Garron Engstrom

💡 One of the most underrated skills as a more experienced designer? Building cross-functional trust, especially with engineers. Great design isn’t just about clean handoffs. It’s about creating space early for collaboration, where engineers aren’t just reviewing your work, they’re helping shape it. I always bring engineers in at the start of a project. Their input often reveals better ways to approach the problem, reduce scope, or unlock ideas I hadn’t considered. This kind of early collaboration builds trust, creates alignment, and leads to better outcomes for the product and the team. If you're growing in your career: this is one of the skills that makes everything else work better. #productdesign #collaboration #product #uxdesign

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As AI disrupts the traditional product triad, are PM, Dev, and UX roles being more united or more separated in your work?

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Less mockups, please. One of my responsibilities as a design systems team member is to ensure that my product teams save time and benefit from reusable styles and patterns that have been tested and validated. Despite this promise, my job still involves helping team members sift through piles of brittle and outdated documentation to learn from the precedent of specific features rendered as "mockups." → Our core design system focuses on tokens and essential components, not a huge set of content or behavioral patterns. → Innovation means detaching things. When our core system doesn't do what a consumer wants, they create their own solutions. This is a mixed bag. → As a designer, I know Figma—it's my safe place. Other forms of documentation, from technical diagrams to more verbose user stories, often seem stewarded by engineering and product partners (and a little boring). I heard some amazing insights from folks who attended "The Question" this week, hosted by Ben Callahan and Brad Frost. https://lnkd.in/gSh2j8nn Design systems are ecosystems.  Our original design system became unmanageable when we tried to force everything into it. More recently, teams have seen the wisdom in keeping the core of the design system as small as possible to meet the needs of as many users as possible. Additional optional layers of your design system can then exist to offer additional patterns and guidelines to support the implementation of specific use cases and content patterns. Sandboxes can lead to sand castles.  Sandboxes are places where we've started to experiment and test new designs. I recently began centralizing experimental patterns in one place where they can mature into "design proposals," which can then be submitted to the rest of the team for discussion and iteration. Documenting these designs is not a commitment to add them to the core system, but does allow them to be discoverable and socialized. Patterns over mockups.  I love visual mockups during experimentation and ideation, but I have to fight the impulse to create more noise with yet another "screenshot" when the majority of the components being used are already well defined. I want my feature team to feel they can move quickly and stand up designs based on existing patterns as much as they can. I'd like to start experimenting with delivering fewer mockups. In my mind, this includes all existing pattern references along with a conversation, a flow diagram, a schematic, or a content map that provides the essential story faster using fewer pixels. Can we save the visuals for the fun stuff? Thanks again to Ben and Brad for hosting "The Question" this week, and everyone who attended for helping me get my head around what my options are and how I might continue to make progress rather than expect perfection.

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We spend weeks interviewing users, spotting patterns and creating meaningful decks… But when it's time to act, nothing moves. No budget. No project. No change. Why? Because we don’t always…… In my latest post, I share how I shifted from presenting “findings” to framing business clarity and how UX research can drive real strategy, not just brainstorms. Simple practices Outcome-first framing Action-focused storytelling If you're a UXer or product thinker trying to make research matter, maybe this one's for you. 🔗 Read it here on Medium

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I keep questioning UX portfolios. 💅🏻We’ve normalized polished case studies that smooth over messy reality, even though real UX work is full of collaboration, politics, constraints, and wrong turns. 🧑‍💼Portfolios often end up evaluating how well someone can market themselves, not how they actually think. 😖 Honestly, I can’t even imagine building another portfolio. I’ve done it so many times that the process feels exhausting and artificial, like repackaging the same work into cleaner and cleaner stories. ⁉️ Curious what others think, should UX portfolios change? #uxportfolio #uxdesign #productdesign

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Are IC enterprise designers unintentionally sabotaging their portfolios in this AI-obsessed market? If you’re a Product Designer updating your case studies… you’ll probably want to read this... I’m actively hiring two Sr-to-Lead Product Designers, and after reviewing a lot of portfolios recently, a pattern keeps repeating: 👉 Too many portfolios are leading with AI chatbot projects. Not sprinkled in… leading with them. Often multiple ones in the same portfolio as Case Study #1 and #2. Here’s the problem👇 AI chatbots are important, but they’re not the center of gravity for most enterprise / SaaS product teams. In the last six-nine months, many of these patterns are already shipped and commoditized. And now with agentic flows, the UI work becomes more about reviewing, validating, and confirming work AI has already completed behind the scenes. Which means… “Old school” multi-step, end-to-end product flows are still valid – with a twist. Because every IC job post right now is calling for “high craft” or “consumer-grade design” – it’s no longer acceptable for flows to simply “get the job done.” Hiring panels want to see refinement and polish in the final output.  Otherwise you’ll get the feedback we give far too often: “The design thinking is great… but the visual design is just… [sigh/meh]… not quite there.” Visual craft always matters. Everywhere. At every company. Whether D2C or B2B or Enterprise. So if you’re refreshing your portfolio, here’s my ask as someone hiring in this tough market: Don’t over-index on AI chatbots just because they’re hot right now. Show me your complex, nuanced, multi-stage flows—the kind that prove you can handle the real product work most teams need. Just make sure they’re polished (ie. That “high craft” buzzword again), intentional, and tight. Because that’s what will actually differentiate you in 2025 and into 2026. And now the proverbial 🔌: If you’re a high-performing Sr. or Lead looking to innovate in the HR and Comp tech space, holler at me in my DMs or Comments. Thanks! 🙏

