Open-Ended Sessions: The Job Brief
A conversation about the choice between using AI to reduce costs and time and using it to expand possibilities.
In the third of our Open-Ended Sessions, we discussed how AI is changing how product and design work are done. In particular, we’re tracking the shift from feature- and screen-level work to more strategic and human-centered system design.
Lots of orgs are choosing to deploy AI as a means to do more of the same, only faster and cheaper. But AI can also be used to unlock new possibilities by augmenting (rather than replacing) humans.
As Greg put it,
The efficiency play can be in service of unlocking human potential, right? So they don’t have to be either-or paths, but they do have to be both at a minimum.
Ultimately, the key question isn’t what the technology is capable of, but what it’s for.
Links
Books and posts mentioned in the conversation:
Magnifica Humanitas by Pope Leo XIV
I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit by Simon Willison
The Cost of Being Busy by Craig Hepburn
The Feature is Dead. The Job Remains. by Greg Petroff
This Moment We’re In, Ep. 3 (Greg’s conversation with Cindy Chastain)
Transcript
(AI generated — likely contains errors.)
Jorge: All right, hey Greg.
Greg: Hi Jorge, how are you?
Jorge: I am doing all right.
Greg: Yeah.
Jorge: It is interesting times.
Greg: Oh my gosh, yeah. You know, I think when we were talking about perhaps hosting one of our sessions here, it was really about the zeitgeist, like what’s happening this moment. And there are these peaks where all of a sudden there’s some kind of thread that shows up that just begs to be probed. So thanks for encouraging me and us to have these conversations. And for those who are joining us, welcome to number three of our Unfinishe sessions, where Jorge and I just talk about stuff that we think is interesting that’s going on. And we hope you find it valuable as well.
Jorge: Yeah. And it might be worth recapping beyond the open-ended conversations. This is not just something that we’re doing because we want to talk about things that interest us. In some ways, it feels like the transformations that we’re seeing are, sounds kind of heavy-handed to say it, but they’re existential. They kind of are. And these conversations I see as an opportunity to name the things we’re seeing. You have your note taker just joined when he’s trying to join. You see, it is existential.
Greg: That’s right. There we go. Goodbye.
Jorge: It might be worth unpacking what that means, but we have not pre-scheduled these, to your point. We’re kind of calling these conversations when we have sensed a shift in the zeitgeist. And this is the third one we’ve had so far. And I’m going to try to sketch out the conditions that precipitated this one. And then we’re going to circle back to a post that you shared, which I see as kind of like a way to deal more skillfully, for organizations to deal more skillfully with the situation that they find themselves in now. But there are several factors at play here. One is the big shift toward the end of last year. I think we saw a big shift in how people in general are thinking about AI. Agentic software development tools like Claude Code started proving their mettle in the organization, right?
Greg: Yeah.
Jorge: And Simon Wilson recently had a blog post where he said that Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit. And he was referring specifically to these tools, right? So there’s been this shift from a modality that is more focused toward software development. And then we have things like Claude Code that build on that agentic way of working with these systems. So that was a big shift toward the tail end of last year. And then I would say that around the end of the first quarter of the year, we started paying the piper, literally. Organizations have started realizing that that kind of usage can get very expensive, right? And we’ve started to see some organizations start to pull back, capping their people’s budget for using these tools.
Greg: I would just build. I’ve been working as a fractional for a couple of different companies, fractional design leader, for those who haven’t heard that term before, over the last year. And to watch how product organizations have started to use these tools, and then the uptake in them, and then the capabilities that they unlock, and then the speed that teams can work at, and more importantly that you can do more, it’s been really remarkable to watch. And at the same time, it’s causing all kinds of churn because teams are struggling with who does what, how, when, and they’re hitting some of these issues too around utilization and use of the tools and the cost of using the tools, and not just the financial cost of using the tools, which can be significant when teams burn through their tokens, but the cognitive costs of using these tools, because you can build incredibly dense, rich, powerful documents now, but then your peers have to have time to consume them. And one of the things I’m noticing is that many of us are collaborating with our AIs more than we are collaborating with each other. And so there are all these kinds of things that we’re learning in the process of using these tools. And I also think there was some hyperbole around what was going to happen and how this might change things and the number of people, etc., that I think is starting to not show up. I think there are some things that we can think about that are different. So in this moment, yeah, we saw toward—
Jorge: Beginning of the year, organizations were starting to boast of how many tokens they were using, and they had leaderboards for this stuff.
