#designops

We don’t start from a blank canvas anymore. We start with intent. And we let AI handle the first draft. Over the last few months, here’s how we’ve redesigned our process: → From brief to prototype in hours, not days → AI helps us sketch flows, outline ideas, and explore edge cases → We move faster without losing depth or quality Faster doesn’t mean sloppy. It means: → More experiments → More feedback → Less friction → Smarter pivots And with the grunt work offloaded, we finally get to focus on what matters: → Strategy → User psychology → Micro-interactions → Journey refinement We’ve shifted from MVP → MLP → MAP: → Minimum AI-powered Prototype → Validate early. → Iterate faster. → Build smarter. Building something bold? Design with intention. Ship at speed. Let AI be your junior designer.

I was asked recently if our design organization has a quality program. I responded by explaining that our design organization is a quality program. So much of what a UX design team does is focused on ensuring a quality experience for our users. We conduct user research to understand the needs of our users. We employ visual design and interaction design principles to improve quality. We conduct usability testing to validate quality. We collect customer sentiment and behavioral analytics to measure quality and identify areas to improve.

People tend to not like being added to new meetings. We have so many meetings, and the vast majority of them are virtual, due to the fact that we are distributed across the world. And there are so many bad meetings—meetings that should have been an email or, better yet, a Slack thread—that people are suspect of new meetings. Especially when a meeting has the word “status” in the title.

Today, I led the first of a new bi-weekly meeting of our entire DesignOps team. I was very intentional in the way I planned the meeting, providing a time-boxed agenda with assigned responsibilities. I took time to explain the purpose of the meeting and my expectations going forward.

There’s been a lot of really good commentary on the current state of the UX job market. Two years ago, I posted about my experience as a hiring manager.

In January, Jared Spool presented a comprehensive explanation.

Just a week ago, Jon Kolko offered his advice based on his own job hunt.

And only a couple days ago, Uday Gajendar provided his perspective.

After mastering design skills and design software, what's the next step in starting to level up your UX career?

There are always additional skills, but that isn't really what the question is looking for. Design strategy is where I would suggest you focus next. You know how to do the design work, but do you know how to work with various stakeholders to influence the decision making around what you will be working on? Are you working on things that will improve your user's experience? Are you building features that will solve your customer's problems? Is your team being granted enough time and resources to perform user research and usability testing? Do you have enough business acumen to understand how to bring more value to your company? Are you able to improve your team's software development lifecycle through better integration of your UX and development practices? How are your relationships with sales, marketing, and support?

I was invited to sit on a panel discussing UX careers recently, and I'd like to share some of the questions that were posed. This is going to be a new series of posts that I'll string out over the next few weeks.

What career pathways do you believe have emerged for UX professionals in the past 10 years?

The first one that jumps to mind is DesignOps. Derived from DevOps, Dave Malouf coined the term in 2014, and it caught on rapidly, largely because a lot of people were thinking about it and trying to mature it, but they hadn't had a name for it. Dave worked with Lou Rosenfeld to launch the DesignOps Summit in 2017. Today, large design organizations are staffing DesignOps teams.

Another fairly recent career path is that of UX Engineer. This is a hybrid role: part frontend developer but with a true design bent. They have the chops to contribute production-ready code, and they understand interaction design and visual design enough to realize and respect the intent of the designer. They ensure that implementation is faithful to the design.

I would also suggest that, while UX researchers have been around for a long time, the role has really come into its own in the past 10 years. ResearchOps followed right on the heals of DesignOps, and there was widespread acknowledgement that we, as designers, still had a lot to learn about the rigor of quality research. Teams were maturing to the point that research specialists were becoming common.