. I think the big thing for product discovery, I try to keep this really simple. How do we know we’re building the right stuff? And every team in order to build something, has to make decisions about what to build. How do we know those are the right decisions? How do we have good feedback loops with our customers to help steer us along the way? I know since your audience is a lot of designers, I will be upfront about a lot of these practices came from design, but came from a particular type of design. Jesse, I know we’ve talked about like, and both of you… Design agencies and like these practices of research and human-centered design and feedback from customers. I think what’s changing is, in the early days of the internet, we didn’t have the right people on our teams to do that research. And now companies are starting to invest in cross-functional teams that are building those skills. And so we’re bringing it in-house. Product teams are doing it themselves, instead of going out and hiring research firms or going out and hiring design firms. And so it’s led to a more team approach. It’s led to a more, just, cross-functional approach. And then I also think the pacing of it has changed quite a bit. So when we outsource something, we tend to hire a company for a big project. When we’re doing it internally, we can do it more continuously because we’re working on a product more continuously. Jesse: Do you engage with design teams in your practices? Is that a part of what you do or are you really focused on… Teresa: yeah. Jesse: …the product management side? Teresa: So in my coaching, I always coached the cross-functional product trio. So it was typically a product manager, a designer, and an engineer. Trios look different at every company. Sometimes they’re quads, sometimes they’re quints. Whatever the cross-functional team is, what roles you have. So, like, some teams that I worked with had a user researcher as the fourth person. Some teams had a product marketing manager as the fourth person. Some data products have a data scientist, sometimes in lieu of a designer, sometimes in addition to a designer. So when I say product trio, it’s really just the cross-functional product team. Whatever roles are involved and however many people that is, once you’re more than five people, it gets hard to move quickly. I would say generally it’s three to five people. And then we see the same thing in our courses. So we have product managers, designers, user researchers. And even lately, more engineers enrolling in our programs. Peter: I am curious how you think things have progressed, because in my interactions and conversations with my clients and other design leaders, it feels like so many organizations are still struggling to do just the basic blocking and tackling of things like product discovery or dual track agile or contemporary product development, or whatever you want to call it. There’s still a lot of PMs or POs getting requirements from the business and funneling it out to a group of people and saying, go build that. And I’m wondering if, and maybe now given your perhaps broader perspective, ’cause you’re engaging with more people through teaching than you probably could through coaching, like, are we still bending towards progress as a whole or are we, it feels at times, like, we’re kind of stuck or sometimes we go backwards. Like, what’s your take on, just, like, how things are going in terms of organizations adopting continuous discovery, product discovery, these practices. The Unevenness of Change Teresa: I think we’re still making progress. I think it’s uneven and there’s some two steps forward, one step back happening. So it can feel like in a single moment maybe we’re not making progress. But I just think back, like to the beginning of my career, okay, so I took my first full-time job in 1999. At that time, I graduated a very naive student of HCI. And I really thought this was just how business worked. And as you all know, this is simply, it’s still not how business works. But I’ll tell you, my first job, you wanna know what my title was? It was application software developer. Do you know what I did in my job? I did interaction design. Peter: Right. Teresa: People didn’t know what interaction design was. They didn’t hire designers, they hired people that built applications and software. And so even though I was a full-time designer, my title was application software developer. We have certainly come a long way. I’ll also tell you that, like, at that time, I think I was involved in a year in maybe like two or three usability studies because we had to rent a facility with a two-way mirror and it took all day and we spent a month recruiting the right people, right? Like if we just remember where we came from, like we have made tremendous progress. Now, I also, like, during that same time period, the web was blowing up everybody and their mom wanted to be a web developer, which means everybody and their mom wanted to be a designer. And now we say things like designers own research and designers own that. No, some designers have that background. Some designers do not. Some product managers have that background. Some product managers do not, right? And so I think some of this, like, it’s just as messy, it’s way messier than we want it to be. Here’s what I do see. I see way more companies recognizing if we wanna