Greg: Yeah.
Jorge: Which is another factor here that I think the emphasis was clearly on adoption as opposed to value creation. And one of the things that has shifted is, well, first they’ve stopped doing that because I think they realized, like, hey, this is really expensive. But also, that’s no way to measure progress, right? What you want to do is you want to be actually creating value. You don’t want to be boasting of how much you’re using the tools, right? So it feels like we’re kind of speed-running the process of maturing into how—
Greg: These tools can serve human needs. Yeah, there’s a whole set of new problems that are showing up inside product organizations around utilization. Are you using the right model? Are you leaving your context window open too long and therefore every time you ask for something you’re burning through credits like mad? Did you budget appropriately for the amount of credits that your team is using? What does finance think about all of that, right? I think there’s a whole bunch of things that are popping up right now. And some of that showed up in some recent announcements with Microsoft deciding to turn Claude off inside of their environment. There’s been conversation about bringing their own code development tools and their own models to bear, so maybe that has part of it. But I also, from what I understand, they were spending a lot of money. And my own experience in watching the team that I’ve been helping, the startup that I’m working with, is we run out of credits on a regular basis, or tokens on a regular basis. And then we have to go and ask for more. And there’s no real governance or process in place for a small company where they’re kind of making it up as they go and trying to understand what it means. They want to go fast, and so they’re willing to spend the money, but they have finite resources. So they can’t spend as much as they maybe think they should, or as the team wants to spend potentially. And there are all sorts of stories around teams that have burned giant holes in the budget of their organization by doing things which may not have been valuable, right? And it goes back to your point around this leaderboard thing. And I think one of the things that there’s a really great post by Hepburn about the cost of being busy that I think is really interesting to me. It was really about the teams that give the tools so that AI can be adopted throughout the organization and people sort of adopt them at their own speed are not really getting all that much productivity gain. They’re getting richer content perhaps, but they’re not institutionalizing the work in a way that takes the work that’s repetitive or less of priority and maybe building agents around that so that you can unleash your people towards new things. And I think there’s another aspect of this, which you and I started, I think this is one of the reasons why I wanted to talk this week, was Pope Leo’s encyclical came out, and it kind of fits a notion that we’ve been talking about for Unfinishe, our practice, which is we want to help organizations discover how they can, you know, the possibilities of unleashing their talent towards new efforts versus a productivity gain where you’re laying people off because you don’t need them anymore, right? I think it’s a very different mental model. And I think that there’s something about this conversation that needs to come up around the humans in the system and the value that these tools create for us, but also the value of work, etc., that I think is a notional, the conversation’s happening now and that’s good. And I think that document was a really important document to come out. And there’s been a lot of conversation around it. I know you have a take on it, but some people will leave it at that and hear what you think.
Jorge: Yeah, and I’m glad you brought that up. And even though this is turning into a kind of long preamble, I also want to bring to the table the conversation that you had with Cindy Chastain on her podcast.
Greg: Yeah.
Jorge: Because that conversation also circled around some of these issues. And I’m going to try to name it, just hearing you talk about it. I’m going to try to name the connecting thread for all of these things that we’re observing. And the thread is the question: but what is it for? It’s like, what are we doing with this, right? What’s the point? The conversation with Cindy, one way to summarize it might be something like: for design and product teams, there are two possible things that you can do with this. You can approach it as a way to do the things you were doing before more efficiently, faster. I don’t know if more cheaply, as is becoming evident, but do, let’s say, more with fewer people, right? Or another possible approach you could take is you could take this as an opportunity to do more with the people that you have, or maybe even with more people in your team, right? Just empower them to explore possibilities that were previously unattainable because of the natural constraints of a team of humans and their limited cognitive abilities and attention. And I wanted to bring that up because, A, I think that we, well, I’d love to hear your take, but I think that we’re both in the second camp. It’s like, hey, let’s see how we can augment people to do more. Because one of the things that motivates us in our shared practice is possibilities, like opening a broader space of possibilities, right?
