"Writing my book was just another UX research project synthesizing my career and leading me toward law."

"Transparency requires all decisions to be clear and understandable to non-technical users."

"It’s not about solving or fixing complexity. We’re making sense of it so we can operate in it."

"Our goal ultimately is not to deploy a static solution but to make sure humans in the system achieve their goals successfully as often as possible."

"Critical thinking is our strongest asset, not just automation or AI."

"The real shift wasn’t speed, it was also trust."

"De-risking sessions gave disgruntled stakeholders a forum to voice fears before larger workshops."

"Service design and enterprise design are not just for digital or government—they're applicable to complex organizational change and B2B market entry."

"We were reinventing the wheel every time we entered a new market, which was incredibly slow and inefficient."

"You don’t need a huge planned research study; even two participants can uncover valuable insights."

"The democratization spectrum ranges from everyone accessing feedback to a free-for-all, but I don’t advocate for a free-for-all."

"Design systems help us bring healthy consistency across digital and non-digital experiences for equity."

"Naming was nothing about the name; it was about creating alignment and clarity of purpose."

"All of our models and metrics are temporary scripts. What matters is the rehearsal and how we keep rewriting the score together."

"Involving frontline staff as co-creators helps ensure AI is a collaborator rather than a threat."

"If accessibility is buried three levels deep in a checklist, it’s going to get missed."

"What would change if learning itself was not just a KPI but your North star metric?"

"Journalists experiencing the same trauma as samurai during the Meiji Restoration – once warriors, now unsure of their role."

"You have to socialize service design within organizations considering their dominant logic — whether engineering, clinical, or commercial."

"Clients often want flashy autoplay video even though it negatively impacts performance and sustainability."

"Career growth is mostly about skills development, responsibility, and influence rather than just compensation or titles."

"I'm basically a philosopher because 50% of people don't know what an ethicist is."

"Leadership Dichotomies are not opposites but spectrums where leaders find their dominant position and comfort range."

"Bees measure success not by how fast they work but by how well they prepare."

"What if we trained Midjourney on our own style? That felt more ethical and right for our project."

"If you build for the next model, even if it can hardly do something now, it will probably do it well in the future."

"A library that contains everything is not necessarily useful because everything is not useful."

"The more I work with evals, the more I think UX and product people need to be involved because of the need for diverse perspectives."

"There is a large and growing capability overhang in these models we haven’t discovered yet."

"Slowing down is hard in a capitalist economy that values speed, but patience and self-care are necessary."

"Executives often ignore potential negative consequences, but surfacing them at least provides awareness and mitigation possibilities."

"Use AI responsibly; never input sensitive info without governance, or it could lead to dangerous outcomes."

"End your day by writing the to-do list for tomorrow; it’s easy to get distracted when you’re not in a full-time gig."

"What would have to be true is the most powerful question in strategy."

"Raising the floor and the ceiling means eliminating low-value problems and empowering talent to shine creatively."

"Books are semantically very rich and thus pull content much more effectively in our vector database than conference talks."

"Artificial intelligence is reshaping our workflows. Our roles are shifting."

"It took me just a little bit amount of time to get into that and actually make a proper component from Figma."

"We define knowledge management as a dynamic, systemic, and agile approach to creating, capturing, storing, and sharing knowledge."

"Our edge isn’t in managing what exists; it’s in architecting new meaning at scale where process becomes infrastructure."

"Professional development budgets get cut first in tough times, yet skill building is more important than ever."

"The more the compliance level increased, the higher the cost efficiency."

"Accessibility often happens too late, as an afterthought, making updates costly and disconnected from lived experience."

"We needed a modern, scalable way to operationalize transformation across more than 4,500 global employees."

"Feedback is a system. It's not just a pile of comments. It needs to be choreographed, timed, sequenced, and aimed to move the work."

"The role of leaders is to provide just enough guidance so teams don’t feel lost but avoid bureaucracy."

"Our goal is to be AI fluent, not necessarily AI experts."

"Publishing a component library means anyone can update titles or roles, and it updates everywhere at once."

"Often tooling is a vacuum particularly around insights repositories—everyone wants it or no one wants it."

