Dan Rosell

This hit close to home. This quarter we've been actively rethinking our design process. Removing rituals, pulling back on some discovery activities, and prioritizing speed and learning over craft and critique. It can be uncomfortable but it's the right direction. This episode puts a lot of it into words.

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DesignOps is simple in theory: help designers spend time on work that matters, not on blockers, chaos, or process confusion. That was our focus in 2025. 𝐎𝐮𝐫 𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧: Reduce operational hurdles, clarify how we work, and make collaboration across teams easier so design can stay focused on customer impact. What we delivered in 2025: ⏱️ 15 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐬  average from problem to solution The goal was fast unblocking. No endless MS Teams threads. No trial and error for half a day. 🧠 7 𝐞𝐧𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐬𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 From AI best practices, to design process guidance, to an intro to SAP Build Work Zone for designers. 🛠️ 40+ 𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐝 Through Doctor’s Hour and ad hoc support, we removed critical blockers, reduced delays, and kept teams moving. For me, DesignOps is not overhead. It is how you protect focus and keep delivery smooth when things get messy. Big thanks to everyone who contributed, supported, documented, and showed up when someone was stuck 🙌 Stefan Haingärtner, Simon Schelsky, Niklas Winterfeld and Co. @ sovanta AG And you: what is your biggest DesignOps pain right now: process clarity, tooling, or cross team collaboration? #DesignOps #SAPUX #UX #SAPBTP #BuildingInPublic #EnterpriseUX #TeamEnablement #AIinUX #CleanCore

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This is just another symptom of big business going further down the path of short-term thinking; the note about "not this quarter's problem" is exactly right. Visionary leadership hasn't been in evidence at most of these companies for a long time. The hope of course is that at some point all these product are just so boring and interchangeable that a dark horse sweeps right past them, shaking up the field, kicking everyone's behind, and suddenly deep learning is interesting again. It might take awhile. There's enough profit going around to keep the big shots complacent for a bit. But make no mistake - touting a 996 schedule while doing the same thing as everyone else is complacency. And it's a short term point of view.

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Claude just released Claude Design. I’ve spent a bit of time with it and it’s interesting so far. I like where it's headed. Over the past couple of years, I’ve worked pretty heavily with AI tools. Claude, OpenAI, Cursor, Lovable. I’ve even built product and custom skills to support parts of the design process. Some were helpful. Others felt like extra work without enough return. What I’m starting to like here is the shift toward a more integrated experience. Being able to connect a design system, make tweaks directly, and QA outputs in the same environment feels like a better balance. Less relying purely on prompts, more control over the outcome. That’s been the pattern for a while. Trying to fit tools into the process instead of the other way around. That's not to say that workflows can't change. This feels like a step in a better direction, but it’s still early. What stands out isn’t just what it can do, but how it fits. It’s starting to align more naturally with how we already think, design, and iterate. Less friction, more flow. AI can absolutely push us toward better directions faster and help carry craft further into the final output. But it doesn’t replace thinking. Without that human judgment and intent, it’s easy to land on average solutions that miss the mark. The tools are getting better. That’s clear. But the work is still ours. Craft, taste, and decision-making are what shape the outcome. And the outcome is what matters. Excited to see how this evolves and continues to change my workflow: https://lnkd.in/eqGvEBC3

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Fun portfolio question on a Friday night..... I've been taking Rupa Chaturvedi's Claude Code for Designers. Absolutely great class. I can't recommend it enough. Per usual, I'm revisiting my portfolio because this job market continues to beat me down. UX people, do you think it would be interesting/demonstrate skill/be a creative exercise to use Claude Code to build my new portfolio? I was thinking it could be. Or do I just go the Framer route?

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What if your to-do app didn't look like the DMV? In Via, we've introduced this idea of the luminance graph, a sculpture made out of light that's unique to each week and your performance. Each light dot maps to a task in your week, with the biggest and brightest being your completed high-priority tasks, smaller being your standard tasks, and small/dim/disconnected being your incomplete tasks. The overall brightness of the graph is also powered by Lumens - a resource gathered by complete tasks. Would something like this inspire you to get more done?

