The emergence of AI is an existential threat and existential opportunity for designers and other product professionals.
This calls for a recalibration of professional skills.
This calls for a new rhythm of working.
This calls for solving problems with new capabilities.
You and me? We can thrive. Or we can fade away.
Recalibration
The way that artificial intelligence is emerging in professional life is an attack on our hard skills. The impact is measurable and trackable. The amount of time to draw a box or a button or an interface is decimated. The decision-making that goes into implementation remains human.
In lieu of the deprecation of rote tasks, the decision-making, collaboration, communication, the ‘soft skills’ become the primary skills. Always were, but now it’s easier to see.
The tooling has allowed for faster completion, rapid iteration, and a reconsidering of individual workflows.With those handled more readily by computers, it’s people who connect the dots. And you do this by connecting each other: collaboration, communication, and so on.
The old scope: Diligent execution of research process; Meticulous and time consuming production of design systems; subjective assessment of work in progress; labor-intensive process of product and experience validation; separate contributions requiring significant alignment effort.
The new scope: operating faster and richer human-centered discovery at scale; rapid generation of design materials; critical thinking skills for evaluation of generated materials for errors and alignment; enriched evaluation of work in progress; modifying the design of tests that validate of potential ideas; elevating facilitation and collaboration; re-prioritizing skills needed at each level of the practice
It could happen. But there are risks. And we have to engage them head on.
Rhythm
The design process is being accelerated, remixed, revamped. Research information can be cataloged, analyzed, and synthesized in new ways, faster than before. Capabilities are getting fractured and handed to other people tin the product development team. New forms of pair programming, pair designing are emerging.
No tool is impacting this more visibly than vibe coding. Product, Design, and Engineering are all adjusting to a faster loop of development. What took three sprints now takes one. What took 12 points now takes 2.
The old scope: more time allocation to breaking down tasks; evaluating sizing of work; aggregation and assessment of work in progress; unclear estimation and unpredictable workflows; prioritization of technical execution leaves the team and the user behind.
The new scope: setting up real-time discovery with ongoing communications to stakeholders; refining a team’s understanding of user needs in an ongoing way; understanding how to apply findings to specifications; validating any generated or accelerated outputs; collaboration that bridges gaps across functions within a team and enhances the the execution of meaningful work
Solving Problems
AI itself lives in a black box. But it steps out into enterprises that calibrate it to a use case. Then it reaches out to you and me in the form of a product.
Sometimes, it’s transformative and there is a genuine and rewarding delivery of value. It’s our time to capitalize on that value.
Sometimes, we’re left struggling, wondering why things are the way they are. We see systems getting worse. We see unease and destabilization in areas where it hasn’t been before.
The old scope: long research processes; personalization is driven by algorithmic thinking and remains resource-intensive; cataloging and generating data-driven tools is time-consuming and solutions are fragile; designing to use cases is labor intensive error prone
The new scope: problem identification and framing is faster and clearer; assisted faster breakdowns of problems into testable solutions; Applied AI bends powerful neural networks to specific use cases, not just generalized tools; considering and developing multiple hypotheses for rapid testing; wrangling, synthesizing, and communicating insights as products and solutions are delivered at record pace; maintaining thoughtful and subjective alignment between the product, solution, execution, and downstream impact; identifying and considering the emergence of externalities, previously left out of scope