make good decisions about what we build, the customer needs to be part of that process somewhere. I think it’s hard to find a company that doesn’t agree with that statement. Now, does that mean they’re resourcing their teams to do that? Well, not necessarily. Does that mean when the economy shrinks that their founders, some very famous vocal founders, don’t start talking about we gotta go back to command and control and this is the right way to do things and we don’t empower our teams anymore, right? Like there’s always false starts, there’s always ups and downs. But I think the long arc, we have made tremendous progress. I’m still blown away when I meet a team that is talking to a customer every week. We have a whole industry of discovery tools. Of unmoderated testing platforms, one question surveys, all sorts of testing tools that like literally would not have been able to exist ’cause there was no market for them. Whereas now there’s a huge market for them. Jesse: I’m interested in the cross-functional collaboration piece of what you described. You know, I often feel like everything of any strategic significance in an organization usually came out of a conversation among three or four or five people. Tops. It’s rare that it’s a mass of people coming together to actually drive something meaningful. And I wonder about the different perspectives that you have to reconcile as part of that process, and what it takes to create a sense of being, actually just being on the same team, you know, across these different functions. I hear from so many leaders who feel that they are caught in incentive structures that incentivize different behaviors and different outcomes cross-functionally. So design’s chasing design’s goals, and product is chasing product’s goals, and the organization doesn’t really have any interest in reconciling those. And so we have to reconcile them on the ground, face-to-face in those three to five person meetings. And I’m wondering about how you’ve seen that done effectively. “We suck at collaborat##ing” Teresa: We don’t, I mean, I think if the outcomes aren’t aligned, they’re not gonna work as a team. The good news is I do see way more companies giving cross-functional teams a shared outcome way more than I’ve ever seen in the past. Like, I think we are making progress there. Now, of course, each functional role has other goals or other health metrics they care about, right? Like, a cross-functional product squad isn’t gonna have a shared outcome of like site uptime, but your engineers better care about site uptime, right? And there’s probably similar analogies for every function. I think here’s the reality. We suck at collaborating and we see this like up and down the organization. Like our executive teams are totally dysfunctional ’cause we don’t know how to collaborate across functional roles. Too many of us are taught from day one in business, be territorial, have clear boundaries between your role and the person next to you. And this ladders all the way up the organization. It’s why the head of sales only cares about closing the next deal, and the head of product only cares about how we’re gonna serve the whole market. And the head of design only cares about, but it’s not delightful enough. I know these are like platitudes and I’m not trying to dismiss any of these things, but like, it causes a lot of dysfunction and, like, if we don’t let go of those things, we will actually never collaborate. The good news is, I think, at the individual team level, it’s easier to do this than at the executive level because at the team level, your scope is narrower. You’re just trying to build a thing. It’s three to five humans where you can build strong relationships. There’s not as much at stake, and it really is just like, how do we learn about each other and learn about each other’s strengths and figure out who should do what when. I think it does require that everybody let go of maybe owning some of the things they think they should own all the time. And so here’s what I mean by that. Let’s say a designer wants to get their hands dirty and like play around with Cursor and implement some of their design. Should a engineer on the team that usually does front end development be threatened by that? I don’t know. Maybe not. And like when the product manager uses Lovable to like play with the feature before it goes to design, should the designer be threatened by that? I don’t know. Now if we’re shipping it without it going to the designer, I have a problem with that. And like, ideally, all three of these people are like ideating together and playing with some of these things together. But I think, especially with generative AI, like, the boundaries between our roles are gonna blur even more than they already have. And I personally have always been a boundary spanner. Like I’ve been a designer, I’ve been a product manager. I do some coding. Like, I really think the more we overlap in roles, the better we’ll work together. But it’s hard because our egos get in the way, right? Like, I wanna own that decision. I wanna do that piece. Peter: Yeah. Egos get in the way, as Jesse said, incentives get in the way, right? We are rewarded as individuals, not as teams. and I’m wondering on that front, if you’ve identified a set of qualities or conditions that indicate to you that this group of people is more likely to adopt practice…

