The people building things outside the official roadmap are usually quiet, easy to miss, and producing the work that will redefine the practice in eighteen months. Curating them is a real leadership job in 2026.
I was sitting in a meeting last week where someone on my team described, almost as an aside, an internal tool they had built. It uses an AI model to read Figma files and grade them against a six-dimensional rubric. It uses a different AI model to read product requirement documents and grade those too. The vision is automated weekly quality reports to pillar leads, generated with no manual input from any human, including the person who built the thing. The whole description took about ninety seconds. Then the meeting moved on to the next agenda item.
I want you to pause on what just happened in that meeting, because I almost missed it myself. A senior member of a design team, in a company that does not consider itself an AI company, casually mentioned that they had built an autonomous evaluation system for design quality. This was a serious piece of work, and the kind of thing that, in most organizations, gets buried. Not because anyone wants to bury it. Because the meeting cadence and reporting structure of most companies is not designed to surface things that were built outside the official roadmap.
The people who build things outside the official roadmap are what I have started calling, with full self-awareness about how it sounds, the Vibe Tribe. The phrase started as a joke and has become something I genuinely use. Vibe Tribe members are recognizable. They show up to a meeting with a working prototype that nobody asked for. They have side projects. They use new tools the day they come out. They are usually one or two on any given team. They are almost never the loudest person in the room, which is why their work gets buried, because the loudest person in the room (the Vibe Tribe’s structural opposite, who I am tempted to call the Bandwidth Hog but will not) absorbs the meeting time.
In 2026, I think curating the Vibe Tribe has become a real leadership responsibility, on par with running operations and developing performance plans. This is new, and it is uncomfortable, because it does not fit cleanly into any existing leadership framework. The closest analogy I have is the role that A&R people play at a record label, which is to say a person whose job is to find the artist nobody else has noticed yet and clear the runway. A&R is not management. A&R is curation plus advocacy plus the willingness to look stupid championing someone before the rest of the industry catches up.
Here is what Vibe Tribe stewardship actually looks like, in practice, on a Tuesday afternoon. You set aside time on your calendar specifically to look at what the experimenters on your team are building, separate from your one-on-ones with them, separate from your team meetings. You broadcast their work upward, often without their permission, because the people doing this kind of work are usually allergic to self-promotion. You protect their time from the meeting load that grows on every senior IC like ivy on an old building. You do not over-systematize what they are doing, because the moment you turn their experiment into a process, you have killed it.
I will tell you the part that is hard. Vibe Tribe stewardship looks, from outside, like favoritism. You are spending time with a small subset of your team, championing their work disproportionately, and clearing structural obstacles for them that you are not clearing for everyone. The defense against the favoritism critique is to be transparent about why. The work the Vibe Tribe is doing is, by definition, the work that will redefine the practice in the next eighteen months. Your job is to make sure it gets seen and gets used. The people doing the work do not need a promotion (yet). They need oxygen.
A working acronym, since we are committed to the bit. V.I.B.E. equals Variable, Iterative, Built, Early. Variable, because the work does not fit the operating model. Iterative, because it ships in versions and most of the early versions are bad. Built, because there is always something running, however janky. Early, because if it is in the roadmap, it is too late.
I will leave you with a slightly humiliating admission. The first time someone on my team showed me a Vibe Tribe project, I did not know what I was looking at, so I was polite about it, made encouraging noises, and moved on. Six months later it was the most important thing happening in my organization, and I had been in the room when it started, and I had not seen it. I am better at this now. I am still not as good at it as I want to be. I am writing this article partly to keep myself honest about that, and partly because I suspect I am not the only design leader who has missed the moment, and there are more of these moments coming.