Leading through ambiguity: Supporting a design team relearning their craft
Summary
Our team had been designing AI features for some time before we were forced to confront what that meant for our own craft. At Articulate, we build tools that help people create learning at scale. As we introduced AI-augmented creation workflows, we focused on helping learning designers move faster and generate ideas more easily. But those same forces began reshaping how our own design team worked under the pressure of sustained ambiguity. What started as workflow optimization became real-time field research into how designers learn, resist, and adapt when the act of creation itself changes. Familiar practices began to break, observing where problem framing eroded, critique expanded instead of converging, and experience stopped guaranteeing great judgment. This talk is an ongoing case study in leading teams through that shift. It also reflects on how our internal experience designing with AI became a critical lens for understanding the people we build for.
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