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60: Making the World– Design Education and Social Change (ft. Lesley-Ann Noel, PhD) Jun 29, 2025

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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…

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59: Design Isn’t Dead, But It’s Seen Better Days (ft. John Gleason) Jun 06, 2025

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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: Peter and Jesse are joined by design and business consultant John Gleason. Coming up through P&G’s famous design initiative, we get his perspective on design beyond digital products, such as consumer packaged goods, we explore some significant parallels across industries and design domains with important lessons on the pitfalls that lead to diminishing influence for design leaders, and share what they should advocate in order to break the downward spiral. Help UX and Get a Chance to receive $100! Peter is conducting a global UX and Design Organizational Health survey to better understand the state of our practice and industry. 5 respondents will receive either a $100 gift card or 1 hr of consulting/coaching with Peter. It takes about 10 minutes to complete. Thank you! 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, is design dead? That’s the question strategy consultant John Gleason asked at a recent design conference panel. The ensuing discussion struck some familiar notes for digital product design leaders, but John Gleason doesn’t come from digital product design. Today, we’ll get his perspective on design beyond digital products, such as consumer packaged goods, the stuff you find on the shelves in grocery and drugstore. We’ll explore some significant parallels across industries and design domains with important lessons on the pitfalls that lead to diminishing influence for design leaders, what they should advocate for, and how to break the downward spiral. Peter: Hi John. Thank you for joining us. John: Delighted to be here, Peter. Thank you. Peter: So you and I met on the internet, specifically LinkedIn, around a discussion that was happening based on an article written in Fast Company that was explaining what this journalist had witnessed at a panel of design leaders that you helped moderate. And the title of the article had the provocative statement: Is Design Dead? So that’s how I’d like to start this conversation with you. Maybe we’re starting at the end, and then this can be a very brief conversation… John: What if I said the answer is yes, end of story? Peter: Then, then, then we wrap up the podcast. Jesse: Thanks everybody for listening. You can find us at findingourway.design. Peter: But seriously, I do want to ask, it is meant to be a provocative, obviously there were discussions happening on that panel and in that room that led to this question. So when you’re faced with a question is design dead, how do you respond? John: Well, we respond by creating a conference to talk about it. So my conference partners and I, David Butler, who was the first head of design at Coca-Cola and Fred Richards, who’s a long time ECD, CCO -type person in the brand design space at big agencies. The three of us came together just simply to talk about the industry itself. And as we compared notes, I have started to see that design is in decline, particularly in the consumer facing space, probably starting eight or nine years ago, kind of as evidenced by shrinking budgets and shrinking organizations and diminishing the reporting structure of design into leadership in those companies. And a lot of the people that I’ve talked to kind of chalk it up to, oh, well that’s the economy. Oh, we’re gonna cut budgets, it’s belt tightening, it’s these things. But I’ve had the chance to peek inside more than a hundred big corporations and a couple thousand design agencies. And so I see patterns that emerged. Jesse: Mm-hmm. John: And that led to the provocation of “Is design dead?” And I think we inherently knew that the answer was no, but I don’t think the rest of the room…so we had about a hundred people design leaders from various companies, mostly consumer facing corporations, but we had telecom, we had financial services, we had healthcare, we had core tech there in the room represented as well. I don’t think most of the people in the room saw the patterns because they only see what’s happening in their company, or the one or two companies they may have been a part of. And so there was certainly evidence, as we started to unfold some of the things, people were, “Oh, just thought that was belt tightening. I just thought that was seasonal. I just thought that was post pandemic economy.” That started the conversation. Jesse: So tell us a little bit about these design teams that you were studying and what was the change that you noticed over time? What was happening with these teams? John: So a, few things that I’ve had the chance to see. I’ve tracked about 200, almost 250 companies since about 2016, 2017. Jesse: Mm-hmm. John: And it’s things like, what agencies do they work with? Have they built in-house teams? What’s the reporting structure of the organizations? And some of the patterns that I’ve seen, Jesse, are 39% of those companies, so 95 companies of the 243, have cut the top one or two levels of their design function… Jesse: mm-hmm. John: … or they’ve downgraded the title to some lower title in the company, or they’ve downgraded the boss, the reporting title of the boss of those organizations. Conversely, only 6%, only 15 of those companies have done the opposite, have elevated design with a higher title or a higher reporting status in the company. 