Daniel Sauble

I listened to Jenny Wen's episode on Lenny's Podcast this week. "The design process is dead." She's right. And the conversation is long overdue. Engineers spin up scrappy prototypes in hours. Agentic solutions are replacing entire workflows. The 6-month discovery cycle is gone. Vision is now 3 to 6 months out, not 3 to 5 years. Design's role is evolving faster than most design orgs can keep up with. But here's what the podcast didn't talk about. In the rush to move faster, we're still not asking the most important question: Faster towards what, exactly? I've watched teams optimise brilliantly for speed. Ship faster. Iterate faster. Deploy AI faster. And build products that were technically excellent, commercially successful and quietly harmful. To users. To communities. To the planet. Time pressure and market success push us to optimise for the short-term win. And nobody stops to ask what the long-term cost is. That's why I've been developing a concept I call Digitainable Innovation. Digitainable = AI & Agentic Solutions + Sustainability. The practice of designing AI and agentic solutions that create measurable positive impact for users, for business, and for the planet. Not as a constraint. As a competitive advantage. It's not about slowing down. It's about being intentional about what we're accelerating towards. In an era where AI agents can run autonomously and ship in hours, the question of direction has never mattered more. Because if design's new job is to point people in the right direction? We better make sure the direction is worth going. What do you think: is impact-led design the next frontier, or a luxury we can't afford at this speed? 👉 Jenny Wen Lenny Rachitsky: link to the episode in the comments. --- * The academic foundation for this concept was established by the Bonn Alliance for Sustainability Research (2019 to 2022), who coined "Digitainability" as the cross-fertilisation between digitalisation and sustainable development. I'm building on that research to bring it into the real world of AI, product design, and business, where it belongs. #Digitainable #AIbyDesign #DesignLeadership #ProductDesign #AgenticAI #ResponsibleInnovation

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If your design system was built for humans, it's going to fail an AI agent. Here's the gap: your senior designers carry implicit knowledge that never gets documented. "You wouldn't use that button variant inside a modal." "This component assumes a minimum viewport of 768px." "We never use red for anything except destructive actions." Everyone on the team knows these rules. Nobody wrote them down. Because humans absorb context. Agents don't. I'm seeing this become the primary blocker in design automation projects. The AI is fine. The design system is incomplete — not by human standards, but by machine-readable standards. Practical steps if you're thinking about this: Audit for implicit rules. Walk through every component with a junior designer who's been there less than 3 months. Every question they ask reveals undocumented knowledge. Add behavioral constraints, not just visual specs. "When this component is used alongside X, the following rules apply." Agents need conditional logic, not just token values. Test with real users. Still. Always. The agent generates the UI. Humans tell you if it's good. Put it in front of people before you've built the pipeline around it. AI automates production, not judgment. Budget honestly for this work. It's not trivial. Specialized documentation restructuring costs real money and time. But it's cheaper than rebuilding after your agent generates garbage for six months.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea that “design systems are dead.” I don’t think that’s true. But I also think they need to evolve. As AI makes it easier to build software, we’re going to see a flood of products that all look the same. Clean UI. Decent UX. Fully functional. but all very generic. When everyone can generate a working app, execution alone stops being the advantage. That’s where design starts to matter more, not less. Not design as screens or components, but design as judgment. What to build. What not to build. How things connect. Where to create friction and where to remove it. Design systems aren’t the problem. They’ve just become normalized. The real question is how they evolve when AI is one of the builders. AI needs clearer constraints than humans do. Stronger rules. Less ambiguity. Maybe the future of design systems isn’t about enforcing consistency, but about defining intent, decision trees, boundaries, and room for exploration. what do you think? where do you see design systems going? #Design #DesignSystems #AIinDesign #ProductDesign #UXDesign #FutureOfWork #CreativeTechnology

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Most companies say they hate politics. Very few design against it. Politics is not a people problem. It’s a system design failure. If influence beats impact, you get meetings, backchannels, and perception management. If impact beats influence, politics slowly becomes pointless. I wrote a new piece: The Anti-Politics Playbook: Make Office Games Irrelevant (link in comment) It’s a practical framework for founders, execs, managers, and ICs who want to: - reduce politics without pretending humans are perfect - design clarity instead of policing behavior - build systems where outcomes win by default This is not about being “nice.” It’s about making political behavior a losing strategy.

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The cost of experiments is close to zero now. LLMs turn rough thoughts into output super fast, you build iteratively with almost no friction. Taking back control on core approaches is hard, and it changes with every kind of task. In a constant struggle to improve my workflows.

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Are IC enterprise designers unintentionally sabotaging their portfolios in this AI-obsessed market? If you’re a Product Designer updating your case studies… you’ll probably want to read this... I’m actively hiring two Sr-to-Lead Product Designers, and after reviewing a lot of portfolios recently, a pattern keeps repeating: 👉 Too many portfolios are leading with AI chatbot projects. Not sprinkled in… leading with them. Often multiple ones in the same portfolio as Case Study #1 and #2. Here’s the problem👇 AI chatbots are important, but they’re not the center of gravity for most enterprise / SaaS product teams. In the last six-nine months, many of these patterns are already shipped and commoditized. And now with agentic flows, the UI work becomes more about reviewing, validating, and confirming work AI has already completed behind the scenes. Which means… “Old school” multi-step, end-to-end product flows are still valid – with a twist. Because every IC job post right now is calling for “high craft” or “consumer-grade design” – it’s no longer acceptable for flows to simply “get the job done.” Hiring panels want to see refinement and polish in the final output.  Otherwise you’ll get the feedback we give far too often: “The design thinking is great… but the visual design is just… [sigh/meh]… not quite there.” Visual craft always matters. Everywhere. At every company. Whether D2C or B2B or Enterprise. So if you’re refreshing your portfolio, here’s my ask as someone hiring in this tough market: Don’t over-index on AI chatbots just because they’re hot right now. Show me your complex, nuanced, multi-stage flows—the kind that prove you can handle the real product work most teams need. Just make sure they’re polished (ie. That “high craft” buzzword again), intentional, and tight. Because that’s what will actually differentiate you in 2025 and into 2026. And now the proverbial 🔌: If you’re a high-performing Sr. or Lead looking to innovate in the HR and Comp tech space, holler at me in my DMs or Comments. Thanks! 🙏

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