Greg: Yes, I think with possibilities, intention, like what future do we want to have and how do we help teams and organizations fulfill that in an intentional way? And I love that you brought that up because I think the conversation that Cindy and I had was really about two stories. I’ve been doing this fractional work, and over the last year I’ve worked with two different companies, and sort of not at the same time, too. So one was sort of last year to the end of last year, and the second one is I’m currently engaged with and I started with in January when all these tools started to mature. And there are sort of two conversations. The first one was sort of dabbling with AI, learning how to use the tools, some experiments with vibe coding, etc. The second one was the design team and the product team not only using those tools, but exploring whole new territories that we just didn’t have time for in the past to do. So we were imagining a new product capability, a new product category for a company, not a pivot, but an expansion of this particular organization’s remit that they want to serve. They had a really good idea of a set of problems they wanted to solve. And we just did things that were just hard to argue for in the normal timeframe that software development gets built. And we were able to do them. So we did a bunch of work on information architecture. And one of the things that we did is we looked at competitive tools that were out there, other people trying to solve the problem in similar ways, and we did really deep analysis of how they structured their experiences so we could try to understand why they were doing it. And that helped inform a better architecture for us. We did a bunch of work looking at agentic systems and emerging conversations around how to build MCP apps. And that was exploratory. Frankly, I think it’s exploratory for everyone who’s working in that area. And so we were able to help use the process of making to define the product requirements. And in some ways, we were leading product development in that conversation because we were really trying to understand meaningful outcomes. And we came up with this thing we called the job brief, and it worked for us very well. So I think the opportunity right now is to build much better products. The concept of an MVP to me is sort of like something that needs to be reexamined because most MVPs were always insufficiently great because they were constrained by time and engineering resources. And now, where engineering resources are less constrained, why do we put product into the market that isn’t foundationally awesome? And so we can do that. And I think there’s an opportunity to really ask the organization to rethink how it takes the time of their customers and fulfills their needs and their goals. And we can be much more clear and more polished and build things which on launch make people feel seen, the users of them feel seen in a way that we couldn’t do before. And so I think that to me is an inkling of what these tools should be doing. And that’s just a product development example. But I think you could do this for organizational change. And I think any organization could take a look at it and say, I don’t just want productivity. I want to unleash the creativity of my people towards new outcomes. And that’s the kind of work I want to work on. I think it’s the kind of work that you want to work on. And it’s the kind of work that I think that the Pope’s encyclical talks about, which is meaningful work and placing humans in the system and not just this sort of technocratic cost-out perspective.
Jorge: Yeah. There’s been a, well, you wrote a post about this and I want to get into the post.
Greg: Yeah, sure.
Jorge: The very title of the post has the phrase, “The feature is dead.”
Greg: Yeah.
Jorge: Which is kind of provocative, right?
Greg: Yeah, sure.
Jorge: Why is the product feature dead, Greg?
