This Week’s Updates

Enabling the Team

Collaborative Steering by Luke Wroblewski
As teams start guiding separate AI agents, perspectives can drift faster than output improves, so collaborative steering creates shared context that helps design, product and engineering encode goals together instead of letting every agent optimise for a different version of the work.

Sometimes Your Job Is To Get In The Way by Michael Lopp
Good leadership is not picking one style and sticking to it, it is knowing when to stay out of the way and when to step in hard, drawing a line that resets priorities before speed, momentum or cheerleading turn visible success into systemic failure.

Product Direction

The AI Playbook Puzzle by John Cutler
AI does not create a playbook so much as expose whether teams understand which practices were always broken, which were always useful, and which only made sense because of old constraints, making contextual judgment more valuable than any tactical AI framework. 

The Interface Is No Longer The Product by Alejandro Gonzalez
As agents work directly on structured representations instead of clicking through interfaces, the real product shifts from screens and files to the underlying object of work, pushing teams to rethink software around source of truth, validation and views rather than UI alone.

Continuous Research

How Do We Grow In The Age Of AI? by Optimal (Sponsored Content)
As AI takes over more of the research workflow, the real challenge becomes preserving the judgment, rigor and storytelling that turn raw evidence into trustworthy insight, especially for junior researchers still learning the craft.

The “Second Layer” Problem: What to Do When AI Tools Create Operational Debt by Jordan Brinkman
AI tools do not just add capability, they create a second layer of orchestration, governance and maintenance work, so teams need to account for the cognitive and operational debt of building with AI instead of assuming automation simply makes research lighter.

Continuous Design

Taste Over Haste by Anne Quito
As AI makes polished execution easy, design value shifts toward taste, the judgment to choose what is worth pursuing, what feels coherent, and when a result is too generic, making creative agency and point of view more important than speed alone.

Most AI Tools Make Users Faster. The Best AI Tools Make Users Better. by Daisy Chen
The best AI tools do more than accelerate tasks, they shape how users think, judge and grow over time, so designing human control, calibrated trust and the right friction matters as much as raw speed if AI is meant to improve people rather than quietly deskill them.

Continuous Development

The Un-Hateable Engineering Managers by Anton Zaides
Managers who avoid hard feedback to stay liked usually push the cost onto the rest of the team, so strong leadership means accepting short term discomfort and making the calls that protect team health, clarity and performance.

The Eternal Sloptember by George Hotz
AI agents can frontload progress in software work, but when teams stop reading closely they also make it easier to ship polished looking slop, shifting the real development challenge from generating code to preserving judgment, feedback loops and standards of quality.

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Prices Go Up This Week

Don’t Wait On UXDX San Francisco 2026

This is your final chance to book UXDX San Francisco at the current rate before ticket prices increase later this weekend. On November 5–6, leaders from Target, Expedia, Verizon, Snapchat, ŌURA and more will come together at August Hall to share how product teams are adapting to AI in practice. Expect one day of talks on what is changing inside teams, products and processes, followed by one day of workshops focused on execution. Book your tickets below:

FREE COMMUNITY EVENTS 

Video Of The Week

Leveraging AI for Safer &
More Efficient Healthcare Delivery

AI in healthcare is not just about building powerful models. It is about ensuring they can be deployed safely, understood by the people who use them, and integrated into clinical workflows without adding more complexity to already stretched teams.

In this talk, Dr. Ashley Beecy shares lessons from leading AI operations at NewYork-Presbyterian, including how to bring together clinical users, data teams, MLOps, informatics and research to support better patient care and provider wellbeing. A useful watch for anyone thinking about how AI moves from promising technology to responsible, practical implementation inside complex organisations.

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.