Spotify If you’re waiting for the “right” AI design tool, you’re going to be waiting a long time. Over the past 18 months, we’ve gone from a handful of capable tools to an overwhelming ecosystem. Assistants embedded in design software, standalone generators, prompt-to-UI builders, research summarizers, code copilots, prototyping engines. Every week, something new...
Continue readingOne User, Right Now
Spotify The idea of a “target audience” is starting to break. For most of my career, everything in UX, product, and marketing was built around segments. Personas. Demographics. Behavioral groupings. We simplified the world into categories so we could design, build, and ship at scale. It worked. Until it didn’t. Because the reality is,...
Continue readingFrom Novelty to Delegate: The Shift to Agentic UX
Spotify For a while, generative AI felt like a novelty. We added chatbots. We added “generate” buttons. We showcased what the model could do. It was impressive. It demoed well. It created a sense of progress. But most of it sat on the edges of the product. Users could ask questions. Generate content. Explore...
Continue readingIn 2026, Shouldn’t Registration and Login Be Standard?
Spotify I’ve spent the past month in meetings debating registration and login flows. Multiple senior leaders. Strong opinions. Lots of discussion around “UX.”Where the fields go. What the buttons say. Whether we show or hide something. And the entire time, I kept thinking the same thing. Why are we still doing this? In 2026,...
Continue readingSelling Ideas as a Service. Will Companies Buy? A Different Approach, but More Like College.
Spotify For most of my career, I’ve watched companies struggle with the same problem. They don’t lack execution. They lack direction. Teams are built to deliver, not to think upstream. So what happens is predictable. Roadmaps get filled with incremental work, innovation gets deprioritized, and the few good ideas that do surface are either...
Continue readingPI Planning is burning your budget. Here’s a better way.
Spotify Let me give you the number nobody talks about out loud. 100 people in a room for 2 days. Average fully-loaded cost per person: $800–$1,200/day. That’s $160,000–$240,000 of company time. Every single quarter. And for UX/UI teams? It’s often even worse than that. The dirty secret of PI Planning PI Planning was designed...
Continue readingAlways Ask Why
Spotify I wish I had learned this earlier. Not the frameworks. Not the tools. Not the processes. Just one habit. Always ask why. Early in my career, I was focused on doing things right. Hitting deadlines, delivering designs, following the process. If something was requested, I executed. If a feature was defined, I designed...
Continue readingPersonalization Is Broken
Spotify “Recommended for you” is not personalization. I used to believe it was. A few years ago, I was leading a product initiative where personalization was the centerpiece of the strategy. We had the data. Behavioral segments, historical activity, demographic overlays. We built recommendation engines, tailored dashboards, and dynamic content blocks that changed based...
Continue readingWhy Most Design Systems Are About to Break
Spotify Static systems can’t support dynamic experiences. For years, design systems have been the foundation of scale. They brought consistency, speed, and alignment across teams. Components, tokens, patterns, and guidelines created a shared language that made large products manageable. That model worked when experiences were predictable. It does not hold in a world where...
Continue readingThe Illusion of Simplicity
Spotify Clean UI does not equal simple UX. This is one of the most persistent misconceptions in product design. A clean interface looks simple. It feels modern. Minimal layouts, generous whitespace, reduced visual noise. Everything appears easier. But appearance is not experience. You can remove visual clutter and still leave the user overwhelmed. That...
Continue reading