9% of them, 22 companies have eliminated more than half of their entire design function in a single year. Jesse: Wow. John: 84% of them, this one shouldn’t be a surprise to people. 84% of the design leaders or the heads of design reports to a specific function in the company… Jesse: hmm John: Marketing, innovation product. To me, the troubling part of that is 75% of them don’t report to the head of that function. Jesse: hmm. John: They report to somebody lower in that functional hierarchy, which again, to me, signals a deemphasis of design, as a more of a service organization than a beacon for the future. Almost half, 47% of these companies, the head of design is at a senior director or lower. Jesse: Hmm. John: They’re not even in the executive community inside of those companies, nor do they have a career opportunity to grow beyond that director, senior director, some are even senior manager. Jesse: That’s as far as the design ladder reaches in those organizations. John: Right, right. Yeah. Jesse: So I find myself curious about the mandates of these teams and what these teams are being asked to deliver, and whether those mandates are shrinking as the teams scale down and move downstream as you’re describing in these very large organizations. So what kind of design are we talking about here? John: They certainly are diminishing in the scope of influence inside of those companies. So many of them, the design organization in a lot of consumer goods companies is really a packaging function. And it ends up being a decoration function for packaging. Jesse: Okay. John: In some cases, they might be able to influence a better consumer experience, but, in many cases, especially in the, present economic circumstance, it’s cost cut, diminished, streamlined. Jesse: Right. We’re basically talking about boxes and bottles on retail shelves. John: Yeah. Yeah. And, there are some where design sits in an R and D or innovation organization… Jesse: mm-hmm. John: … where design influences, again, the structural component of packaging. Occasionally they’ll influence the juice and the powders and the things that are inside the boxes and bottles. But mostly more powerful R and D organization says, Hey, design, we’ve got that. We’ll take care of that. Jesse: Right. John: And they tend to be looking at very narrow components inside the company. The other interesting thing, particularly as it relates to a more digital component, is many of these companies have assigned a chief digital officer in charge of the digital transformation and digital pathway for those big companies, building their own design teams, largely UX, UI and some development, although development tends to be outsourced and offshored. And they’re not connected to the other design capabilities inside the company. Jesse: Right. Yeah. John: And in fact they sometimes compete. I did some consulting work for a couple of companies where there was somewhat of a bitter, antagonistic relationship between the head of design and the head of digital. Jesse: Yeah. Well this is, I laugh because this is a regular pattern that we saw in our consulting work going back 20 years. That if the digital product design team was more closely aligned with digital than with design, sometimes that created a conflict and that created friction internally in terms of how things got done. I’m curious about the evolution that you’ve seen in these mandates. So in what ways have these design teams had to refocus their efforts as they’ve scaled down? John: I spent 20 years at Procter and Gamble. I was a part of the very earliest portions of P and G’s journey to elevate design. Jesse: Hmm. John: When I joined the design function, there were 60 people in the design function at P and G. When I left, about five years later, there were 350. It was all around strategic design, leadership, the head of design, Claudia Kotchka at the time, and the CEO AG Lafley had a vision for design. So, why I believe design is in decline is most of the design responsibilities that I see today are nowhere close to what I experienced at P and G. Peter: Hmm. Jesse: Hmm John: That’s the decline part, but you know, there are one or two work generations that have come in and out of the workforce since the early two thousands. I’m often brought into corporate organizations either by the head of design who wants to try to figure out how to articulate up to the C-suite about how design is more important, how it should be invited earlier, how it should be organized and not just touching an artifact, you know, a package or a website or a banner or something, but influence the entire enterprise. Jesse: Mm-hmm. John: The C-suite often has no clue what design would do with the rest of the enterprise other than the thing that they had been doing… Jesse: mm-hmm. John: … in the company. And so there’s often that disconnect. Jesse: right John: One of the things that I often see, first of all, there is no school largely for design leaders to step in and talk business. Jesse: Right. John: Very, very