A strategy for the brave old world

Navigating AI thoughtfully

Hi designers. And product owners. And people building software. How’s it going? Is your OKR on track for the Q? Have your personal development plans been updated? Did you hit that KPI yet? Are you still doing that manually? Have you optimized yourself fully? Don’t forget the side projects!

Kinda rough out there, isn’t it?

I’m here to say nothing new, but hopefully reassuring!

Your greatest asset isn’t your prompt engineering chops. Your strength isn’t in your ability to quickly learn a tool (but def keep doing that). Your value is not in the precision of your pixel game. It’s not found in your optimization of the self or automation of workflows.

Your value is will always be in your ability to rapidly and contextually connect and translate concepts, for yourself and others.

In this brave old world of AI, the strongest and most capable designers are not signing up for every new AI subscription. They aren’t writing to share how they’ve cut out a step of their process.

They are doing two things.

1. They are strategically applying AI in areas the human touch isn’t necessary, so that they may…

2. Apply the human touch where it is necessary. They are getting in front of stakeholder and securing the trust many place in generative AI. They are building relational capital and organizational understanding that enables them to more rapidly understand and propose relevant solutions. After all - speed is just speed. There is nothing in there implying quality, profitability, or even relevance in that equation. You have to have a reason.

So what does that mean?

They are prioritizing delight, and spending more time understanding how to measure that innate and intangible “desireability” of their solution. They are running faster experiments because they have more time to synthesize and apply their recommendations against data. They are learning faster and wiring that knowledge across disciplines and experience.

They are using their intuition in a way designers haven’t before. They are no longer held back by backlog or roadmap. They are spending their time designing the experience of learning about their users problems, designing the paths and micro interactions, designing the hidden stuff that decays a brand’s presence, and most importantly - they’re designing the future.

Every organization and individual should be asking - am I investing resources on an old problem? Am I enabling myself to try to get ahead of the rapidly changing landscape? Or am I placing the same bets and expecting different results?

When the world shifts, it’s the strategists that develop the means to adapt in the long term. And design will continue to be a discipline that established itself at the forefront of successful strategy.

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Disclaimer - if you’ve spent more than 10 minutes around me, you know I hold a fairly strong stance against AI and do my best to minimize my use of it given it’s environmental, biological, and social socioeconomic impacts (to name a few). This isn’t my rallying against it. This is my begging that we feed our brains and remain critical of the tools we pick up and mold ourselves around.