This Week’s Updates

Enabling the Team

The Science Of Social Loafing: Why Groups Kill Individual Effort by Joost Minnaar
Teams work better when individual contributions are visible, coordination stays manageable, and people can see how their effort connects to a meaningful goal. Small teams, clear ownership, transparency, and peer accountability help reduce social loafing before group size turns into hidden drag.

How To Build A Superteam That Keeps Getting Better by Ron Friedman
High-performing teams do not improve by accident. Research-backed team habits, leadership behaviors, and continuous improvement routines are what help good teams keep getting better over time.

Product Direction

5 Ways Product Discovery Breaks Down (Part 2) by Itamar Gilad
Product discovery breaks down when teams cannot measure impact, validate ideas too late, or ignore what experiments are telling them. Better infrastructure, earlier validation, and clearer success criteria help teams learn faster, make stronger product decisions, and avoid shipping ideas that should have been challenged sooner.

Thinking—Fast, Slow, And Artificial: How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning And The Rise Of Cognitive Surrender by Steven D. Shaw and Gideon Nave
AI can improve decisions, but it can also weaken judgment when people accept outputs too quickly and with too much confidence. Teams need stronger review habits, clearer accountability, and ways to challenge AI recommendations so speed does not turn into cognitive surrender

Continuous Research

Designers Will Never Have Influence Without Understanding How Organizations Learn by Pavel Samsonov
Prototypes create more value when teams use them to learn something they do not yet know, not just to win stakeholder approval. Qualitative research helps teams challenge weak metrics, make better sense of what the data is really saying, and turn evidence into decisions the organization can actually learn from. 

Provenance Matters: Why Citations Are The Missing Link In Insight-driven Decisions by Jake Burghardt
Research creates more value when teams can trace insights back to the source, understand the context behind them, and reuse them with confidence in future decisions. Clear citation patterns and better repository links help reduce cherry-picking, strengthen trust in evidence, and make research impact easier to prove over time.

Continuous Design

Collected Consciousness by Brandon Harwood
AI is more useful in creative work when it helps people explore ideas, challenge assumptions, and shape their own intent instead of trying to replace the creative act itself. Better products use AI to surface patterns, prompt reflection, and support co-creation while keeping human judgment, meaning, and authorship at the center.

Context Engineering: A Repeatable AI Workflow For Product Designers by Vadym Grin
AI works better when designers stop dumping in requirements and start structuring the right context in the right order. Treating context like a design problem can make outputs more reliable, reduce endless re-prompting, and turn AI into a more useful collaborator in the workflow.

Continuous Development

Who Will Be The Senior Engineers Of 2035? by James Stanier
Senior engineers do not appear overnight. Teams need real pathways for juniors to build judgment, make mistakes, and learn from experienced people, or they risk creating a future talent gap that AI alone will not fix.

Two 2026 Studies Just Proved AI Is Making Developers Lazy by Fran Soto
AI helps teams write more code, but that can come at the cost of understanding what they ship. Developers get better results when they use AI to explain concepts, challenge reasoning, and support review, rather than delegating the thinking and skipping the hard work of comprehension.

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Price Increases This Week!

Order Your Tickets For San Francisco Now

UXDX San Francisco prices increase in 5 days. Planning to join us in San Francisco? Now is the time to book. UXDX brings together product, UX, design and engineering leaders to explore how teams are adapting to AI, improving collaboration, and building better products together.

Ticket prices increase in 5 days, so book now to secure your place at the current rate:
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FREE COMMUNITY EVENTS 

Video Of The Week

Thriving as a Long-Term IC:
Lessons in Influence, Growth, & Fulfillment

Career growth does not always have to mean moving into management. Long-term individual contributors can create real organisational impact by staying close to the craft, building trust, and using their experience to shape better decisions over time.

In this talk, Cliff Seal shares lessons from his work at Salesforce on how senior ICs can influence strategy, navigate workplace dynamics, and keep growing without managing a team. A useful watch for anyone thinking about the next stage of their career, especially if they want to increase their impact while staying hands-on:

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.