few programs. IIT does a nice job. SCAD is beginning to do things like that by building a business innovation component. But largely it’s teaching the tools of the industry. So when somebody lands in one of these important jobs, they speak the language that they know, whatever it is: UX, UI, digital, color theory, communication theory, whatever those things are. And the thing that I have seen is, when they are under duress, when the business pressures start to pile up, most design leaders recess back into becoming uber project managers for the design activities, rather than leaning into the organizational component of influencing structure in humans and leadership. Jesse: Mm-hmm. John: If it gets to that, it begins to spiral. And within two years, that person is often gone because they’re micromanaging their team, and they’re trying to deliver great outputs, but not really influencing… Jesse: Right. John: …where design can influence. Design has a superpower of seeing things that other people can’t see, but often can’t articulate that in the context of the business language. Jesse: It almost suggests that, there’s, like, this gravitational force that pulls leaders down toward this sort of operational value proposition, as opposed to a more strategic value proposition for design as a function, for themselves as leaders, that takes active, ongoing energy to resist for leaders, yeah? John: One of the things I observed at P and G was when design was added as this new strategic capability for the company at the request of the CEO AG Lafley, the other functions felt like they had to defend themselves against design taking the fun stuff away from them. And part of it was, it isn’t trying to take things away. There was a component of let’s make sure the right people are with the right skills, are working on the right things at the right time. The influence of design was intended to try to make everything else better. Jesse: Mm-hmm. John: The ability to step back and really advocate for the user, in our case, the consumer. You know, P&G was pretty well known for consumer research and brand management and marketing, a lot of other things. So the idea that design could step in and knew better than these things that have been in place for 50 or a hundred years, some people kind of took it personally. I earn a lot of enemies in the design space when I say this. I say if a company really wants to elevate design in a truly strategic way for the entire enterprise, it’s my opinion, the first head of design probably should not be somebody with a portfolio. Jesse: Hmm. Who should they be instead? John: It should be somebody that might have come out of the business, might have been a marketer, might have been an innovator, might have been a strategist, but has a high IQ for design because those people know how to have the battles with other people with more stripes. They know how to, play the political game. They know how to influence. And I’m gonna be horrendously unfair and I’m probably gonna get a lot of mail from your listeners. Designers index introvert. Jesse: Mm-hmm. Peter: Yeah. You’re not gonna get any pushback on that. John: Which means I don’t want conflict. I’m gonna run away from conflict and I’m not gonna address it. Whereas Claudia was an accountant by education and a marketer by training. And she had no fear walking into people that had more stripes than her to say, you’re not doing it right. I mean, she threatened a few business unit presidents to say, I’m taking your whole design team because you haven’t treated them well. You don’t respect them, and they all wanna quit, so I’m gonna take them. And of course, you can’t do that. And, you know, then the tete-a-tete occurred, and those are extreme examples, but part of this is, unless a business leader, whatever function you’re in, and I’ll highlight design in particular, unless you’re willing to fall on the sword for some things… Jesse: mm. John: … then, you can expect that the pressures of the business environment and the politics has the risk of crumbling your status in the enterprise. Peter: A couple of thoughts. The first, it’s interesting to hear you say that about that idea of your first head of design not necessarily being someone who came up through the practice. It sounds like Claudia was like that. Jesse and I have had that experience, him more directly than I, with the head of design at Capital One, which was the company that acquired Adaptive Path, was Scott Zimmer, who… his background was in brand and marketing. But he was design mature. He understood the opportunity that design delivered, and this was, you know, over a decade ago, better than almost any design executive I ever met, he knew how to communicate up. He knew how to get senior leadership excited about what designers could do in a way that designers often struggle articulating their own value. So I’ve seen that. I wanna go back though to the design in decline conversation. ‘Cause in order to decline it had to have risen… John: yep. Peter: …before then. And you explain the P and G story where a very savvy CEO invests in this function, makes it strategic. Like AG Lafley clearly had a plan. With Claudia had a kind of lieutenant who could realize that plan. But that’s likel…

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58: AI is a Stress Test for Your UX: What Cracks Will It Show? May 02, 2025

