Uxtopian

Ideas

On leadership, AI, and what we're not talking about.

Latest

Internal Product Requests Are Relationships

The way you respond to internal requests is how the rest of the org learns what design is for. Every interaction is either building trust or eroding it.

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AI Is Turning Us All Into Cheetahs

AI selects for one cognitive style — fast, focused, output-driven. But resilient teams need cognitive diversity. What happens when the whole jungle becomes a sprint?

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What AI Reveals About Loyalty, Risk, and Modern Work

If systems operate on short horizons by design, why do we still ask individuals to organize their lives around long-term loyalty?

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We’re more patient with AI than one another

We’ve learned how to collaborate with machines faster than we’ve learned how to collaborate with each other. What if we brought that generosity back to human systems?

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Mission Accomplished: How AI Finally Put Design Ahead (and Why That’s a Problem)

Design is ahead, product is ahead, engineering is ahead. But if we don’t bring discernment, “ahead” just means “faster toward somewhere.”

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AI: Where Do We Go From Here?

We didn’t go wrong by embracing speed or technology. We went wrong by confusing progress with acceleration.

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If Design and Code Are Easy, What’s Left to Optimize?

AI can generate layouts in seconds. Copilot writes production-ready code. But as the making part gets easier, the thinking part becomes the bottleneck.

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Why Your Pizza Oven Rarely Gets Used

Product teams love features. But progress without context rarely sticks. Every product team has its pizza oven story.

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Why Brand Matters More Than Ever in the Age of AI-Driven Products

Without a clear brand and strategy, speed becomes chaos, alignment becomes luck, and your team pays the price.

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Bringing Your Whole Self to Work (and Why AI Might Not Need All of It)

Maybe the invitation was never to bring your whole self to work. Maybe it was always to bring your real self.

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Building the Future of Feedback: Lessons from AI for Humans

AI forced us to get serious about observability and evaluation. Humans need both too.

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When “Faster With AI” Slows You Down

The paradox emerges when organizations accelerate AI adoption and inadvertently create more inefficiency than value.

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Design Leadership Years 3 through 5

Years 3–5 is when design leaders fly solo — navigating the bridge from Director to VP, trading tactical tools for strategic ones.

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Three Product Workflows to Contend With

AI has fractured the way teams work. What used to be a single process has splintered into three parallel workstreams.

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Tools need ideas

Every week there’s a new AI tool promising to deliver your product in record time. But every tool still relies on human direction.

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It’s Scary Up Here — Design Leadership — Year 2

You made it through Year 1. Year 2 requires self-reflection, decision making, and balance — including choosing your career topology.

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But I can’t see where I’m going. Design Leadership — Year One

The first of a 3-part series on navigating your first few years as a design leader — role clarity, team assessment, and organizational politics.

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Content and Band Aids

Content resists surface solutions because it resides at the core of your offering. Covering over content problems keeps the poison in your system.

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UX Voyeurism

When you take the time to watch how someone else performs product design & UX, the spectator in you extracts process details and connects dots.

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