Greg: Well, I think we’re designing something different now, right? Feature was a component, a widget, a tool that helped humans solve a problem. And in the traditional way of product development and user experience, the actor was the user, right? The user’s on a journey. You build a capability for them to complete a task that’s important for them. They use that tool. They get it done. And so product development would think in increments of capability, features. That’s what we call them in product. And we would build those features in support of customers accomplishing their goals that were important to them on their adventures at work. And what’s changed now is we have this intelligence that we’re working with. And it can be the actor, right? It can make the choices and decisions on the process, especially when you think about more agentic workflows. And so the notion of product discovery and creating and making is different. We’re not making a widget or a tool. I mean, those are still important, and by the way, yes, thank you for calling out it’s a provocative title. Features don’t disappear; they still are important. But I think what’s more important is encoding the intelligence in a system so that it can support humans and their goals, but also allow some autonomy for agents to do things. And that’s a new skill, a new pattern. And the way I was thinking about it is Clayton Christensen coined this term jobs to be done. And jobs to be done is sort of evergreen. It doesn’t go away. You have to balance your checking account or you have to pay, make payroll, or you have to answer a customer call. But the way that you can do that can change over time with the way technology shows up or how an organization chooses to solve that problem. And ironically, a lot of organizations don’t actually really understand what they do. They’ve built sort of Rube Goldberg machines of technology that allow them to accomplish tasks, and individuals in the organization are actors in that to solve a business problem. But very few people in the organization actually understand the outcomes and business goals that an organization is trying to solve for. So I’ll give you an example. The reason why this came up is there’s also something very different in the way that we can build software right now, where it’s more structural and more of a system and less bespoke custom feature development. So this particular startup that I’m working with, we are building a system that can add new capabilities, and we wanted those new capabilities to show up almost like a feed of content, right? The application would be much more like Spotify, where you’d have a playlist of things that you can, instead of a playlist of things you listen to, a playlist of things that you can do. But to do that, then you have to kind of understand, like, what do those things do and why are they valuable and how do they achieve outcomes that are important for the end user or the company that’s buying a product or a service. And so we built this thing. I’m calling it a job brief. It’s a little bit of a hybrid. It’s influenced a little bit from the Josh Seiden sort of outcomes over output construct, being an outcome-centric notion. But what I wanted to do is try to create a recipe. And I built this sort of recipe card. You can’t really see it here, but I’ll share this with folks if they’re interested. And it was really very straightforward: find the job. What is the problem? Sit with a practitioner or a person at work and find out what is the thing that they need to accomplish. Write a job statement, one sentence: who’s the user, what are they trying to do, whether they want to know or decide. Don’t make it about technology at all. What’s the outcome that they’re trying to get to? And then the next layer, which is new, I mean, this is something we’ve done forever, but the next layer is what is the context that we understand in the system? What data do we have access to? Where is the user or the person who’s acting in a moment in their day, in their workflow, in the ebb and flow of an organization? You have to define what done means. When the job is completed, what does success look like? And then the last part of it is really understanding what expertise is around that. And working with people who have deep knowledge of what that outcome should look like, what’s meaningful for an organization. And I would argue that for every organization, that expertise might be different based on the values of that organization, the people they have, the things that they find important. And this is an opportunity to add that human layer into what differentiates company A from company B. Don’t just use a novel solution that everyone uses. Build something that’s respectful of what’s important to you as an organization. And then finally, the last part is find some way to measure it by how often it’s used, by invocation, like how often it gets done. And so that construct is really about understanding how humans in the system work. Now, I’m not naive. Some of this work turns into agents that do the work for you. And ideally, in an organization, you could use this as a way to look at the things in your organization that you can codify, the domain expertise, to gain productivity and to gain efficiency where you can. But my next point of view on that is in service of being able to do more interesting, more valuable work that pushes your objectives farther forward. And so that’s the notion behind it.
Jorge: This is all in the context of design and the projects that you have been working on. You’ve been working, your role has been like a fractional chief design officer, right? So you’ve been leading design teams. Another one of the signals that we are picking up from the environment is that it feels like many organizations are questioning the value of investing in design.
Greg: Yeah.
Jorge: And I was thinking, there was a time when a lot of organizations did not have big design teams internally, right? The idea that design is a function of the organization, I would say at least the current wave, because there have been prior ones, but the current wave, we can probably date back to around 20 years ago after it had become clear that Steve Jobs had saved Apple through design, right? And people were upholding the iPod as an example of a well-designed product. And there are still business leaders out there who are thinking in terms of, like, I want something that is as useful, beautiful, whatever, as the iPod, right? So it became like a touchstone that articulated the value of design for organizations. And that seems to have shifted significantly as a result of AI. And I suspect that it might not be coincidental that Jony Ive and company’s latest product to hit the market has not been well received by a lot of people. I’m talking about the new Ferrari.
Greg: Yeah, right.
Jorge: And I have no, you know, I’m not an expert in that space. I’m not a Ferrari fan or anything. To me, it looked like—
Greg: I lost your audio. Oh, no. I can’t hear you. Now I can.