Show notes

Show Notes Jesse and Peter explore how AI is revealing the true value proposition of design teams. They discuss why “whoever controls the prompt controls the product” and why design leaders must understand their organization’s expectations before embracing AI. The more things change, the more they stay the same—AI may be new, but the fundamentals of design leadership remain critical. Jesse’s presentation “The Elements of UX in the Age of AI” is now available as a digital download. Get your copy today. Peter has just launched his masterclass “UX/Design Leadership Demystified” in two formats—self-study and cohort course. Learn more here. Transcript Peter: Make sure to stick around to the end of the episode to hear a couple of new offerings from Peter and Jesse. Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett, Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And we’re finding our way, Peter: Navigating the opportunities Jesse: and challenges Peter: of design and design leadership, Jesse: On today’s show, reflecting on my talk: The Elements of UX in the Age of AI, Peter and I sit down one-on-one to talk about AI and its implications for design roles, design processes, and design leaders. We’ll talk about the new skills teams will need, the old skills that won’t be going away, and why. In an AI-enabled world, whoever controls the prompt, controls the product. Peter: So, a few weeks ago now, you gave a talk on the Elements of User Experience in the Age of AI. And that’s where I want to start. As a UX guy, when I see commentary about the intersection of UX and AI, or rather, primarily, design and AI… Jesse: mm-hmm. Peter: …it typically focuses on the top two layers of the elements diagram, the surface layer and the skeleton layer. And really the surface layer. I don’t even know if we’re getting much from a workflow standpoint. I’m just seeing screen design… Jesse: mm-hmm. Peter: …being what’s being discussed. And I’m wondering, am I missing something? Where is the conversation happening about AI and how it’s affecting the lower levels of the diagram? The structural concerns, the scope concerns, the strategic concerns? ’cause that for me, given my background in strategic design, is where my focus is at. And it also feels like, well, that’s the kind of thing AI can’t do. It requires my human brain. But I also don’t want to be that guy and be ignorant of the possibility that these tools are able to have a more kind of foundational… Jesse: mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Peter: impact on the practice of developing user experiences. AI’s Strengths: Analysis and Synthesis Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. So the way that I tend to think about this technology is in terms of what I see as its two strengths, which are analysis and synthesis. Which is to say, finding patterns within a data set, and then extrapolating from those patterns something broader, right? So the pattern finding is the analysis part, and analysis is the stuff that’s gonna kick in when you’re down at those lower levels on the elements of user experience, where you’re talking about strategy, where you’re talking about scope, where you’re talking about user needs, where you’re talking about business requirements, where you’re talking about business models, where you’re talking about functional requirements, content requirements, all of those kinds of things. So this is where getting a whole bunch of data together and feeding it to the machine can help surface patterns that you might not otherwise see. And this analysis value proposition for the LLM is where I see it coming into play in these more kind of strategic and product strategy, scope oriented domains. Then when you get toward the top layers of the elements, then you start to get into these areas where the synthesis matters more. Where it’s more about what can you create, what can you generate out of the insights that you’ve created, out of the, really, the constraints that you’ve identified on your design problem. Because if we think about the double diamond, this is where divergent thinking comes in, where you are generating possibilities, creating ideas, and then convergent thinking comes in where you are refining those ideas based on criteria that you’ve developed. And so these are both areas where an LLM can potentially play a role in a user experience design process. What we see though, is that in these analysis oriented areas, where you are turning user needs into insights, turning those insights into requirements where you are evaluating and refining possible strategic directions, these tend to be processes that are owned by people outside of design. They may be owned by people in a UX research role. They may be owned by people in a product leadership role. They may be owned by people who are in a business leadership role. But often the direct purview of a design leader doesn’t actually extend all the way down the stack of the elements of user experience. And so what you see is a lot of the things that end up influencing user experience outcomes are actually owned by other roles in organizations. So I think part of what you’re seeing is that what design leaders feel like they can authentically control is the stuff that’s closer to the top of the stack, whereas the activity that’s happening at the bottom of the stack