"It’s strange that despite all our technology, we’re still struggling to bring design and code closer together."

"The opposite of doom scrolling is hope. Hope is active. It’s about claiming our agency in a moment that may be difficult."

"Persuasive technology shifted design focus from ease of use to influencing what users do."

"I walked into the building and it just felt surreal. It didn’t feel right in my body to be there anymore."

"If 71% of people self-identify as gamers, why aren’t you learning from the video game industry?"

"People can make all sorts of inventive mistakes on their forms that AI struggles to interpret."

"The six-month calibration cycle in tech gamifies performance but discourages a long-term vision for career longevity."

"Humans need to override and dominate AI because machines have no context or experience."

"No one size fits all solution in complexity. We have to work in context and be resourceful and repurpose tools."

"Objectives are qualitative, inspirational statements about the future we want to create for our customers without mentioning any solutions."

"The mandala metaphor reminds us not to be emotionally attached to deliverables; sometimes you build to throw away."

"AI wasn’t the obstacle. Fragmentation was."

"Co-creation is where the meat of transformation happens; designers facilitate those who hold knowledge and make decisions."

"The challenge is co-developing a custom investment model that alters decision making based on portfolio logic rather than project-based thinking."

"My definition of service design is dancing with needs and value."

"Don’t be afraid to not know something. Let assistive technology users teach you."

"Democratization is here to stay, and it’s a positive force for good in product development."

"Building psychological safety and trust through dialogue creates organizational memory that drives change."

"Increasing coordinated collaboration increased our service capacity by 200%."

"Every spreadsheet is emotional. It’s a stage direction."

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

"If we make creating inclusive experiences our goal, legal compliance will naturally follow."

"Complex systems are not chaos but non-deterministic due to interdependencies and autonomy within the system."

"People are better equipped to decide and act in their lives when we deliver relevant and useful information."

"Customer journeys used to be specialist knowledge, but now they’re a normalized, even commodified, organizational artifact."

"Generative AI is not creative; it’s just pattern finding and recycling what’s been done before."

"The farther away you are from the CEO or GM, the less happy and healthy your organization tends to be."

"Ethics tends to emerge at the level of mastery of a community."

"Directive Disruptors plow through organizations without listening, causing alienation and low morale."

"Adaptability isn’t weakness, it’s strength."

"Cursor is super transparent about what files it creates and how it builds the logic step by step."

"Your short term memory is the context window; too big, and the model has trouble accessing everything."

"Operations is a verb. You’ve always been operating — the role just invites you to do it better."

"A constitution is a very good exercise: write down your system’s principles and values to help guide its behavior."

"Without a golden dataset, you have to build the golden dataset yourself."

"UX research is a team sport and our research process is cross-functional and non-negotiable."

"Unintended consequences conversations are productive because organizations want to avoid becoming negative headlines."

"Our approach to career development is thinking about two dimensions: what you’re good at and enjoy, and what you’re good at but don’t enjoy."

"If I don’t make a dollar doing this, I’ll be okay, but I actually am making a dollar doing it."

"Organizations are complex systems; you need to understand them deeply before acting."

"AI is raising the floor of design work—you're not gonna get 10% crappy design anymore, but it won't create rockstar UI yet."

"Nobody really knows what all this AI stuff is about yet, so we’re experimenting with it ourselves."

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

"Maintaining large-scale design systems is a real challenge that AI tools are starting to solve."

"Most of our team members held term positions, and in 2020 we experienced a mandatory turnover of nearly our entire staff, creating risk of knowledge loss."

"Data is power; find your eigen metric, the one or two things that prove your hypothesis."

"This is a just-do-it moment. Ask for forgiveness, not permission."

"Ethics is fantastic, but for the business, the right thing sometimes is revenue."

"Teams testing components in real-world contexts early can catch issues before products are even built."

"We combined the best elements of process design, UX, service design, and change management into a single expression to form the PT operating model."

"You can't do one without the other. Design the system, set rituals in the quality bar. They reinforce each other."

"Hope is not a strategy, and mandates don’t build culture. What works is scaffolding."

"The hackathon is a low-commitment way to get people creatively engaged and having fun."

"Starting a new job with no map felt lost; so I built a new map as my BYO orientation."

"If you don’t operationalize content early, you end up with last minute crunches breaking the design."

"The secondary first, primary second sequence may seem a numerical mismatch, but it is the way to go."

"One in four people in the United States have a disability."

"Even the most mature organizations tend to be on the nascent end of design ops maturity, and that leads to duplicated work and inconsistent user experiences."

"HIPAA isn’t that complicated; sending data to patients only needs two sentences."

"Research alone is insufficient to solve complex organizational problems; it’s more about learning how to work with the teams and complexity."

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

"We need secure defaults that protect users out of the box without them having to figure it out."

"Tool use lets the model decide itself when to call external APIs or services to get needed information."

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

"The interface you’ve designed is like a landscape shaping the flow of user behavior as water flows through a stream."

"The job market is cyclical — tough times pass and opportunities come back around."

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

"Insight summaries create durable knowledge that only goes away when it's been resolved or no longer relevant."

"Every job is a climate job. Wherever we are, the climate needs us to address it in our role."

"Insights can have impact years after the fact if properly activated."

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

"Starting from scratch is really hard, but also a cool opportunity to throw away painful patterns."

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

"I think to understand how they work, it’s not just understanding how they operate, it’s understanding how to make the sausage rather than consume the sausage."

"This doesn't replace books, it helps people learn about books and synthesize related information."

"Physical paper has a special tactility to it; people still gravitate back to it because of this nature."

"Simulated personas allow you to test ideas rapidly to decide whether they’re worth pursuing before expensive user research."

"What if you didn’t know there were important questions you should be asking in your data?"

"Design handoff is really about cozying up with engineers and getting closer to the final product."

"This isn’t about Skynet; it’s about simple signals of awareness that adapt to immediate context."

"Machine learning models can unlearn behaviors, but we need robust feedback loops to detect when they go awry."

"Finding meaningful insights is not just casting a wide net—it requires discipline, structure, and knowing where to fish."

"We saw a 2.5 times increase in active monthly users and a 1.5 times increase in purchases attributed to the AI assistant."

"It can seem like all the AI UX authorities are trying to sell you something without real skin in the game."

"Two companies, Klarna and Duolingo, went all in on AI replacing humans and then recanted - Christopher."

"The app reads the question and prepares tutoring material, then helps solve it step by step or through chat if further questions remain."

"We’ve seen about a 12% boost in conversion rates in just a few weeks with some clients using the platform."

"Hallucinations are when AI makes up stuff—it's a fundamental property of these models."

"Most product teams don't really have user research outputs or they come too late and disconnected from design."

"Start small and learn in low-stakes ways so you can train the organization to think, act, and react to AI."

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

"Extractive, commercially-driven communities aren’t really communities in the pure sense."

"The portfolio should not be a forensic exercise pulled together last minute; it’s a journaling effort capturing weekly work."

"Matchmaking connects AI capabilities to user needs so you find the low hanging fruit projects."

"Psychological safety is key—if folks aren't in the right state, the conversation isn't productive."

"You have to verify key data points carefully because AI can hallucinate details in critical areas."

"If you’re dealing with someone more senior who won’t engage, appeal to how the problem affects their responsibilities."

"Most clients initially thought the web was a greener medium because it replaced paper, and they had no idea about digital sustainability."

"Learning unfolds through encounters that disrupt our existing frames and invite transformation."

"You need to know your limits on how far you’re willing to exert influence and your energy investment."