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The discourse around design tooling is drowning in broad generalizations (like this very sentence). So I wrote up some concrete examples of what the Vercel product design team is using at this moment in time. https://lnkd.in/gydwuD4s

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“If you haven’t come up with a canvas, are you even a design leader?” — heard on a podcast. So… here’s my contribution. Introducing the Human-centred AI canvas. You might have noticed it looks suspiciously similar to the lean UX canvas by Jeff Gothelf. It even has the original copyright marks. I’m sorry, officer, I shamelessly stole it from the internet because product design is product design. And I’m sick and tired of people on the internet saying that Gen AI is a monumental paradigm shift because it really isn’t and everyone needs to chill out. Yeah, there may be certain nuances to do with the non-deterministic nature of the new technology, but if you look under the bonnet it’s just product design again. Hasn’t changed (much) since the 80s (if not the 50s). #leadership #hcai #design

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Most designers say they want impact. What they really want is proof. At scale, I had to formalize proof. I once built a quarterly UX strategy using Jared Spool's Persuasive Metrics to connect design decisions to revenue. A 2% reduction in onboarding friction translated into six figures in retained revenue. That was the language the room spoke. Dashboards. Quarterly reviews. Attribution models. Impact had to be quantified before it was believed. Now I’m at a tiny startup. Last week, a customer Slacked: “Magemetrics saves me days on campaign reports.” Following the rebrand, a prospect opened the site and said: “Okay. This feels serious.” These calls felt different: less explaining, fewer objections, more trust. No attribution model. No presentation. Just behavior changing in real time. Here’s what’s different: In enterprise, proof arrives as numbers. In startups, proof shows up as decisions. Enterprise feedback arrives filtered and quarterly; startup impact is immediate. Doubt slows deals. Confidence speeds them up. Immediacy forces clarity. You take fewer performative bets. You stop optimizing for presentations. You design to remove doubt. Because you’re not defending slides — you’re shaping what happens next.

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The market is moving faster than most people's careers are. I've watched this unfold from two angles, as a leader reading industry signals, and as a community builder trying to answer the same question that 50K+ designers keep asking us: "Where is this all heading, and am I positioned for it?" The honest answer? Most of us are navigating a major talent shift with outdated maps. So I built a new one. Not because I had a product idea, but because adapting to change requires seeing it clearly before acting on it. That's the builder's mindset: you don't wait for the map to appear. You make it. And you keep humans at the center of every decision it informs. Workforce Intelligence is a real-time platform built to navigate the global flow of talent and opportunity. Explore it here: 👉 https://lnkd.in/gyRZwQTn Here's what it gives you: ⇢ Real-time workforce shift tracking: Aggregated across multiple sources. Access to market movement, live. ⇢ Industry Safety Index: 12 sectors scored on hiring momentum, risk, and volatility. Know where to move before the crowd does. ⇢ Company Health Scores: identifies organisations with strong cash positions, AI-forward strategies, and an active hiring appetite. ⇢ Opportunity Bridge: connects displaced talent with growth companies absorbing the market shift, not retreating from it. ⇢ Skills Intelligence: which capabilities are declining (entry-level roles, data entry) and which are surging (prompt engineering, cloud, cybersecurity). ⇢ UXDesign Intelligence: a dedicated view for the design community: role safety scores, active hiring companies, India market breakdown, GCC opportunity mapping. The tool surfaces the intelligence. But the decisions on where to move, when to pivot, and whom to trust, those stay human. What's the one market signal you're watching most closely right now? Happy to hear your view. RethinkingUX

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The biggest shift I have seen as a VP of Design isn't AI-generated wireframes or prototyping shortcuts. It is designers using AI to step directly into frontend coding. No more design QA. No more translating Figma into tickets. Designers polish the experience in the same medium the user actually sees and feels. This change transformed my team. Designers loved the autonomy. Engineers loved being free to work on complex backend code. Quality went up, and we shipped faster. The more I talk with design leaders, the clearer it is that this will not stay a niche skill. This is becoming part of how modern design teams work. I launched CraftAmplify to help designers build this skill properly. We focus on writing production-quality code rather than prototypes. The response has been incredible. Thank you to everyone who put in the work and started shipping real code. Watching designers push their first production PR has been the highlight of my year. Each cohort is capped at five designers to keep the experience hands-on. I checked this morning, and there is only one seat left for all of 2025, so I added new sessions for January and February 2026. Details are here: https://lnkd.in/eXqsMadG #ProductDesign #Frontend #AI #DesignEngineering #CraftAmplify