Jorge: Okay, great. What I was saying: I am not a Ferrari fan, so I don’t have as strong feelings about that product as other people. But it did strike me that at least a lot of the commentary I saw online, I got the sense that it felt like this, like it was over-designed or like it’s precious. Or it’s like it’s a product that is trying to make design, like it’s a design-forward thing. And in some ways, that almost hurt it because it feels like it’s a rethinking of what a Ferrari is supposed to be. And I almost found it to be like a metaphor for what’s happening elsewhere in design. It’s like, I guess the question is: is design necessary now that there’s a Claude design and Figma will do design work? And I think that I’ll stop after this. I think that a lot of organizations have built design functions that are primarily production functions.
Greg: Yeah.
Jorge: And by production, I mean they are set up basically to crank out screen-based experiences.
Greg: Yeah.
Jorge: And they have staffed up with people who are tasked with doing that kind of work. And at least to me, it’s been pretty clear that that’s going away, and it has been clear for a while, right? The tools have been getting better. The kind of design work that you’re talking about when you talk about job briefs. You said that the jobs-to-be-done construct is evergreen. And I think that one of the reasons it’s evergreen is because it moves the level of abstraction. It’s not about how do you execute on the hole in the wall. It’s about how do you determine what it is that the customer needs. And then you can figure out how that’s delivered to them, right? And I’m wondering, I’m just, again, this is open-ended and unstructured, right? So I’m thinking out loud here. I’m wondering if what we’re seeing is a shift from an understanding of design as this kind of screen-level production function to, and then there’s a question mark. And I think that your article tries to answer that question by saying to a role that is more strategic, which is something that designers have been trying to do for a while with not a lot of traction, I would say.
Greg: Yeah, many haven’t. Yeah, there have been some examples of people who have, but yes, you’re right. Let me respond to it. I think when we build products, there are different roles that are really important. And I think when design is seen as only craft and only as screen building, it misses the value that design can bring to the table. Those things are important, but they’re not the only thing. And the challenge is that at some level for many people in many organizations, the AI tooling is capable of doing, I wouldn’t say excellent, but reasonable results on the sort of production-level quality of building a user interface. However, I think one of the things that designers bring to the table is a deep understanding of human behavior and building products that recognize humans in the system and the mental models that people have. And it’s connected to empathy. It’s connected to having the ability to do ethnography, basically sit with customers and understand how they solve problems and what they’re trying to accomplish. It requires some new skills now because when we look at the capabilities of these tools, you can incrementally make things better or you could radically change things. And it doesn’t mean one or the other is the right path. It’s actually what is the right path for the group of humans that you’re responsible for delivering a solution for. Too much change may require a group of people to do things they’re just not unwilling to do or unable to do cognitively. Not enough change is a missed opportunity toward functionally changing the game in a way that produces some really interesting results for an organization or for the people who work in the organization. And we’re in this really messy period where the old rules don’t really apply and people are trying to apply the old rules. So you still see PRD, product requirement documents. You still see engineering burndowns. You still see JIRA tickets created. You still see, this is a software development process, because people anchor to that. That’s what they know. They kind of organize around it. But it’s unclear to me if that process of how we built software is still usable and useful in this new moment. And there’s an opportunity to change that. So where am I going with all this? I think designers bring a couple of skills to a team that are really valuable. And if not there, it’s a missed opportunity for organizations. And they can be very strategic. We are adept at the art of juxtaposition. We can take two different ideas and put them together and discern a net-new outcome. Because we make the think, we make things, we make artifacts, and those artifacts inform us. And that conversation we have with the things that we make allows us to find truth or an answer or a solution or a novel way of solving a problem in a way that can be faster than other methods. It’s not the only way to solve those problems, but it’s a super valuable way to do it. So that’s kind of just one path that designers take. The second part of it is I think it is my personal perspective that it’s inexcusable that you don’t make things great now because the tools let us do that. And that requires discernment. That requires someone who can look at a small radius or a small curve on a user experience or looking at accessibility and making sure that a product is useful for all of us, regardless of our abilities. That we can choose words carefully so that it aids people in the direction of the path that they’re trying to take. We don’t just build a piece of software and expect them to learn how to use it. We can now frame a product in a way that fits the mental model of the people that we’re serving, and we can actually get closer and closer and closer to that because these tools allow us to actually iterate and understand that more successfully. So I guess a long way of saying is I think designers are very important. There are some new things that we have to look out for, like I think interfaces are starting to collapse. We’re doing more of our work in language models, right? We’re speaking with AI. We’re having a conversation with AI. AI systems can not only