Outcomes Become Your Competitive Advantage

AI is making outputs cheap. That changes what gets rewarded.

When anyone can generate a solid PRD, a decent design direction, or a passable analysis in minutes, the edge is no longer how well you produce. It is whether you are working on the right thing, and whether it actually moves an outcome.

That is the trap this week’s piece tackles. Teams (and careers) get stuck perfecting solutions to problems that do not matter. In the past, slow delivery gave cover. Now the feedback loop is faster, so you hit “did it work?” sooner, and there is nowhere to hide behind effort.

The shift is from being a specialist who optimises your slice to being someone who can connect the system across functions and align people around the real problem. That is what “comb-shaped” capability is getting at: enough cross-functional fluency to spot the wrong framing, translate between incentives, and make the problem visible so teams can solve it together.

This Week’s Updates

Enabling the Team

As AI Commoditises Outputs, Outcomes Become Your Competitive Advantage by Rory Madden
A cross-functional team built a solution: a centralised system that aggregated feedback from every channel. Customer voices would finally drive the roadmap. There was just one problem. It didn't work.

Head Up, Feet Moving by Jen Briselli
Treating collaboration like hockey in a complex system means keeping your “head up” to read patterns and possibilities while your “feet keep moving” through experiments, so teams learn to navigate uncertainty together instead of waiting on perfect plans from the sidelines.

Product Direction

So You Want To Define “the Problem”? by John Cutler
Defining “the problem” means layering customer stories, other actors’ perspectives, and the surrounding incentives and power dynamics instead of hunting for a single root cause.

Key Practice: Continuous Discovery, Continuous Design, Continuous Delivery (CD3) by Jason Yip
Framing discovery, design, and delivery as simultaneous, continuously rebalanced activities helps leaders decide when to deepen problem discovery, expand solution options or double down on shipping.

Continuous Research

Lean Thinking in UX Research: More Value, Less Waste | Great Question by Sara Ulius-Sabel (Sponsored Content)
Sara on the power of Lean Thinking, the seven wastes in UX research, and her strategies for minimizing each and maximizing value for customers.

UX Leadership In The AI Disruption | Dscout by Michael Winnick
Treating AI as a new design material, not an existential threat, means UX leaders need to model curiosity, run small bets, and talk in business outcomes, so their teams stay relevant and credible instead of getting stuck in fear or hype driven extremes.

Continuous Design

Public Design Systems Are Worth It by PJ Onori
Treating public design systems as libraries, not leaks, keeps craft knowledge flowing between companies and generations, raising the bar for documentation and giving teams a shared reference instead of hiding patterns behind private walls.

Most AIUX Is Just Search With Extra Steps? by Imran Saif
Imran argues that most AI products still mimic search boxes and show alternative patterns like one-click actions, structured commands, and guided flows that treat AI as a collaborator instead of a fancy query field.

Continuous Development

Holistic Engineering: Organic Problem Solving For Complex Evolving Systems by Vanessa Formicola
Holistic engineering treats software as a socio-technical system where reward structures, org charts, and hidden dynamics shape architectures as much as code, so leaders need to model these forces explicitly.

The Rise Of Industrial Software by Chris Loy
AI coding is shifting software from handcrafted craft to industrial production, flooding the world with cheap, disposable apps, so leaders need to anticipate Jevons’ style overproduction, mounting technical debt, and stewardship problems for software that no one really owns, rather than just celebrating lower build costs.

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Wildcard Winner: Rahul Balu

New UXDX EMEA 2026 Speaker Joins The Stage

Rahul Balu is taking the final wildcard slot for UXDX EMEA 2026. Rahul is Senior UX Designer at Amazon, and he’ll be speaking on “From Opinions to Outcomes: How Clarity Builds Trust and Better Design.” It’s a session for anyone who has felt design work stall, not because of a lack of talent or research, but because everyone is right in different ways.

