In the game of Battleship, knowing where your opponent’s ships are not is as important as knowing where they are.  The same is true with product development: knowing where not to invest gives you focus and dramatically increases your odds of winning the game. Knowing where the battleships are not is also true for companies pursuing strong lines of growth and market position. Knowing what the market is ready for, who’s investing to define the space, creating awareness, and priming the pump is critical. While first mover advantage is the dream of many entrepreneurs, second mover advantage reduces your risk, and allow you to invest in building a better moat: superior execution.

For over 20 years Adobe, Figma, MacroMedia, Sketch, Canva, etc. have shaped our design tools, indeed they have even shaped design education. More to the point, these companies have determined how design should be done, defining design in both the how and the what. Most importantly they have removed the tangible byproducts of the designer’s thinking; their sketches. Like a mathematician’s chalkboard, not only did this process sharpen the designer’s thinking it also improved their craft, immersing the designer in their own thinking, allowing other share in their thinking. With GenAI the time has come for designers to reclaim their tools, and shape the tools we need to be successful.

Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience outlined five UX planes. While foundational for design’s role, this model has always fallen short in the face of complex enterprise systems.

Now with the arrival of GenAI we need to challenge the primacy of the graphical interface with the introduction context-aware, multimodal, and adaptive experiences. It’s time to rethink UX as an emergent, AI-mediated systems. Like a building on a floating foundation, generative user experiences achieve balance—not by resisting change, but by responding to it. They rest not on fixed inputs, but on the dynamic equilibrium of evolving data, adjusting in real time to preserve coherence and relevance not a static hierarchy of layers.