answer words, they can answer in interfaces, so they can create custom experiences for us or custom tools for us in the conversation. You could just do that. But I think the thing that design brings to the table is an intentional way of doing it, shaping the grammar of an organization, inserting a value set of values into an organization, shaping how answers are delivered. Are they long? Are they short? What’s the structure? What’s the organization of them? Left alone, a large language model may choose to answer a problem differently every time you ask it, and that may not serve the audience that you’re trying to serve, right? So I think there’s a role for design to be very much involved in intentional curation of these experiences and bringing human values into them explicitly. I remember, I’m forgetting who told me this. I’ll think of it in a moment. But all software has opinions in it, whether they are explicitly or implicitly embedded in the software. Some teams are very explicit about it: this is what we do, certain things. Others, it’s just the end result of the people who built it and what they valued. But it’s there, right? We have an opportunity to be very explicit about how we serve people. And again, I think design is the discipline that not just solves business problems but figures out ways to make it deeply human. And I think our opportunity is to help organizations at a different layer, at a different level. And it may not be screens we’re working on. It could be orchestrating the flow of how work happens in a way that makes sense for people. And that’s a new skill. Not all designers are going to pivot or understand how to move into that space. But I think the things that we bring to the table are very useful there. Anyway, that—
Jorge: Was a long answer to your question. Well, and it kind of prompts some follow-up questions. You said earlier in the conversation, and I’m going to be—
Greg: I lost you there for a second there, Jorge. I think your internet took a—
Jorge: Yeah, something’s glitchy. Can you hear me?
Greg: I can hear you now, yes. I wanted to repeat your question or insight.
Jorge: Yeah, so you said, I’m going to paraphrase and probably get it wrong, but you said something earlier in the conversation along the lines of one of the things that we’re grappling with, and this was talking about as designers, is the fact that many of the things that we were doing as humans working with tools are now being delegated to agentic systems, right? And I’m going to put on my CEO hat, right? Like I have to make, I have to determine how I’m going to invest, how I’m going to allocate the organization’s capital, right? And there’s a lot of incentive right now for organizations to invest in capability, like technical capability, right? Compute is what they’re calling it, right? And you said that one of the things that designers bring to the table is a deep understanding of human behavior. Yeah. But if the systems that we’re building are not going to be used by humans, why does that matter? If I’m a CEO looking to invest, what’s the argument in favor of investing in a design team that is going to be crafting experiences to be used by humans? When, hey, isn’t AI going to do all of it? Why am I investing in human experiences?
Greg: Well, I mean, that’s a great question. I think if you’re a cost-out CEO, that may be what you think about, right? You’re like, I don’t need a design team. We’re going to use all these tools, and we’re going to deliver this service with as few people as possible. And we’re going to look at generating as much revenue as possible. And this is a path for us to get there. And my guess is there’ll be many parts of our economy that are going to be efficiency plays like that, that are going to be things that people are worried about from a job perspective. And it’s sort of inevitable. However, I also think that there will be a group of CEOs that have a growth mindset who look at what their organization does in their community or wherever they serve and look for opportunities to provide better services or better outcomes or better products. And I think one of the things that’s missed is there’s this bottom-up and top-down conversation that’s missed. So as an example, I think small organizations benefit massively from these tools because they allow them to punch way above their weight so they can compete at levels that they couldn’t compete with before. And small, intimate teams with these tools that communicate well with each other now have the ability to expand their horizons around the things that they can offer, the services they can develop, the things that they can provide for whoever their customers are, or users are, or whatever their goals are, whether they’re for-profit, not-for-profit, etc. In large organizations, I think the transition is going to be identifying also where in the aspect of the services that they provide that humans are actually important for their customers, right? So I think as humans, people want to hang out with people, right? And I mean, there are people apparently who have chat, cheap, and girlfriends, but I think most of us are, especially even post-pandemic, and I still think we’re in the post-pandemic phase, we want to have a sense of community and connection to each other. And so I think there’s huge opportunity for organizations that recognize how to place their people front and center with their customers or the people that they care about or the things that are important. So I guess what I’m trying to discern is I think there’s an opportunity space for the people who are good at unlocking possibilities and discerning new things to service, developing better outcomes for all of us. And it’s a little bit of a, you know, it needs to be seen, but I think that’s the path that I want to see. I would love to see our politics in this world focus on the opportunity to service and support everyone. I’d love to see our businesses look for opportunities to grow their businesses in new and creative ways. And I would love to see human potential be the big story about being unlocked by these tools versus being laid off. And I think we need to think about that very hard. I think we need to find this is going to be a transition. There’s