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We’ve laid off too many junior designers and focused hiring too much on seniors. You can understand why: seniors are efficient, autonomous, and high-output. But there’s an insidious problem: when you don’t train junior designers mentorship collapses and the pipeline dries up. In 10 years there will be no one left ready to fill those senior seats. Short-term optimization = Long-term pain. You can read more from my recent newsletter article: https://lnkd.in/g-DgFMau

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An incredibly valuable perspective regarding actual use of MCP and impact it has on the UX. Having a good grasp of MCP as a product and design leader is critical now. https://lnkd.in/g3X2N9Qc

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This might be a contrary opinion, but I think tracking user success metrics should belong to the UX function, not PM. This does several things: It turns UX from being a "doer" to being a partner in driving outcomes. It forces cross-functional partners to define measurable success metrics. It provides everyone a rich source of feedback to inform future decisions.

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In about a month I will be running a no decks, no tech session with a group of UX and product folks about maybe the least talked about challenge in design right now. How do we actually build stuff that sticks? New tools. Shorter shipping timelines. The same features released everywhere. Yet I’d argue we’re less excited about features than ever before. Why? Because we’re not prioritizing building the ones that truly make a difference. I’ve designed this session to be centered around candid conversations and what we can do to find our way back to true user centeredness. 

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This is a fantastic read on the evolving role designers must play. I love the section on the Inversion of Paradigms. How are you evolving your role as a designer? What's working, and why? What's not, and why? https://lnkd.in/eAMVaA7X

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A lot of this reflects my own personal view of how the design process is changing, and its effects on the archetypes of designers needed for the next chapter

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Diverse teams don't happen by accident. And design bootcamps alone won't get you a job on my team. Tomorrow, Tuesday, March 17, I'm recording a podcast with Sarah Doody from Career Strategy Lab about hiring designers. After building design teams for 10+ years across very different industries and companies, I've learned that diverse teams don't happen by accident. You build them through intent and rigor in your hiring process. For me, that starts with being honest about what the work actually demands and taking a deep look at where the team is currently. I am delighted about this opportunity because I have experiences and opinions about building teams that I don't usually share publicly. We will talk about what the industry gets wrong, what I look for, and why, and about the mistakes I've made. Stuff like dealing with hiring toxic people despite all initial checks and chats, or hiring people who looked great on paper but couldn't think through a problem with the team. I'll share more when the episode is out ✌

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Our designers prototype directly in our production codebase now. Not in Figma. Not in Lovable. In the code itself. The handoff to dev is now a branch and a markdown file — and that one shift has been a step change: → Tighter feedback loops → Less back and forth → More complete designs from day one Our very own Jack Steele recently walked Insight Partners Portco through the how, and wrote it all down. Link is where you'd normally find it. 👇

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When someone outside your discipline offers prescriptive solutions rather than collaborative input, it rarely leads to good outcomes. Designers don't tell engineers which algorithms to use. Engineers shouldn't dictate design decisions. The best products come from teams where everyone contributes their unique perspective—sharing expertise, asking questions, and trusting each other's craft.

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“Trust the process” used to be good advice. But AI collapsed the cost of prototyping. When you can build and test ideas in hours, weeks of artifacts stop being rigor, they become overhead. The edge is no longer process compliance. It’s design judgment. Fast decisions. Real prototypes. Ship → learn → refine. In 2026, the best designers won’t be the ones who run the cleanest workshops. They’ll be the ones who can make strong calls at speed and polish until it feels inevitable.

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A friend got me Articulating Design Decisions by Tom Greever 4 days ago, and I’m already HALFWAY through reading it (also taking notes in it). 📖 For any and all designers who are trying to understand how to communicate and win decisions for your team or project, this is an excellent resource. The book is organized by the different parts that go into meeting with key stakeholders, and explains concepts with great analogies. 📚

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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 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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