This Week’s Updates

Enabling the Team

The Playbook For AI Transformation by John Vetan
AI transformation stalls when companies treat it as scattered pilots instead of a repeatable cross-functional system. Dedicated facilitators, small decision-making pods, and structured workflow sprints help teams kill weak ideas early, redesign workflows with the people closest to the work, and measure value beyond individual productivity.

Stop Chasing Design Tools. Start Building A Design Harness by Rex & Duckie and Bill Guo
As AI tools keep changing, teams get more value by building a reusable harness of context, workflows, skills and evaluation criteria, so good practice compounds across tools instead of resetting with every new release.

Product Direction

Product Roadmaps: How The Best Product Teams Plan For Uncertainty by Teresa Torres
Planning roadmaps around certainty levels instead of fixed features and dates helps teams preserve room for discovery while still giving sales, marketing and leadership enough visibility to coordinate around what is known, what is likely and what is still fluid.

Demand Mix, Shaping, And AI As (Dys)function Multiplier by John Cutler
AI does not fix broken product systems, it accelerates them, so teams need to understand their demand mix and shape work at the source rather than using faster prototyping and PRDs to push even more noise through the funnel. 

Continuous Research

What Gets Lost When UX Research Speeds Up by Dr Maria Panagiotidi
Speeding up UX research with AI can make outputs look sharper while quietly stripping out reflection, methodological rigor and interpretive depth, so teams need to protect the slower thinking that turns data into trustworthy insight rather than just faster deliverables.

How To AI UXR: A Map For Building AI-Augmented Research Operations by Kate Towsey
Scaling AI in research is less about individual shortcuts and more about building the operational systems, guardrails and evaluation practices that let teams make research faster, safer and more reusable without losing rigor.

Continuous Design

When AI Experiences Fail, Who Is Held Accountable? by Dolphia
AI products create more risk when teams make the system feel confident, final, and trustworthy without making responsibility equally clear behind the scenes. Designers, product teams, and companies need clearer escalation paths, stronger dissent before launch, and more deliberate choices about how AI outputs are presented so users are not left carrying the cost of organisational ambiguity.

Every Designer On My Team Ships The Same Quality Now by Hoang Nguyen
When AI can already produce system-compliant design output, teams create more value through judgment than execution alone. The harder and more valuable work becomes defining what should be built, where the system breaks down, and how design contributes beyond polished assets that now look increasingly interchangeable.

Continuous Development

The Machines Are Fine. I'm Worried About Us. by Minas Karamanis
Using AI to remove grunt work can also remove the struggle that builds engineering judgment, so the real risk is not smarter machines but development practices that optimise for output while quietly eroding the learning, intuition and independence that strong technical work depends on.

The Last Software Engineer by Kent C. Dodds
As AI makes implementation less scarce, engineering value shifts toward judgment about constraints, trade-offs, rollout risks and accountability, making product thinking a core part of modern software development rather than something that sits outside it.

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The First Agenda Is Now Live

Check Out The UXDX San Francisco’s Agenda

On November 5–6, UXDX expands to San Francisco for an exclusive 300-person flagship event at August Hall, focused on how companies are building AI-native product teams in practice.

The first confirmed speakers include leaders from Snapchat, ŌURA, Expedia, Target and Verizon, with more being added weekly. Across 20+ sessions, 4+ deep-dive workshops and a highly interactive format, the event is designed to feel more like a team offsite than a trade show.

See what’s on the agenda and grab your early bird ticket before we run out:
https://uxdx.com/sanfran/2026/agenda/

Use ‘NEWSLETTERSF26’ at checkout to get 10% off the price!

FREE COMMUNITY EVENTS 

Video Of The Week

Who Moved My Roadmap? Navigating the Unpredictable
Future of UX and Product in the Era of AI

Technology shifts can feel chaotic, but the teams that adapt best are not the ones that react the fastest. They are the ones who move with direction, stay curious, and make smart decisions when the ground is shifting.

In this talk, Dónal O’Mahony shares lessons from working through major industry disruptions, from the iPad’s impact on e-learning to generative AI in content management and 5G in connected vehicles. A useful watch for anyone navigating change in product, UX or leadership, especially if they want to turn uncertainty into opportunity without losing sight of their North Star.

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.