"You enter a single prompt, like washing your own car, and the system analyzes the whole context and returns research artifacts."

"When we build accessibility into an environment, especially if we do it subtly, it becomes the new normal."

"Changes made in this sync tool migrate to Figma and vice versa, enabling a federated push-pull system managed by design and engineering leads."

"For every dollar spent on cancer care, roughly four are spent on administration."

"Most research methods come from an engineering mindset suitable for complicated problems, but product problems are mostly complex."

"If I stop doing it, it stops, and I'm the human in the loop, or the monkey in the middle."

"If Charlie has been tampered with, Alice needs a clear way to be alerted that she shouldn't trust it."

"Think of the context window like an intern's briefing document: would the intern be able to answer the question with this information?"

"Domain experts are crucial for tagging data because users might say ‘that’s great,’ but experts can tell it’s totally wrong."

"Behavioral turbulence happens when flow breaks down, causing chaotic and unpredictable user interactions."

"Synthetic personas created with AI are a horrible substitute for real user research."

"Models are stateless; they take input and give output and forget everything immediately after."

"Traceable research citations can be simple links referencing insights in planning workspaces, driving consistent use."

"Don’t cold reach out to people with ‘let’s connect’; instead, ask very specific questions about topics they care about."

"Research waste means customer insights that were unseen, ignored, or unintentionally left out of planning."

"The lipstick on the pig—cosmetic fixes give little impact without addressing deeper usability and business value."

"I thought, maybe now is the time for change, maybe designers should code—maybe the better question in 2025 is should I code."

"AI intelligence is too cheap to meter, or we can call it McKinsey interns too cheap to meter."

"People want to demystify AI because most have been native AI users without even realizing it."

"We're not trying to cannibalize book sales but want to make the knowledge more accessible."

"With Draw Dream, the AI acts as a muse, giving inspiration but not the final outcome."

"The AI assistant enables ongoing conversation and follow-up questions to refine persona insights dynamically."

"People just don't get that the design and the process is fundamental."

"AI is not just speeding up what I used to do, it's changing what I used to do."

"AI is not just a tool for productivity or efficiency; it's a design material with unusual strengths and weaknesses."

"You have to build guardrails and test models with red teaming to ensure they behave ethically and safely."

"AI systems can present speculative connections as established facts, so confidence ratings are critical."

"Don't design for a response, design for reasoning. Teach AI to think critically, analyze information, and arrive at logical conclusions."

"Today’s speakers come from real world companies facing real consequences for their choices about AI."

"We’re seeing these agents trying to represent ourselves online in ways we’ve never seen before - Bria."

"AI is like plastics on the surface — it gives amazing powers but has hidden damages we must not repeat."

"Synthetic users are an expansion of the human-centered design toolkit, not a replacement."

"You can’t have good AI without good information architecture."

"This is pure context information, not requirements yet, but it’s structured and detailed for design."

"Bring your own AI and keep control over the process rather than being locked into vendor solutions."

"Legal was one of the most challenging stakeholders — I wish I’d built those relationships early."

"Community is a thing that fosters a sense of belonging and wanting to identify with it."

"Your resume, your portfolio, your body of work should reflect you as a human being."

"Executives said it's better to go fast and fail than to go slow and succeed."

"You want to check your motivations and your understanding of the situation before any conversation."

"Skills are modular tasks that bots can perform, triggered by specific commands or inputs."

"Clarity and cruelty are different things; you want directness without belittling."

"Accessibility is a line in the sand for us; if you don’t want an accessible website, maybe don’t hire us."

"Planning is essential, but plans are useless."

"Anger doesn’t mean you have to yell—it’s about speaking clearly to the problem you see."

"If you don’t have any work, make some spec work just to show your skills."

"Adoption is crucial; build your community early by involving them in co-design and pilots."

"My hope is that in five years we won’t have Chief Sustainability Officers because sustainability will be part of every process and mindset."

"Knowledge is the material we’re working with in AI design, not just pixels or code."

"The DEO looks at all business problems as design problems, solvable through creativity, imagination, and metrics."

"We need to transform insights into wisdom that influences decisions."