19 korrents from this recording
Every claim below is a statement made in this recording, quoted word for word and linked to the second it was said, so you can hear it rather than take our word for it. The wording comes from the transcript published alongside the recording; the sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording.
Their wordsYou're managing the team, but you're also with the team. Like you're building things together. you know, you're kind of not in this ivory tower just doing performance reviews and alignment meetings while the IC's are doing the things the IC's do
Their wordsprototypes win arguments, right? Prototypes get people psyched. like you know moving away from slide decks, moving away from PRDs, moving into like something that people can actually feel and react to
Their wordsyou can do that in like 100th of the speed. And so I think for managers who are curious and crafty, they can do a lot more with their day with the 40 hours that they have
Their wordsthat courage of like being able to sort of push on these tools A and B dog fooding tools instead of just like sending them over to your team and hoping that they work
Their wordssome of the best design leaders are people that have spent some amount of time being entrepreneurs or working in early stage companies again because of that ownership thing
Their wordsI'm definitely seeing more companies that are looking at things that you built outside of work, not as extra credit, but as possibly reasons to get jobs in addition to or even over traditional work experience
Their wordsbuilding software isn't as hard as it used to be, but growing an audience is as hard as it always has been
Their wordsall the usual exercises still help of like really clearly defining like what is the goal of this product? Who is it for? What are the critical user journeys that this product is supposed to handle
Their wordsI've generally found that when you try to build everything at once with any platform it's kind of a disaster in a way
Our reading
A place for stored project context that an AI platform can keep referencing is worth setting up.
Their wordsmake sure there's a place that's sort of like the project memory, right? Like kind of your stored context for like what this thing is that it can keep referencing to understand like, oh wait, I'm building a matchmaking service for brands, not whatever some email platform, right
Their wordswhen something is off in Claude, I could back and forth with it in words for like 10 minutes or I could go to Figma and sketch it out in 5 minutes and it's probably going to be closer to like the pixel perfect version I have in my head
Our reading
AI-built products look very similar because the tools are all trained on the same material.
Their wordsThey're looking at the outputs of AI tools and they're like, "Oh, that's pretty good." But like a lot of them, as we both know, look very similar. And that is because they're literally all being trained on the same world of stuff
Their wordsdon't wait till like the very end to think about branding and differentiation. Like really try to like I mean in general like I think once you know what the product is and what it's for. I feel like that is a conversation and some definition you should have as early as possible to start to infuse some of that soul and some of that like kind of like brand and point of view into the product
Their wordsyou can't just be execution. You can't just be order takers. Not that I think designers ever should be, but like that is no longer valuable because a product manager can doesn't need you anymore to do that
Their wordsdesigners that like have the the boldness and the courage to like find ways to like do scrappy cafe testing or like user testing.com or whatever it is and know what that looks like, know when it's useful, and like just do it. Like I think that's that's huge
Their wordsfinding the customers number one like like real growth stuff and then two like having a really differentiating product right that feels more premium has an emotional connection with its users like those are things that fall squarely in the design world
Their wordsreading the output of cloud code and what it's doing and understanding it actually makes you a more successful builder
Their wordsit is your responsibility as a leader at a company to understand what people's strengths are, what their passions are, and to like know how to grow people in the areas to make them well-rounded
Their wordsI really think a lot of brand expression today can come with motion design that is and I think it's a very underutilized skill by product designers