not going to be without, there already is massive transformation going on in organizations. And I think we are, as a culture, need to be managing this carefully. And again, I’ll come back to why I think design is important, because I think designers can find opportunities to potentially mitigate some of the challenges with AI, from an employment and cultural perspective. But they’re also just going to be great at finding new things to do that we didn’t know we needed before and that are exciting and fun and fulfilling and helpful. And so, if I were a large CEO, one of the things I would be investing in is a creative design team that is just exploring and looking for net-new things that could benefit, that are adjacencies to a company’s core mission that might be new growth opportunities for them. And I think that the tooling allows creatives the opportunity to really shine there. I don’t think we’re there yet. I don’t think people have talked about it yet enough. But I do think that there’s really an opportunity for us to look for ways to be more future-focused and actually try to tackle some of the real problems that we have in the world.
Jorge: I kind of want to double down on what you’re saying there, because in playing devil’s advocate earlier, it may not have been clear just how much I agree with what you’re saying there. But my read is that organizations that are kind of restructuring themselves to maybe, like a phrase that you could, maybe a phrase we could use is something like a post-design world, or like a world in which they’re not placing their emphasis on human experience, right? The organizations that are investing in AI as a way to gain efficiencies by automating the sort of touchpoints that humans have relied on so far, they’re doing so from what I see as like a, like in my mind, I have this Venn diagram that has fear, bad incentives, and a kind of like spectacular lack of imagination. Yeah. The phrase that often comes to mind is this Warren Buffett thing where he says that he advises being bold when others are fearful and fearful when others are being bold. And I just want to kind of double down on what you said about this being a time of unique opportunity, particularly for the organizations that are willing to zag where everyone else is zigging in the direction of efficiencies. Just because there are, like to your point, there are now possibilities that were just previously unavailable. And to only think about the path of, like, how can we make, how can we deliver the minimum possible experience as cheaply as possible is one possible direction, but by no means the only one, right? And I suspect that we are still in the throes of, like, hey, this is a new technology and let’s double down on efficiencies where we have not yet truly explored the possibilities of other ways of using the technology, right?
Greg: Yeah, I mean, I love that framing. I’ve been a big, one of the things I’ve talked about for the last 10 years is this notion of incrementalism versus really understanding the problem, right? And for a lot of organizations, incrementalism was the path towards success because you took small pieces and you got better and you got better over time and you got better over time. It kind of fits the Agile Manifesto. It’s how organizations work. They’re risk-averse, so they don’t want to try to take on too much. We’ll make one small change, we’ll make a change of, you know, and. But it was connected to the fact that things were very difficult to do well, and therefore you had to be careful about doing it. And so instead of going for it and doing something big or trying an experiment and failing, you just made your product slightly better over time or your outcome slightly better over time, your system slightly better over time. And there’s nothing wrong with that as a strategy, by the way. It makes sense and allows you to do things in a sustained way. What is interesting about this moment is that these tools allow us to build things that used to be very, the very expensive part of building software is far less expensive than it used to be. And so an incrementalist mindset may just be a faster way to get to the wrong place, you know? And I think one of the things that we don’t do enough of is discovery work, understanding what is the problem and what would really be meaningful for people. And now we can spend a lot of time in that, right? And in the design space there’s this diagram called the double diamond that came out of the British Design Council that’s a very popular way of describing the process of design. And the first half, the first diamond, is discovery. And then you sort of evolve that into a product, and then you go into an execution phase, and then you deliver and you learn from your customers. And my argument now is that these tools allow us to build the first part of that diamond much bigger and the rest of it much smaller. And what do I mean by that? It means that we can spend, in a short period of time with these tools, we can learn way more about who we’re serving and have a much better understanding of what their problem is and iterate on not just one, but hundreds of solutions that could possibly satisfy those needs and outcomes, and then discern which one is the best, refine it, make it great, and then deliver it at fairly low cost from an execution standpoint. And so that upends the process. It used to be the other way around, that the execution part was so hard that that’s where all the energy was, right? And so it was like, make a small bet, get it out to market, make another small bet, make it out to market. So it goes back to your point of lack of imagination. And I think there’s an opportunity right now for companies to at least have some part of their organization that is thinking boldly and broadly and unhampered by an incrementalist mindset. And I think if I were a CEO of a larger organization, I would be setting up a lab to think about not how to use these tools to do what I do better now. I would be setting up a lab on how do I use these tools to do something I’m not doing now that would help me grow my outcomes that are important to my shareholders or to my customers or to the business community that I’m trying to connect to.
