John Francis

With no affiliation, sharing this as I know it will be good. Peter Merholz's ideas have been instrumental in my shaping of design teams. As iF Design point out here - the right environment around the design team is key to producing a successful team. The role of the leader is to create that environment.

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This is a fantastic read on the evolving role designers must play. I love the section on the Inversion of Paradigms. How are you evolving your role as a designer? What's working, and why? What's not, and why? https://lnkd.in/eAMVaA7X

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The biggest shift I have seen as a VP of Design isn't AI-generated wireframes or prototyping shortcuts. It is designers using AI to step directly into frontend coding. No more design QA. No more translating Figma into tickets. Designers polish the experience in the same medium the user actually sees and feels. This change transformed my team. Designers loved the autonomy. Engineers loved being free to work on complex backend code. Quality went up, and we shipped faster. The more I talk with design leaders, the clearer it is that this will not stay a niche skill. This is becoming part of how modern design teams work. I launched CraftAmplify to help designers build this skill properly. We focus on writing production-quality code rather than prototypes. The response has been incredible. Thank you to everyone who put in the work and started shipping real code. Watching designers push their first production PR has been the highlight of my year. Each cohort is capped at five designers to keep the experience hands-on. I checked this morning, and there is only one seat left for all of 2025, so I added new sessions for January and February 2026. Details are here: https://lnkd.in/eXqsMadG #ProductDesign #Frontend #AI #DesignEngineering #CraftAmplify

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What happens when a design leader has lived every side of the product world? Engineering, strategy, brand, music, and even mechanics? You get someone who understands creativity at human level.  You get someone who sees patterns others miss.  You get Rich Thrush. In this upcoming episode of WHY DESIGN?, Rich takes us from:   🔹 diagnosing cars as a young mechanic   🔹 to shaping global brands at Motorola, Hasbro & Helen of Troy   🔹 to leading private brands at Guitar Center And the thread that runs through it all? “I’ve always been drawn to that space between the product and the person.” The full conversation drops tomorrow. This is one to sit with, not skim. 

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A few months ago, in collaboration with Thomas Sonsalla, I had the opportunity to delve into the proliferation of GenAI tools aimed specifically at our world of product and interaction design. If you're interested in what we found, please check out the report (https://lnkd.in/g7MNB-Gg), which includes our perspective on how design leaders can best position their teams in the coming years. ----------- From my personal perspective, there’s a troubling disconnect between the top-down mandates to achieve X% additional efficiency across all roles by leveraging AI and the current maturity and readiness of this technology to integrate into real workflows. We’ve seen many companies make big bets through layoffs, effectively taking a sledgehammer to themselves to become lean in the short term. GenAI has become the shiny poster they’ve slapped over the cracks to pretend there’s an underlying plan. Until more reasonable leadership emerges, this leaves product designers in a world where they’re being asked to cover more ground in less time, with less collaboration, research, and iteration—while simultaneously proving they’re doing it by leveraging immature and ill-defined technology. In many cases, designers are being asked individually to reconcile these conflicting pressures, which will likely lead to wasted and redundant effort, and is unlikely to produce scalable or reliable practices within organizations. At minimum, I think design leaders can help their teams by defining a shared approach and setting clear expectations—so designers aren’t left in the limbo of wondering, “Am I supposed to be as efficient as possible and fear being left behind, or should I be continuously investing in figuring out whether these new tools can actually help me?” Efficiency—especially at scale—requires investment in experimentation, adaptation, and refinement. Organizations need to decide whether they want to invest upfront, hoping the technology will pay off through early adoption and adaptation, or hold back as late adopters, focusing on proven workflows to achieve maximum efficiency today. Anyone telling you they’re doing both is, in truth, telling you they have no idea what they’re doing.

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I’ve been reflecting on a recent conversation about design as control versus design as collaboration. Dr. Liz Gerber puts it this way, "AI...has been promised to do whatever we want. The one thing it can’t do is tell us what we want." Jai Shekhawat asked, "What might a future interface look like?" I’d challenge us to even expand that question to include what future societies might look like when we prioritize collaboration over control, inclusion over speed, sustainability over scale. Whether design, technology, media, or civic spaces, the common thread is the same: we cannot outsource human values to systems. I believe our work is to invite possibility, to imagine what humans want before tech imposes what’s possible. “To create anything new and novel, you have to be prepared to do something different to get after it," Kevin Bethune notes. As design finds its role alongside AI, we can feel confident that our choices shape systems, not the other way around. What choices then are we making today, in design, in media, in our communities, to ensure human dignity leads the way? Thank you to Lee Moreau for convening the conversation.

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It seems there has been a gradual shift away from process-heavy case studies in design portfolios toward simpler overviews—or even just polished final deliverables. It’s understandable that some people prefer one approach over the other. To navigate this change, I’ve been experimenting with a toggle in my case studies that lets viewers switch between a visual presentation and a process-focused one. Why limit yourself to a single format when you can offer both?

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Terminal Fluency: As AI becomes more central to Designer workflows, I’ve been seeing more questions about whether the terminal is still worth learning. I think it is, terminal is core skill that compounds and unlocks next-level control over agents. Make terminal your second brain with this tmux + vim cheatsheet (or just get started) and keep your hands on the keyboard. https://lnkd.in/eV5bAFhF

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This is what investing in AI in design looks like. As with many other job families, the design industry focuses on what might the impact of AI be: will it lower the quality with slop? Will it replace humans? Etc But I don't see much focus on to understand and really capitalise on the potential AI brings to design. We are largely treating it as any other tool: a way to get incrementally better. At best it's a short course for the designers, at worst it's expecting designers to already know how to use it. But AI has the potential for making radical shifts and leaps. I'd love to hear, and learn, from anyone who is making significant strides to drive AI transformation in design.

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Big breakthroughs don’t always come from new tech. Often, they start with the right collaboration.🤝 YLD Head of Product Design, Luis (Edward) Klefsjo and Senior Product Designer, James Hevey share how we help clients solve complex challenges and create real impact.

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