Or: How UX design is basically controlled chaos with a ‘smooth’ setting nobody uses. Spotify Nobody tells you this in bootcamp. Nobody stitches it on the onboarding welcome kit. But somewhere between your first stakeholder review and your fortieth “can we just make it pop more,” you realize the truth: UX design is not...
Continue readingYour AI Feature Has Terrible UX. Here’s the Receipt.
There’s a pattern I keep seeing across every SaaS product that shipped an AI feature in the last 18 months. A text box. A blinking cursor. A placeholder that says “Ask me anything.” And then nothing. No rails. No suggestion. No signal that the user is doing it right. Just a void, and the...
Continue readingUX Leaders Make Better C-Suite Leaders
Spotify Fast Company recently made a point that hit hard: the traits that often get designers labeled as “difficult” inside companies are the same traits that make them strong entrepreneurs. Systems thinking, comfort with ambiguity, challenging assumptions, and refusing to accept shallow briefs are not flaws. They are leadership skills in the wrong environment....
Continue readingDesigning for the Machine: When AI Agents Become the User
For most of my career, the user was clear. A person, on a screen, is trying to get something done. That assumption is starting to break. We are entering a phase where designers are no longer optimizing interfaces only for humans, but for AI agents that act on behalf of humans. And that changes...
Continue readingPick One and Build: Navigating the Explosion of AI Design Tools
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 readingSearching for Funding
Spotify I’ve watched a lot of teams go after funding, and most of them are focused on the wrong thing. If you’re searching for funding, it’s worth pausing, because the act of searching can distract you from what actually matters, building something worth funding. Early in my career, I worked on a product that...
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...
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