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.
He arrived at my desk seeking advice. Two near misses for executive roles at the center of AI had him reeling and downtrodden over espresso. Should he target Series A startups? Update his resume? Find something this summer?
My answer: Start designing again.
Pick a model on Hugging Face.
Experiment with GPT-4, Claude, or Gemini.
Take an app from 2015 and reimagine it with an AI-native products lens. What does Evernote look like with a super intelligence behind it? How will restaurateurs experience the next Yelp? And what might influence look like on the next Instagram?
The punchline: build whatever inspires you, but start experimenting again.
Do you feel the world accelerating past you? It is. My first awakening to this two years terrorized me until I started building. 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.” Also that “this is the greatest transformative moment in computer science ever.” Not one for hyperbole he added, “is the most exciting thing of my life technologically."
Did you see Jony Ive is teaming up with OpenAI to create new consumer hardware and go after Apple?
Those guys love the game. They’re competitive athletes.
They’re wondering if they still have the skills to win in this new AI world. And they can’t know without building things. So they’re trying.
The coolest part about this moment is that one great product idea can make you relevant again.
You see it almost everyday now on X.
Someone builds a product using new technology in their free time. Messing around, they release it online. People love experiments. One goes viral. The product design community starts talking about it. Boom. 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.
—
Thank you to reader William Johnson for the feedback and edits. You improved this essay immensely.