Not crazy
I was listening to Jenny Wen on Lenny's Podcast and about 8 or 9 minutes in, I got so excited I had to turn it off. Weird, right? But I paused it so I could capture my thoughts and the moment I realized that… I’m not crazy?
Why I’ve felt like an oddball
I’ve bounced between two primary conflicting beliefs over the years:
I’m good at this—look, people like me and things I work on are good
I’m lucky and/or hiding in places where my bullshit passes
Note: I don’t call this imposter syndrome because A) that’s quite a trope by now, and B) I don’t really believe the second one. (I’m too egotistical for that). But because I’ve never worked in “big tech” or somewhere with a big, well-oiled team, I’ve always been left wondering, “what if…”
Much of my success has come from thinking fast, moving forward, politicking for the right thing, and delivering damn good work in demanding situations. A lot of that happened in the consulting world, which was a great place for me to evolve beyond the often dogmatic world of human-centered design. We built real software with real impact. And in many ways, we did have well-oiled teams, they just didn’t look like the ones being lionized in online product and design circles.
Consulting led me to be a more ruthless, efficiency-seeking pragmatist—cutting out anything that felt like design theater, being more hypothesis-driven, re-using the good parts of process, and looking for any shortcut to impact.
All of which is… good?
Jenny characterized two ways of working she’s seen emerge recently (under the clickbait-y title of the podcast, “The design process is dead”):
Supporting the execution (or I’d just say “Delivering”)
Creating a vision or direction—for the team to sprint towards
This was my ⚡ moment: this is almost all I’ve done for the last 2-3 years.
Delivering, or “Supporting the execution”
NOTE: I don’t love calling this support, and I think that’s probably why I renamed it delivering. I think this was what I referred to in my own head as ”read and react”, Which, whenever I say it is, when I feel these pains of doubt about, I don’t know the sustainability of it, or the validity of the way I’m doing things. I think the output from this way of working is fine, but it was the lack of a formal process that made it feel slightly off. And it felt like I would have trouble explaining it to my next employer when they ask how I work.
The last year I was BCG, everyone was ChatGPT crazy. It was 2023, after all. I was lucky enough to lead the design and be the pseudo-product-manager for an internal LLM-driven slide building tool called Deckster. (Building decks, get it?)
It was an awesome experience because it was on the cutting edge of building on top of LLMs for an actually valuable use case for a big organization. And it was pretty good! I missed using it when I left. It was better than anything else that was shipping in terms of public products at the time.
But what was most interesting to me, a student of collaboration, was the way our team had to change our ways of working as we built a product like this. It was a big part of the Deckster case study I made when getting my job at Gecko. From that case study, in early 2024:
Things move extremely fast, which broke our “design-test-build” pattern. As ideas came from users, leaders, engineers, and everyone else, [we] had to separate experiments from development tasks. Many items were explored for a day or a week before being tossed or incorporated into the roadmap. Feasbility has never been harder to pin down than when working with generative AI…
This was even before Claude enabled the “cheap execution” that we’ve seen explode over the last few quarters. But the pace of feature development on top of the GPT-4 models was insane at the time. We started doing “product crits” instead of design crits because everyone was bringing new work and experiments for sharing and feedback.
As the designer, you have to be the one to keep it all in your head in order to shape this new thing towards a cohesive product—in real time. That’s never easy, but it feels more under control when there is a more designerly process in place. When you’re doing it live—with the whole team, with senior stakeholders, in 1:1s—you need quick thinking and experience to make decisions snap together into a whole.
Set a direction
I think I (and many designers) have traditionally tried to do this, and even been responsible for it within product teams. But the way in which I’ve approached it has certainly changed.
Last fall I joined the Gecko Manufacturing team as the team was moving from a technical proof of concept system towards deploying with third party operators at forges. I was coming from our flagship field software team with a clear goal to transfer my knowledge into a new team building a new system.
I dove deep into the problem space and hardware/software stack, and without waiting to truly understand everything about it, I took a drastic, scary step: I vibe coded a prototype that overhauled their entire application.
It was not perfect, but it was right enough that the team was able to rally around it, poke holes in it, ask great questions, and make it better than I could. And then we used it to inform the general direction of the app for months after that. But I didn’t revisit it as we made new decisions. I didn’t make v2 or v3 every month. It served its purpose of aligning us at a critical point in time so that we had a shared understanding of what the product could and should be.
In the before times, this type of prototyping was different. It was slower, sure. But it was looked at as a source of truth, which meant it was informed by research. Now it can inform the research. A good prototype was a way to de-risk what was to be built. Now building and shipping is its own de-risking process.
So what?
I don’t know really. I still rely on some tried-and-true human-centered design methods and pull them out of the quiver as needed. But I rarely think about or pitch anyone on anything resembling a double diamond. I am still advocating for more design-forward and user-centered approaches to problems, but my rhetoric has changed.
It’s a very interesting time. And hearing someone else say the things I’ve been feeling on a popular podcast felt like a bit of validation.
What does it mean for what comes next, how the product triad roles converge, or whether or not we’ll all have jobs in a few years? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