Rahul’s argument is simple and sharp: design teams rarely fail due to missing tools. They fail when research, delivery, stakeholders, and designers all speak different languages. Somewhere in that mix, clarity disappears. In his talk, Rahul will share practical ways to build a shared design language that turns debate into decisions, aligns teams around outcomes, and helps design move faster without losing judgement.

A quick reminder: ticket prices increase this weekend. If you’re planning to join us in Berlin or New York, now is the moment to secure your spot before rates go up.

FREE COMMUNITY EVENTS 

THE UNBLOCKERS

Awards for cross-functional teams

This year in Berlin, we will be celebrating teams that deliver real impact. We are excited to announce The Unblockers, three awards built to recognise teams who can show a clear chain from evidence to decision to impact. No popularity contest, no glossy decks, no “best process” awards. Just practical case studies that other teams can learn from, grounded in what actually changed and what it moved.

Here are the categories:

• Impact Award: Evidence that led to real outcomes (adoption, retention, conversion)

• Best Use of AI Award: AI that changed how you work or what you built

• The Unblocker Award: Removing barriers so cross-functional teams move faster

You can fill out your initial expression of interest with quick entry here before March 22nd. From there, you will be given instructions to create your official submission.

UXDX 2026 Speaker Announcements

Two more speakers are joining the UXDX 2026 stage! Both sessions cut straight to what senior teams are wrestling with right now: real AI implementation and the organisational change that comes with it.

At UXDX EMEA 2026 in Berlin, Des Traynor will share how Intercom rebuilt its entire way of building software to succeed in an AI-first world. He will cover what changed across process, pace, teams, and roles, and what Intercom learned while launching Fin, its AI Agent for customer service.

At UXDX USA 2026 in New York, Sneha Narahalli will share how Sephora keeps journeys simple across web, app, store, and chat. She will break down the core loop (search, discover, purchase, receive), how they cut friction, and how they use experiments to prioritise tech work, including practical patterns for conversational commerce.

Missed the announcements of other speakers? You can find the highlights of the speakers announced in February here.

Video Of The Week

Building Customer Intuition Across the Product Lifecycle

At DocuSign, Marine Palamutyan and Morgan Davis were given an ambitious mandate: build stronger customer intuition across the organisation. They started by defining what “intuition” actually means, then turned it into a repeatable system that scales across product, engineering, marketing, sales, and leadership.

In this talk, they share the framework that made it practical: a Customer Intuition Pyramid with three layers. Foundation knowledge teams can return to “built together” workflows that turn insights into decisions, and cross-org partnerships that embed customer readiness into how the business ships. Watch the full talk now:

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question: Where does “AI slop” show up most often in your organisation?

Last week’s poll asked where “AI slop” shows up most often inside organisations, and the results point to a familiar pattern: it’s not the obvious failures that hurt most, it’s the polished work that quietly erodes quality. The top answer was designs that look finished but break consistency (28%), followed by research summaries that miss key context (24%). Together, that’s over half of respondents calling out the two areas where “looking right” can mask “being wrong”.

What’s interesting is that the risks are different but connected. In design, slop shows up as UI that ships faster than the system can absorb, creating fragmentation that teams pay for later. In research, it shows up as a believable synthesis that skips the nuance needed for good judgment. Add in the 18% seeing features that ship but solve the wrong problem, and the theme is clear: AI makes it easier to produce outputs that feel high-quality, while making it easier to miss the deeper work of coherence, context, and intent.

The 21% who aren’t seeing this yet are worth paying attention to too. That can mean teams are using AI cautiously, or it can mean the costs just haven’t surfaced. Either way, the best guardrail isn’t banning tools, it’s raising the bar on what “done” means: consistency checks, stronger definitions of ready and done, and human ownership of the frame before AI accelerates the execution.

If you want to go deeper on how careers are shifting as AI compresses the ladder, my ebook Managing Your Career In The Age Of AI digs into the levels of thinking and how to keep building judgment in a world that keeps trying to automate it.