No Water Breaks

I heard this week that a company I worked at laid off another design leader. The third in five-ish years. Script on the way in: we need design leadership, we're building out the function, we want you to elevate the practice, the craft, and the workflow. Script on the way out: design didn't get it. Leadership got it. We're going in a different direction.

The direction was always the same. Run faster. No clapping. No water breaks. All the trophies are ours. All the missteps are yours. Just run faster.

This isn't one company's problem. It's a script that's running in a lot of product & design orgs right now. Leaders get hired, get blamed for things outside their authority, and get cycled out within a year or two. A new one gets hired with the same charge. The same thing happens.

(To be fair: I believe you're 50% of every problem if you care. Own your 50%)

The executives running this play aren't villains. Most of them are exhausted too. The "design doesn't get it" script doesn't get pulled off a shelf by someone who hates designers. It gets pulled off a shelf by someone who needs an answer to "why aren't we shipping faster" and "why we aren't selling more" and doesn't have anywhere else to put it. It gets pulled off the shelf by the pressure to continually grow by 30% yoy, providing value to shareholders or VCs. All real pressures. Choices, but real pressures. Listen, executives have the right to shape organizations however they want. 20:1 eng-to-design ratio - doable. No HR department - go for it. CEO as micromanaging CPO - sometimes a great idea.

The pattern I want to name is bigger than design. The velocity-only org runs on the same engine no matter what discipline ends up under the wheel. It's not malice. It's the absence of slack in the system. An org built around "run faster" has no room for the work that doesn't immediately show up on the dashboard. Trust. Culture. Change management. The team cohesion and repair work between sprints. When that work is treated as overhead instead of infrastructure, the people responsible for it get cycled out faster than the work itself gets deprioritized. This year, it's design leaders. Next year it'll be someone else. This may be why we see senior tenures in tech plummeting. VP of Design averages about 2.1 years. VP of Product, 2.3. CRO, 1.8. CMO, 1.8. (More on this in Why Are We Asking Humans to Be More Loyal Than the Systems They Serve.)

Here's why I think this story is about to flip.

Velocity has been a differentiator for about twenty-four months. It isn't anymore. When every PM has Claude open in another tab, every engineer is shipping with Cursor, and every designer is prompting their way to a third iteration, speed flattens into table stakes. The race ends not because anyone wins it. The gap just closes.

That's the part nobody is pricing in yet. The 2024 productivity bump from AI being new was a one-time thing. The 2025 advantage went to the orgs that restructured fastest - did the hard foundational work that allowed AI and orgs to move quickly. The 2026/2027 special sauce, the one I think is coming, doesn't go to whoever adopts the next model the day it ships. It goes to whoever can hold their people steady while the rest of the industry hyperventilates.

Companies like Linear and 37signals stand out. My money is on companies like these. The ones making more rational bets and more deliberate people investments. The companies that didn't cycle through three design leaders, didn't kill the watering holes, didn't burn the cultural capital they had. They're going to look very different in eighteen months. Not louder. Not faster. Just steadier. Steadiness, when it's earned, compounds.

Steadiness, when it's earned, compounds.

Here's the actual moat. Everyone has the same tools. Everyone has roughly the same model access. Everyone is generating the same outputs from the same prompts. What separates a team that compounds from a team that breaks isn't tooling. It's whether the people inside it have the trust, the rest, the context, and the clarity to actually use and innovate with the tools they have.

If you're reading this and thinking does this guy do the work though? Yes. MCP servers, .md files, design system ingestion workflows. Real work. None of it compounds without the people investment underneath.

When trust, rest, context, and clarity are missing, the symptoms are predictable. Three themes come up over and over in my current consulting work.

1. Shipping faster, but the experiences lack unification. The workflows don't flow. The journeys aren't enjoyable. The experiences don't address human anxieties and tendencies. Everything is flat, cold, digital. The fix isn't more AI output. It's investment in the people who hold the cross-feature view and the time they need to make the seams disappear.

2. Teams (especially design + product + engineering) lack a coherent workflow. Everyone is prototyping and shipping (yay!), but no one is coordinating. We don't know where things are. AI can prototype anything. It can't hold the seams. That takes investment in the people whose job is the middle, and the rituals they run to keep the team aligned.

3. People are burnt out and operating from a place of fear vs. opportunity. You can't get the upside of speed when the people running at it are running scared. Psychological safety, real rest, honest career conversations - that investment is what flips the operating mode from fear to opportunity.

These aren't three separate problems. They're three faces of the same one. The velocity-only org optimized for the artifact and forgot the seams between the people producing it. Fix the seams and all three start to resolve.

For two years, the story of work has been: tools got faster, jobs got harder, people got squeezed. That's a story with a clear loser. Everyone. Sustainable advantage doesn't come from being the loudest in a race that's already plateauing. It comes from doing the work everyone else deprioritized.

The leaders who held their teams together while everyone around them chased velocity look quiet right now. They're going to look like geniuses in eighteen months. Not because they predicted the next model release schedule. Because they remembered that organizations are made of people, and that people compound when you invest in them.

To the three design leaders cycled through that company, and to the dozens more reading this with the same story: this isn't a referendum on you. The script that got run on you is about to expire. The companies that figured this out are going to need you.

Adopt AI & Invest in the people.