Who gets hired, how teams get built, and the operating shapes that follow.
21 entries
Williams calls the end of the single source of truth: Figma holds intent, Storybook behavior, production reality — and reconciling them is a job nobody has posted yet.
Yeo turns murmurations and goose formations into an operating model — async telemetry, rotating leads, domain pods, three anchors, and a scheduled molt for design debt.
Nubank threw open its studio: 400 seats, a brand refresh, case tracks, and Eismann closing. Design culture as a public event, at 135-million-customer scale.
Stone oversees engineering, product, and design as one system. Her hiring bar for the AI era: systems thinkers who see the whole machine, with fluency expected of everyone.
Quarterbacks under a blitz buy time by stepping toward pressure, not fleeing it. Hoang maps the move onto tech's three blitzes and the drift that follows panic.
Twenty exec interviews, the Config crowd, and a 458-response pulse check converge: how your org behaves predicts how design feels about AI.
The second annual tech-worker sentiment survey finds an industry splitting along AI identity, with designers and researchers at the anxious edge.
Production capacity stopped being the constraint. Dean maps what design leaders manage instead: judgment, team cohesion, and the moment to stop generating.
Figma distills two days with 1,300 senior leaders into the questions that matter: expertise, team shape, trust, and the quality bar.
Jen Dunnam on leading through acceleration: less panic, harder interview probes for dissent, and naming which speed actually matters.
Figma's chief design officer reframes taste as care, not gift, and names three things she screens for when hiring.
Jeff Humble gathers a hiring playbook where every tip is from this year, aimed at senior designers rethinking their career strategy.
Martyn Reding argues the old shape of design leadership is gone, and lays out what changed and how to adapt.
A blunt read on where designer value sits in 2026: production is getting automated, so strategy and judgment are what stay human.
An early-career designer notices she keeps reaching for connective work wherever structure is missing, and asks what that instinct reveals.
Forty design leaders in Amsterdam reach the same conclusion: the role is dissolving while the capacity becomes foundational to leadership.
Employees increasingly turn to AI for advice, support, and friendship. The researchers argue leaders must protect human connection at work.
Merholz reads the layoff wave through decades-old org theory: under uncertainty, executives copy each other, then call it AI strategy.
A short, honest reflection on stalls, rebuilds, and why recalibration, not uninterrupted success, is what separates senior designers.
Slack's VP of Product Design on guiding roughly 70 designers through AI without mandates: stay curious, stay skeptical, and keep the bar high.
Most companies don't write down how they hire because writing it down forces honesty about what they actually value. Linear did the work and published it.