Jorge: I love that framing.
Greg: And I think designers are great at that. They’re not the only one. There need to be other parties in that conversation. It’s a multidisciplinary effort, but it doesn’t work without designers in the room.
Jorge: You know, to circle back to the Pope’s encyclical, the central metaphor that he uses to talk about the possible ways forward for the development of AI-based systems, he uses this architectural analogy from using two stories from the Bible. One story is the construction of the Tower of Babel, which is a kind of technocratic, top-down effort to, now I’m kind of reading into it, right, to control. And it’s an effort that kind of flattens differences between people. And he contrasts that with another story from the Bible, which is the rebuilding of Jerusalem after it had been torn down. And he talks about Nehemiah. I don’t know if that’s how you pronounce it, but this person who rather than dictate top-down this technocratic solution, gathered the people who inhabited the city. And through this kind of consultative approach, led to the rebuilding of this kind of organic, more organic city that responded to their needs. And part of what I’m hearing you say is that, and I think that this is also implicit, if not explicit, in the encyclical, is that AI allows for both of those approaches. We can do the top-down thing really fast now and really comprehensively, and it can turn into a real dystopia. Or we could employ it in this more kind of bottom-up, consultative, human-centered way, and it could also do it much faster with greater scope, with the possibility to explore many, many more alternatives just because the tool allows us to do so much more. So it becomes a matter of how do you choose which of the two approaches you’re going to take? And I think what we’re saying here is we would like to foster a world that follows the second path, the more kind of designerly path, the path that puts human beings, their needs, including their dignity, which is an important word in the encyclical, front and center. And the tools are amazing. They can empower us to do much more than before, as long as it’s in service of that, right?
Greg: Yeah, creating a better world. And the irony is you can have both of those things happen. The efficiency play can be in service of unlocking human potential, right? So they don’t have to be either-or paths, but they do have to be both at a minimum. If we just go the Tower of Babel path, I don’t want to live in that future. I’m very much interested in being intentional about the choices that we make. And again, that’s why I go back to why designers are important. We’re good at that. We are good at intentionally helping craft a narrative and artifacts and things which connect to the way that we want to live. And then we’re good at telling stories around that with the things that we create. Those things that we create inspire people. And it’s a really part of being human that there are things that delight us and bring us joy and make us cry and help us understand and live fulfilling lives, all the things that I think are important, which by the way, that’s not the longest list of important things, but nonetheless, I think we’re coming to a close.
Jorge: I was going to say that feels like a good place to wrap it up. If you want to follow our work, we do have a Substack. It’s called Unfinishe Thoughts, and it’s at thoughts.unfinishe.com. Remember, it’s Unfinishe without the D. And Greg and I post there periodically. It feels like almost as infrequently as we do these live streams, but we should write these things up more.
Greg: Yeah, our plan is to be a little bit more prolific in the rest of this year. But thanks for hanging out with us today. And Jorge, as always, I love hanging out with you and talking about our stuff. And we’ll see you at the next Unfinish.
Jorge: Same here. Thanks, Greg. Bye.