A team of faster designers can be a slower team. We spent the past year obsessed with getting individual designers faster with AI. Fair enough, most of us figured that out. But make seven designers faster and you don't get a faster team. You get seven private workflows, seven definitions of done, and a coordination problem nobody's talking about.

Exploring Storyroom, a social audiobook concept where listeners move through a book together, and how using AI as a thinking partner reshaped my design process, accelerated building, and changed how I approach product design today.

The latest round of AI-driven layoffs hit hard. But after thirty years of tech waves and an honest conversation at Ocean Beach, the data surprised me. This is what it actually says about the future of design jobs — and why I think it's still worth paddling back out.