What’s next for design teams?

AI tools have changed so much for individual designers. The second-order effect is on teams. What is the role of a design team in a company, now that individuals from all backgrounds are able to bring their own designs to life?

I’ve been talking with folks on many types of teams, and have started to see some interesting patterns and opportunities for design teams more broadly.

At a high level, the biggest opportunities are around not just producing design, but multiplying it. Teams need to understand that everyone in an organization can ship design work now, and focus their efforts on helping that grow while simultaneously raising the design standard to a higher level.

1. Pay attention, as an organization

I wrote recently about how people dedicated to paying attention to design will remain an important part of successful product teams. The same thing is true at the organization level. Who is paying attention to company-level design issues?

• Is the brand evolving as desired, and are products evolving to meet it?
• How are leaders talking about and considering design in decisions?
• Are products connected to each other in thoughtful, elegant ways?
• Is anyone making sure the company has a vision for the future?

Promoting and maintaining attention to design at the company level takes education, consistent pressure, and deep knowledge of great design. Design teams should be the source of these efforts, and measured by their success.

2. Keep the bar high, systematically

It’s wonderful that people from every role and background can now visualize and contribute their ideas. But not all ideas, and not all designs, should be immediately merged and pushed live. Endless uncoordinated changes lead to disjointed, clumsy experiences that frustrate customers.

And yet no one wants to be the bad cop blocking their colleagues all day. Many designers I spoke to referenced how their role in maintaining design quality was exhausting as they were asked to review dozens of UI changes each day from all corners of the company.

One solution is redefining the “design system” one more time. An AI design system lives in code and is readable by agents. When that’s in place, designers can build agents, skills, and evals on top of it to be the first reviewer on proposed UI changes. Those agents can look at a well-documented design system and give rational, emotionally neutral feedback on known design system conflicts, reserving human review for higher-level discussions.

3. Be the inspiration

One of the most fun and effective practices my design teams have done at multiple companies is to bring regular, diverse, and thought-provoking inspiration to product and engineering teams. Often this takes the form of a weekly newsletter with snippets of work, things we’ve learned, and external products, ideas, and resources we’ve discovered.

Being the source of this inspiration is a powerful way to spark new ideas, conversations, and influence among the team. It also takes a lot of time to gather material from your team and everything they’re drawing on.

With AI doing the synthesis, this sort of practice is easier than ever. You can set up an agent to gather these resources for you, and simply choose which items to share out. Agents can look further and broader than you ever could, and bring you things that are truly inspirational.

For a design team, this might be an evolution of a content design practice, or a design ops one. In both cases the “customer” will often be an internal one.

4. Create tools and templates

In all of these cases, while doing the work yourself is good, it’s even better to make that work possible for others. You can sometimes just as easily build a tool for others to gather inspiration, prompt an exploration, or map a user journey. Stop thinking of your team as just designers of objects; think of them as designers of processes.

Design teams should have people dedicated to building design tools and templates for others, not just designing products directly.

5. Actually design “the experience”

The title “UX designer” has always been a bit of a reach. Sure, we talk about “designing the experience”, but most of our time has been spent moving pixels between rectangles.

With AI doing the pixel pushing, we’re free to consider the broader experience people have with our products, working at the level of customer journeys, emotional state, and jobs to be done. Blending those solutions with the detail and care for the UI is a powerful combination.

It also keeps us focused on the human with a need, not the display on their screen. Human designers will maintain better intuition about human emotions and desires than an LLM for the foreseeable future, and be a better judge of potential solutions.

Design teams can organize around and focus on customer problems rather than product features. Their impact should be seen in cross-team collaboration and elegant cross-product experiences.

6. Frame the problems

The old UX joke: “How many designers does it take to change a light bulb? Well… does it have to be a light bulb?”

Designers are infamous for reinterpreting and reframing product requests. It’s a habit we just can’t help, and it’s equally valuable and frustrating to our colleagues. In fact, when I trained my design agent on my own behaviors, I started getting frustrated with it too! It’s never easy or comfortable to be challenged on your own ideas.

Yet this is something unique to our role and perspective, and powerful. Designers are skilled at seeing problems through different lenses, comparing and contrasting them, and finding a framing that is elegant and clear.

Design teams should look across the problems they’re being asked to solve, and build a better way of thinking about them. That might mean reorganizing the team around new experience pillars, or proposing a design evolution that guides multiple efforts into one unified direction. A product strategy is also a design, of course.

Now that design and prototyping is more accessible than ever before, the role of a design team is shifting from producing design to multiplying it: focusing attention, setting the bar, building the tools, and framing the problems everyone else is now empowered to solve.