This Week’s Updates

Enabling the Team

How Leaders Get In The Way Of Organizational Change by Ron Carucci
Organisational change stalls when leaders underestimate the work, overload teams with disconnected initiatives and promote transformation without changing themselves, so progress depends on realistic capacity, integrated priorities and leaders demonstrating the behaviours they expect from others.

The 3 Biggest Workplace Stressors; 1 Structural Fix by Joost Minnaar
Workplace stress is not one problem: unclear expectations damage performance, conflicting demands drive burnout and excessive workloads harm wellbeing, so defining roles through clear purpose, decision rights and measures of success gives teams more autonomy without leaving responsibility ambiguous.

Product Direction

Productive Garbage by Afonso Franco
AI has made it cheap to generate endless documents, prototypes and options, shifting the product bottleneck from creation to judgment, so teams need stronger prioritisation and curation to stop apparent productivity from overwhelming decision-making.

The AI Playbook Puzzle by John Cutler
AI does not provide a universal playbook; it exposes which practices were already broken, which good practices can be strengthened, and which old constraints no longer apply, making contextual judgment and adaptability more valuable than rigid AI frameworks.

Continuous Research

How To Spot And Stop Discovery Slop by Tim Herbig
AI can make product discovery look more rigorous without reducing meaningful uncertainty, so teams need to return to raw evidence, separate synthesis from summarisation and use human judgment to stop polished outputs from masking weak research.

Stop Reporting UX Activity And Report Business Outcomes by Lola Famulegun
Reporting interviews, usability scores and design activity makes UX look like a cost centre, so teams need to connect their work to revenue, cost, risk, speed and retention to demonstrate impact in the language leadership uses to allocate resources. 

Continuous Design

Output Isn’t Design by Karri Saarinen
AI can generate polished interfaces quickly, but design still depends on understanding the human needs, constraints and tensions behind the problem. Hence, teams need to treat generated output as material for exploration rather than evidence that the right solution has been found. 

We Built This. Now We Own It. by Patrizia Bertini
Designing AI responsibly means looking beyond immediate usability and engagement to the wider systems products create, questioning who may be harmed, where dependency is encouraged and how oversight, safeguards and accountability can be built into decisions before launch.

Continuous Development

AI Demands More Engineering Discipline. Not Less by Charity Majors
AI makes it easier to generate large volumes of plausible code, increasing the need for testing, observability, small changes and clear ownership so engineering teams can move faster without losing control of quality or production systems.

Revised Rules Of Engineering Leadership. by Will Larson
AI makes first-pass code and large migrations dramatically cheaper. However, reliable delivery still depends on strong development harnesses, durable teams with deep domain context and leaders who can make fast, binding decisions without sacrificing technical quality.

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Turning AI Experiments Into Business Impact

At UXDX San Francisco, Explore What It Takes To Scale AI Beyond Isolated Pilots

Most organisations have launched AI experiments. Far fewer have turned them into products, workflows and operating models that deliver measurable customer and business value. The challenge is no longer proving that AI can work. It is deciding which initiatives deserve investment, how success should be measured and how innovation can scale without creating unnecessary risk.

At UXDX San Francisco, Maz Brumand will share what separates successful AI transformation from costly experimentation. The session will cover how to prioritise initiatives based on value and effort, establish practical governance, measure impact beyond usage metrics and scale proven capabilities across teams, products and customer experiences.

FREE COMMUNITY EVENTS 

Video Of The Week

UX Researcher: Team of one

Great research does not create impact on its own. In this online community event, Swati Sachdeva, UX Researcher at Google, shares what she learned after presenting a strong research deck that received polite agreement but led to no action. The missing skill was not research quality. It was understanding the business, stakeholder priorities and how decisions were actually made.

Swati explores what solo researchers need beyond running studies, including earning trust, navigating stakeholder politics, communicating with people who do not read research reports and proving the value of research while building the function itself. It is a practical session for researchers entering solo roles or trying to understand what seniority really looks like in practice.

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.