This Week’s Updates

Enabling the Team

Who In The C-Suite Should Own AI? by Toby E. Stuart
AI initiatives work better when companies stop treating them as the responsibility of one function alone. Clear ownership, shared accountability, and tighter coordination across technology, operations, risk, data, and finance help organizations move faster without creating gaps in decision-making or control.

I’m An Introvert. This Is How I Get Myself To Speak Up. by Wes Kao
Prepare go-to phrases to insert yourself in meetings, ask a colleague to keep you accountable, and other tactics I personally use to get myself to speak up.

Product Direction

Messy Docs As Helpful Pattern by John Cutler
Teams often work better when they use messy, evolving docs to keep context visible, revisit assumptions, and connect signals that do not fit neatly into tickets. The trick is not forcing the mess away, but creating simple routines and shared language so others can understand the work without flattening how it really happens.

How To Close Your Confidence Loop by Tim Herbig
Product decisions get stronger when teams can clearly connect what they are building to the behavior change they expect and the business goal it supports. AI can help fill in the story faster, but confidence only becomes real when the team can explain and defend each link in that chain for themselves.

Continuous Research

Don’t Design For Average Users by Jakob Nielsen
Research gets more useful when teams look beyond the average user and study the needs of higher-value and more complex segments separately. Better segmentation can reveal where simple experiences matter most, where advanced workflows create disproportionate value, and why one-size-fits-all decisions often miss both groups.

Winning The Game Of Broken Telephone: A Blueprint For Evaluating AI Across The Research Pipeline by Lindsey DeWitt Prat
AI research workflows get more reliable when teams define what accuracy means for their context, compare tools side by side, and keep checking where outputs start to drift from the source. Better evaluation makes it easier to catch hidden errors early, stay closer to the participant's meaning, and stop polished outputs from creating false confidence.

Continuous Design

How I’m Dealing With The Pressure To Adopt AI As A Designer by Martin Wright
Teams do not need to adopt every AI tool at the speed of the hype cycle. Experiment widely, deploy narrowly, and use AI where it improves the work without outsourcing the judgment, synthesis, and craft that make the work valuable in the first place.

Something Big “Might” Be Happening by Elvis Hsiao
AI can take on more of the making, but designers still create value through problem framing, taste, judgment, and deciding what is worth building in the first place. The pressure is real, but the stronger response is to use AI to extend your range while protecting the thinking skills that generic outputs still cannot replace.

Continuous Development

Agents Don’t Know What Good Looks Like. And That’s Exactly The Problem. by Luca Mezzalira
AI agents can make code behave correctly against a spec while still making systems worse in production. Teams need guardrails around architecture, scale, resilience, and ownership so faster generation does not create software that passes tests but fails in the real world.

Every Layer Of Review Makes You 10x Slower by Avery Pennarun
Shipping gets slower when every extra layer of review adds more waiting time to the work. Teams move faster when they reduce unnecessary approvals, build quality into the system earlier, and create smaller, better-defined components that need less coordination to change safely.

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The First Speakers Of UXDX San Francisco

5 - 6 November 2026

If you missed our announcement on stage at UXDX, here is the big news: UXDX San Francisco 2026 is locked in for November 5–6. Our core theme, Becoming AI Native, will tackle how product, design, research, and engineering teams can move past the hype cycle and embed AI deeply into their operational rhythm.

We’re launching with a stellar first look at our speaker lineup, featuring product and design leaders from Snap Inc., ŌURA, Expedia Group, Target, and Verizon. Early tickets and the first version of the agenda are now live. Be part of our West Coast event and grab your ticket today: Get your tickets for UXDX San Francisco 2026

UXDX San Francisco 2026

FREE COMMUNITY EVENTS 

Video Of The Week

Bridging the Gap:
How Product, UX, and Dev Can Build AI-Native Products Together

AI-native products need more than strong models. They need product managers, designers, and engineers working from a shared understanding of what is technically possible, what users actually need, and how decisions should be made along the way.

In this conversation, Carsten Wierwille, Global VP of Product & Design at HTEC, and Jacobus Kok, VP of Product at Priceline, explore how teams can bridge the gap between bottom-up machine learning approaches and top-down product and UX thinking. A practical watch for anyone trying to build AI products without creating new silos in the process.

Want to go into how careers and leadership are shifting as AI compresses the ladder? My ebook Managing Your Career In The Age Of AI explores how to build judgment, relationships, and influence in a world that keeps trying to automate the surface of the work.