Essays on AI, design leadership, and product strategy from 18+ years in the industry.
A study published this week showed that engineering teams using AI-enabled workflows can now test nearly 4x more design options per project than conventional approaches.
I have sat in more fintech design reviews than I can count. And the pattern is always the same. The team walks through a slick onboarding flow. Beautiful gradients. Smooth transitions.
Somewhere in the last decade, we decided that the way to reward great designers was to stop them designing. Promote them. Give them a team. Hand them a calendar full of alignment meetings.
There is a new user in your product and they will never click a button. They will never scroll. Never squint at your onboarding flow. Never rage-tap a loading spinner.
Over 45,000 tech workers were laid off in the first quarter of 2026. A solid chunk were in product design. And if you spend any time on LinkedIn right now, it looks grim.
Three days after Mike Krieger, Anthropic's CPO, stepped down from Figma's board, Anthropic launched Claude Design on 17 April 2026. Figma's stock dropped 7% in a single trading day (DesignRush,...
Product design postings fell 5.5% in April 2026. Design engineering postings rose 14.4% in the same month (Zero To Mastery, April 2026). Those two numbers are not telling a story...
Every design leader I know is asking the wrong question about Lovable 2.0.
Most product designers I know are still chasing the wrong promotion. They want to manage. They think headcount equals seniority. That mental model is six years out of date.
Most companies I've watched hire a full-time design director in the last three years didn't need one. They needed a sharp founding designer and adult supervision — not an expensive...
Here's something most design leaders won't say out loud: if you're a senior designer who hasn't been promoted in two years, stop reviewing your own work.
The average fintech product loses 63% of new users during onboarding — 5.7 million people walking away from a product that failed them in their first sixty seconds.
Only 15% of neo-banks are profitable in 2026. Twenty-seven percent of new users go inactive within their first year. Thirty-nine percent hold accounts at both a neo-bank and a traditional bank.
Google relaunched Stitch on March 19th. AI-native infinite canvas, voice commands, multi-screen generation from a natural language prompt. The Figma PMs are relaxed. The designers are panicking.
Open every consumer fintech app in dark mode. Gradient cards. AI tiles. Apple Wallet-style lists. They all look identical — because they all copied the same three references.
The best thing I ever did for my director-level work was stop being a director. Leaving the structure of a big org and running client delivery from scratch stripped away every comfort blanket.
66% of CEOs plan to freeze or cut hiring through the rest of 2026. The assumption: AI will absorb the output. What they haven't accounted for is the quality gap no model can close.
The most dangerous thing happening in design right now isn't AI. It's the quiet exodus of the best senior designers away from management and into deep, autonomous craft.
Figma just gave AI agents write access to your design files. Not read access. Write. Through the Figma MCP server, agents can now create frames, build components, and modify live designs.
I have spent the last decade building, scaling, and maintaining design systems. Tokens, components, documentation, governance. The whole machine. AI just changed what all of it is for.
Describe a business goal or an emotional direction, and an AI agent builds you high-fidelity UI. The designers who are worried about this are the wrong ones to be worried.
Figma announced that AI agents can now write directly to your Figma files. Not suggest options. Not generate images. Write. To your actual canvas.
The industry just caught up to something I've known for seven years. NNGroup's State of UX 2026 — the headline is already circulating through every design Slack channel.
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