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“That green feels off.” 🫠 That’s designing for interfaces. “This makes the user hesitate before committing.” 🙌 That’s designing for influence. Design maturity isn’t just about sharper visuals, it’s about deeper POVs. The kind that move from aesthetics to outcomes. At Sparq, we talk about brand not just as a visual identity, but as a set of behaviors. So when our design critiques shift from pixels to user psychology, from what looks clean to what builds trust that’s lived brand behavior in action. #ProductDesign #BehavioralDesign #DesignLeadership

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It’s tempting to chase “prettier” components, but scale comes from choosing boring, predictable patterns. A system succeeds when designers stop asking, “Which version should I use?”

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The industry changed. How we work, what companies expect, even what "being ready" means. But here's the thing: You don't need another course or bootcamp. You need practice with real designers who get it. That's why we built Practice Round. Free mock interviews, case study workshops, and honest feedback from designers who've been where you are. Join the 70+ designers already practicing together → practiceround.co

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Why does it feel like designers are more focused on mastering technical workflows and endless AI tools than actually designing?

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Two great pieces of thinking have been on my mind this past week. Jenny Wen (Head of Design, Claude/Anthropic) on Lenny's Podcast declaring the design process dead. Rachel Been (SVP of Design, Expedia Group) writing about design leadership in the age of vibecoding (link to both in the comments). Both are right about the tools changing fast. The thing is though the design process is alive and well. The process as a rigid sequence of phases was never the point anyway. The underlying principles still hold. We are starting from a different place now, and we need the same rigor. More, if anything. I see AI products that are severely lacking thoughtful design. And it was cute a few years ago but you can't forever hide under "it's an experiment" label. I see companies shipping capabilities, not experiences. The core design questions have not changed. What is the user trying to do? What is their intent before they even type a first prompt? What happens between that intent and a successful outcome? How do we shorten that gap? Nobody is asking these questions rigorously enough. Instead, the default interaction model for nearly every AI product is a blank text field. You type, you hope, you iterate through conversation. When the output is wrong, your only option is to generate more stuff. The cognitive load sits entirely on the user. This is the opposite of good design. What we have now are fragmented workflows where you need five separate tools to accomplish one goal. Endless, uneditable conversation threads where relevant information gets buried under irrelevant output. No or minimal controls to refine results without starting over. The list goes on. We know how to solve this. User control and freedom. Recognition over recall. Visibility of system status. Nielsen wrote the heuristics decades ago. Foundational HCI. There are ways to understand user intent, provide structure, and reduce the distance to a successful outcome before a single prompt is sent. A system's "brain" is only as good as its ability to be trusted and understood by the person using it. The tools are new and the opportunity to apply real design thinking to AI products is wide open.

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One thing I’ve learned leading design teams is design should NEVER be the bottleneck. When integrated the right way, design doesn’t slow product development... it streamlines it and breaks down walls.. Here’s how I make that happen: 🤝 Collaboration early and often: Bringing design into product conversations from day one prevents costly rework later. 👾 Systemized design assets: Reusable components and consistent patterns mean less time reinventing, more time refining. 🤔 Clarity over complexity: The best design processes simplify communication, shorten feedback loops, and make decision-making faster for everyone. When design and product move in sync, ideas ship faster and better.

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We’re entering a period of structural change in how product design and development teams operate. As AI accelerates production and organizations shift toward outcomes, the role of UX is expanding beyond execution into strategy, orchestration, and decision-making. I’ve been exploring how those dynamics are evolving: from outputs to outcomes, silos to journeys, and production to orchestration. This is part 1 of a 3-part series on how UX, product, and engineering teams are changing in the agentic era. https://lnkd.in/eQndDQMe #designexcellence #agenticAI #UXleadership #designleadership

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