is happening in other parts of the organization, or that design leaders are ceding their influence over those areas out of a sense that that’s somebody else’s job, and my product person is gonna handle the AI that generates requirements, and I’m not gonna try to handle that myself. Peter: Weird that you say some of this, in part because I tend to think of the user needs part, the user research part is very much within the realm of design, typically. Jesse: It depends on the organization. In some organizations, the people who actually own that stuff don’t report into a design leader. Peter: That’s increasingly true, but not historically true, at least when it comes to UX research. There’s other forms of research. Jesse: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Design leaders telling on themselves Peter: As you’re saying this, I’m thinking about something I saw a day or two ago on LinkedIn where a design leader was saying that unless you know code or are some Jony Ive-level brand craft wizard… Jesse: mm. Peter: that AI is going to take everything in in the middle or AI is going to subsume the work you do. Jesse: Mm-hmm. Peter: And I responded, well, maybe, if all your leading is production, but that’s not design, right? And so one of the things that’s been clear to me is design leaders telling on themselves about how they have led design and how they have abandoned those lower levels of the diagram. Jesse: Yes. Peter: And I say abandoned. It was not taken from them. If they knew what they were doing, it was there for them to lead. In my role as a design leader, I led folks doing the research. I led folks figuring out organizational models. I led folks developing the insights coming outta research that drove, that informed, I should say, product requirements. There were other means of informing product requirements… Jesse: mm-hmm. Peter: …certain kinds of customer conversations or whatever. But, maybe the conversation about AI and UX is really just a conversation about UX and design. It’s casting a light on just all the different ways, the varieties of ways that this has been led, this has been practiced in organizations, because, my point of view, both having led teams and working with design leaders of teams, is most of the teams I’m involved with have some responsibility all the way up and down the stack. You know, they maybe have more responsibility the higher up the diagram you get, sure. And the lower down the diagram, there’s a conversation to be had, but it’s a conversation. They’re not simply taking user needs from someone or the strategic objectives from someone. I guess, if as a designer and design leader, all you did was executing on the synthesis parts as you were calling them, the upper levels of the diagram, yes, it does appear that much of that work can be done by machines… Jesse: mm-hmm. Peter: …and that, for me seems like an opportunity for design. But it’s, intriguing how many people see it as a threat. Jesse: Right. Well, so, as you know, this talk came out of the work that I’ve been doing with design leaders for the last several years as a leadership coach. And in working with design leaders on their leadership challenge, it was this recurring theme that kept coming up of like, I’ve gotta figure out what I’m gonna do about AI. And what I found in those conversations is the value that AI potentially can deliver to your team depends a lot on the value that your team is seen as delivering to the larger organization. So if the value proposition of your team is narrowly focused on quality and speed of delivery of design assets, the value proposition of AI for your team is very different than it would be for a team where your value prop is more rooted in product strategy, user research, driving requirements, that kind of thing. And that kind of thing is gonna be highly variable because we’ve seen, as we’ve talked about with the variety of design leaders that we’ve talked with on this show over the last few years, we’ve seen a wide range of different frames for the value proposition of design as a function. And so where AI fits in, I think really relies on the leader clearly understanding what the organization thinks design is there to do for them. Peter: I had a similar conversation with some folks probably two years ago now about design systems, and the rise of design systems. And these folks were thinking of putting together an assessment of your design system situation. And as they were sharing this with me, what I realized is that that assessment had very little to do with the design system. Rather, that assessment was a probe on the organizational maturity when it came to matters of design and user experience. That, what you got out of that assessment was going to more be an indicator of what you were just talking about in terms of how the organizations that these leaders are in, understand design. And I think this is something we’ve talked a lot about, but I don’t know if we’ve talked about it on the podcast. And I wrote a little bit about it a couple weeks ago, which is the benefit for design leaders in considering their team, as a function, as an organizational function of the firm. Jesse: Yes. Peter: … not as a set of practices or activities. Jesse: Yes. Or as a group of people to defend or protect, right? Design is a symbiote Peter: Yeah. It’s more than just a group of