The Great Reset for Engineers, Designers & Product People
I spoke yesterday with one of the most talented product designers I've ever collaborated with, and something he said stuck with me: "I feel old."
He's 37 years old, an age when professionals in most fields are entering the prime of their careers.
But today he's witnessing the AI-driven product design landscape reinvent itself in a language he hasn't yet learned.
My designer friend had a few big deal job interviews recently where he didn't get the role. Highly relevant companies that would put him in the center of everything happening in AI.
I could tell the experience of not getting the jobs after such a successful career woke him up. So he asked me for advice.
Should he target Series A startups? Update his resume? What could he work on this summer?
My answer was was pretty simple: Start designing again.
Pick a model on Hugging Face. Experiment with GPT-4.1, Claude 4, or Gemini.
Take an app from 2015 and reimagine them with an AI-native products lens. Evernote. Yelp. Early Instagram.
Build whatever inspires you, but start experimenting again.
If you feel the world accelerating past you, it probably is. I realized that years ago—and it terrified me. So now I wake up every day and choose to build.
Sergey Brin recently came out of retirement recently and said:
"This is the most fun I've had in my life, honestly, and this is the greatest transformative moment in computer science ever. Being a computer scientist, it is the most exciting thing of my life technologically."
You probably saw the news yesterday that Jony Ive is teaming up with OpenAI to create new consumer hardware and go after Apple.
Those guys love the game. They’re competitive like athletes.
If you asked them over a glass of wine, I bet they’re curious to know if they still have the skills to win again in this new AI world.
The coolest part about this moment is that one great product idea can make you relevant again.
I’ve seen this happen time and time again this year on X.
Someone builds a product using new technology in their free time and is just sort of messing around, then they release it online.
People love the experiment and it goes viral and everyone in the product and design community is talking about it.
Boom suddenly they’re back in the game.
It’s like a musician releasing a song that makes them popular again. That’s what you need to do if you’re feeling lost as a product person or designer right now.
We’re living in historical times and the game is just getting started. Now is your time to fall in love with technology again.