Hiring teams and recruiters owe candidates accountability, not excuses. Ghosting is a natural byproduct of an immature hiring process. Whether your not you rejected a candidate because your team botched an interview, or the person was legitimately not a fit, own it. Reach out. Make your decision clear. Candidates deserve respect, not be to collateral damage from someone else's unpreparedness.

Most "innovation" is incremental noise chasing technology or profit. It’s a reflexive enhancement or a copy of a competitor's move. Engineers build to demonstrate what new technology can do. Business spends the minimal capital needed for the most revenue possible. Design starts somewhere else: with people. To be sure, design will leverage the latest tech, and work to get highest ROI, but only after it can answer the one question that produces something worth having.

A common complaint amongst design professionals is that design is seen as a verb,—something you do, and not as professional discipline. Now with AI, the verb design can be done by anyone who has access to a design system and ADA guidelines. Design needs to take ownership of the word design—like engineering, marketing and (product) management have done. More importantly design needs to regain the trust that it has lost in the last 20 years.

While I am not tone-deaf to our current economic landscape, I am also aware that many designers, especially UX designers, are feeling disenfranchised, drifting in the long shadow AI is casting over their perceived self-worth. In response I cannot help but ask: do you know what truly interests you, what concerns you, as a designer? And are you working in pursuit of those interests? Or are you just working?

AI is repeating design's mistake: throwing budget at tools without building the skills to use them. Twenty years ago companies threw headcount and budget behind design without understanding what made it actually work, and the results were disappointing to everyone. Today companies doing the same with AI: near-universal adoption, blown budgets, almost no enterprise-wide value. The fix isn't more spend or a better model. It's building the coaching infrastructure to use AI well. Here's what SAP's design transformation teaches us.

how do you make the leap from IC to executive? No two paths are ever the same. Sometimes it a question of hard work, taking one step at time. Other times its a question of getting on a plane.

Changing roles is a great time to detox from the culture you just left. While the experience you gained at your previous company is likely a big part of what gets you hired into your next role, it's worth taking time to be intentional about what you want to bring with you. While you're looking for your next role, do the work to separate what is authentically you from the habits and assumptions you've picked up along the way.

Craft is not a credential. Unfortunately most design leaders have reduced making to things like post-it notes and white board sketches. Or assembling components from pattern library like Colorforms. Design leaders who have never made something from raw material, never felt the gap between their intention and the execution created by their own hand, can never really understand craft. 

As Frank Herbert said: “fear is the mind killer”. But today’s is the fear of missing out. AI is causing companies to revert to old behaviors; chasing the technology and not the opportunity. You can’t talk your way into alignment, no mater how many presentations or white papers you write. For design leaders the most effective way to advocate for your point of view it to put it into action, to demonstrate why it matters.

Designers have dedicated two decades to mastering the language of business, but most stopped there. They stopped short of true impact. Were you one of them?

Despite acquiring the right vocabulary, these designers often express frustration over their perceived lack of authority. The issue is not in what they say; its what they hold themselves accountable for. Accountability for what gets built and why, its effectiveness, and its impact on growth. Designers who bridge this gap be asking for a seat at the table; they will have build their own.

Eliminating you design team while potentially making the numbers work in the short-term will have a negative impact almost immediately. AI identified 5 key areas where it cannot do the designer’s job, so your engineers will need to step up if you want to deliver success.

Design is not aesthetics. Design is solving meaningful problems in meaningful ways. Design distills what has meaning to the user, both in the near-term as well as the long-term. Design serves the betterment of society using the tools of the time. And it strives to understand what has meaning to our civilization ensuring both equity and inclusion. Design strives to find meaningful solutions beyond humanity’s constructions to address planetary concerns ensuring sustainability and regeneration. Design’s responsibility is to go beyond mere emotion and to provide people with the ability to assign meaning beyond functionality.

For decades, we have all tried to hire T-shaped talent: people with broad general knowledge and deep expertise in a single discipline. It made perfect sense when roles & deliverables were clearly defined but AI has rewritten the rules. Today, the boundaries between design, engineering, product, and marketing are dissolving. Work no longer happens within disciplines. Innovation emerges from people who can connect ideas, evaluate AI-generated outputs, and understand the underlying models and data that shape them. The future belongs to M-shaped professionals.

Simply pushing for design to report to the CEO is like teaching a pig to sing: it wastes your time and annoys the pig. Stop demanding to report to the CEO and start delivering value to the business in dramatic and game changing ways. Demand accountability for the success of the business; meet with customers, turn their needs in revenue—both new and recurring. Stop leaning back, expecting to be noticed and lean-in, engage, build value both for the company and for yourself.

Blindly applying a prescriptive playbook or process to every novel situation will deliver predictable outcomes but it will also ensure the outcomes are mediocre at best, and worst leave untold value sitting on the floor. Don’t allow the rush to conformity rob you of innovations, or the ability to gain greater value, simply because it was hanging over the foot of your bed.

No Baker, Doctor, or Mathematician ever felt their profession was at risk because of a boxed cake mix, first aid kit, or a handheld calculator. Consumers want designs that engage and connect on an emotional level; they want designs that feel intuitive, personal, and that make them felt seen. The first university programs for Human Computer Interaction were established over 40 years ago. The science of ergonomics and human factors goes back to the 1940’s. Design should never be negotiated the way priorities are debated. Designers need to stand up for their own creditability if they expect others to do the same.

Craft, as we invoke it today, is an illusion—a nostalgic callback to a halcyon era of design when form, color, texture, refinement, and detail were shaped through apprenticeship and accumulated over decades. The uncomfortable truth is that the ground beneath the profession is shifting faster than most can adapt. But in a era where trends ignite and evaporate at the speed of an algorithmic swipe, craft is a mirage, promises of stability, control and relevance in a world defined by volatility.

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.