The pressure on product organizations to move faster and ship more is massive. Products that used to take months or even years to ship are now expected to fly out the door in a fraction of the time.
This is a natural byproduct of a world devoured by AI. It reminds me of the old Portlandia joke, put a bird on it.
"Can't you just AI it?" asks some leader, half-joking, I think.
On one level, it makes sense. As Jenny Wen, the Design Lead for Anthropic's Claude recently wrote, for a long period of time, design was obsessed with process.
We stopped caring so much about the actual design of the thing — what people actually saw or felt when they used the thing we made. And we self-indulged in all the “practice of design”...We became servants to the process, following it step by step every single time, saying stuff like “trust the process.” We made designers feel like their work wasn’t complete if they didn’t start from a perfectly articulated problem statement.
This is spot on. An oft repeated mantra to my teams has been, "Process is in service of design, not the other way around." So, if we want, we can break the process, skip it, remix it, whatever.
You're a Product Designer, not a Process Designer.
Don't get me wrong. Some really good things come from formalizing a design process. Deeper insights. Alignment. Considerations of divergent ideas. A closeness to the customer. And more.
But along the way, there were some adverse effects. Such as a perception of design as a function that slows you down. In really bad cases, design as dogmatics.
The point always was and is to get something shipped, even if just a prototype. So it's not surprising the prospect of skipping right to prototyping with AI is so alluring.
But just like you can't make a recipe without the right ingredients, you can't make a good prototype without the right inputs. The artifacts of the design process are still important.
You really do need those customer insights and robust discussions. The question is now how do you do that faster?
But first...