people. There’s lots of ways you can slice these companies. You can have departments, you can have business units, you can have functions. And when you think of design as a function, it gets very simple in terms of what others expect of your team. You mentioned the word value proposition, right? What is the value proposition of your team? And, when you think of the value proposition of your team, as if it were a function, you can start looking at analogies of, well, what are the value propositions of product management, of engineering, of marketing, of sales? And how do you line up with that? And design has a really hard time lining up with that. That value proposition is different across different companies because design as a function is like a, um, a symbiote, I was gonna say parasite, but let me, let me say symbiote… Jesse: [Laughter] better. Peter: …design as a function is a symbiote in that it ends up taking on the shape of the organization it’s part of in a way that other functions I don’t think do, right? Marketing is gonna kind of look the same wherever it is. Sales is gonna look the same wherever it is. Engineering’s gonna mostly look the same wherever it is. Design is going to have to take on the shape of the organization that it’s part of in order for it to deliver its value, because design’s value is, much more about multiplying the success of other functions than delivering something straight on its own, right? And so, maybe before people start getting caught up in, how am I going to be disrupted by AI… Jesse: mm-hmm. Peter: … to do some groundwork in thinking about, how is my team showing up as a function of the firm? What is our value proposition? What do people expect of us? How satisfied are we with those expectations? Or do we need to change those expectations? Are people thinking of us primarily as UI production, or are people coming to us for the full stack of user experience delivery? And then once you have a sense of what your value proposition is, what people’s expectations are of you, now I’m wondering, how AI can be a tool to enable you to realize your objective in terms of how you want the rest of the organization to see your team. Jesse: Right. So there is delivering within your existing mandate, so to speak. Like, we’re gonna leverage this technology to better meet the expectations that have already been set, right? And then there’s the question of, well, can we push the boundaries of those expectations? Can we make a play for a broader value proposition for design in the product development process, for design in the product strategy process, to have more of a voice, to have more of a point of view that it brings to the table on where all of this is going. Whomever controls the prompt controls the product Jesse: One of the things that I mentioned in the talk that I think is a really important piece for design leaders is, in an AI-enabled digital product development workflow, whoever controls the prompt controls the product. Whoever is talking to the robot that makes the thing is the person with the power. And so your choice as a design leader is to figure out which things do you want control of the prompt over. Which areas of the product do you want your people to be the most prominent voice around, and building processes that support that voice and that engagement with the technology to elevate that value proposition. So it may well be that you’ve got, as we were talking about, product and maybe even research, people who are nominally owners of the lower planes on the stack who don’t have a strong point of view, who don’t have, you know, a facility with the technology or an ability to wrangle it toward those objectives. If you can step into that void, if your people can do that better than their people can do that, you can make a play for a wider value proposition for your team and for design as a function. But you gotta master the prompt craft first. The Role of Power Peter: This is interesting. I’m glad we’re getting to prompts and, I suspected we would get there. This ties into something else that I don’t think you and I have discussed on the podcast, but have discussed outside of it, which is the three types of power. This is something that I was introduced to about a month and a half ago at the Advancing Research Conference in a talk given by Robert Fabricant. And it’s a model where within any group of people, but let’s think about it within organizations, there are three distinct types of power that show up in these organizations. What most people think of when they think of power is positional power, right? The senior most person in their ability to tell other people what to do. The second type of power that comes up is expertise power, that someone has special knowledge of a thing, and because of that, other people will listen to them because they don’t have that knowledge. So this person might not be particularly senior, but they’ve, to use the example you just shared, they’ve mastered prompt craft. They know prompts better than anybody else. The third type of power is relational power. and that’s how people, it’s gonna sound mercenary when I say it, use relationships to make those connections with others within the organization to then realize their power for getting things done, getting the things they want done. And…

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