This Week’s Updates

Enabling the Team

Before You Fire All Your Glue People Because Of AI by John Cutler
AI can reproduce visible artifacts like updates, notes and roadmaps, but not the judgment, trust and social coordination that make them matter, so cutting “glue people” too early risks hollowing out the hidden capabilities that hold teams together.

3 Forces Are Redefining The Transition From Manager To Leader by Michael D. Watkins
Moving from manager to leader now means handling AI you do not fully understand, navigating faster regulatory and geopolitical shifts, and stepping up with fewer of the traditional proving grounds. Hence, leadership transitions require more judgment, adaptability, and enterprise thinking than before.

Product Direction

Great Products, Bad Companies by Marty Cagan
Great products are not enough if governance, incentives and leadership pull the company away from its mission, so product teams need to understand how boards, investors and culture shape whether good product work can survive and scale.

Strategy Drift: How To Spot It, Fix It, And Stop It From Happening by Martin Eriksson
Strategy drift happens when small disconnects pile up between stated priorities and actual work, so teams need regular checks that link day to day execution back to strategy, objectives and vision before busy activity quietly replaces real progress.

Continuous Research

We've Always Outsourced Our Thinking. Is AI Different? by Dr Maria Panagiotidi
AI changes more than cognitive offloading as it can generate judgments that people accept with little scrutiny. Designing for calibrated trust, visible uncertainty, and critical engagement matters if teams want users to stay in the loop rather than quietly surrender their thinking.

What We Learned About Modern Interview Workflows & Building A Research Repository by Optimal (Sponsored Content)
Turning interviews into a reusable research repository means removing the operational drag around scheduling, transcription and synthesis so teams can move faster, revisit past evidence and make research a more continuous part of product decision making.

Continuous Design

“Vibe Coding” Is Accelerating The Erosion Of Design Authority by Michael Buckley
When clickable AI artifacts start standing in for design thinking, authority shifts from judgment and architecture toward whatever can be shown fastest, so teams need to make reasoning visible and treat prototypes as inputs to decisions rather than proof that decisions are already made.

The Trust-Latency Gap: Why The Future Of UX Is Intentionally Slower by Honey Mehta
As AI compresses decisions into milliseconds, trust starts lagging behind execution, so designers need to add the right moments of visibility, friction and deliberation when stakes are high rather than treating speed as the default measure of good UX.

Continuous Development

Agentic Coding Is A Trap by Lars Faye
Agentic coding can speed up output while quietly increasing ambiguity, review burden and skill atrophy, so teams get more durable value when AI supports planning, research and scoped delegation without replacing the direct code-level engagement that builds real engineering judgment.

What AI Coding Costs You by Tom Wojcik
Using too much AI in development can quietly erode the understanding, debugging skill and creative engagement that strong engineering depends on, so the real challenge is not whether to use AI, but how to stay cognitively involved enough to keep building judgment while still benefiting from the speed.

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Last Week To Apply For A Team Pass

Make Sure To Not Miss Out On San Francisco!

This is the last week to apply for a chance to bring your product team to UXDX San Francisco 2026 for free. Tell us what your team is doing well in AI and what you want to improve next. The team with the most votes will receive up to 5 tickets to UXDX San Francisco.

More details and the form can be found here:: Apply for a UXDX San Francisco team pass

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Video Of The Week

From Cost Center to Strategic Asset: Redefining the Role of Design

Design teams are often treated as execution hubs, brought in to produce screens rather than shape the direction of the business. But when design is kept too close to delivery and too far from strategy, teams end up reacting to decisions instead of influencing them.

In this fireside chat, Paul Strike and Falguni Desai share lessons from senior design leadership on how to shift design from an output-focused function to a strategic business partner. A useful watch for anyone working to prove the value of design, build stronger business sponsorship, and help design teams operate at both strategic and tactical levels. Check it out below:

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.