Katarina Batina

Their words

our material language for building is now becoming words. We now have to give critique to our agents. Most the time we have to point at the thing and say, "This isn't right, and here's why." The higher fidelity that designers can have in the language they use to make their work better, the better off they're going to be in an agentic era

Their words

one-on-one time should be about the work. Let's get into the work. Let's open up your prototype. Let's have live critique and and you know move this work forward and help designers figure out how to make better decisions.

Their words

I think it's really hard to generate that culture if you're not deeply passionate about the craft. I think it'll be a really tough go in the long run for like the professional manager whose calendar is really driven by one-on-one time talking about career development.

Their words

great design leaders of this era just have to have a deeply intense relationship with what the business is there to do and pair that intensity with a deep relationship with what makes great design.

Their words

But all of that data then has an MCP hooked up to it that as I'm looking to make decisions as a product leader, I can just ask my agent and it will query and find all of these previous decisions, we've actually worked on that before. Here's where it failed. And so making as much internal decision making legible feels critically critically important.

Their words

As much as there's a really myopic focus on like designers in code, which is important and true, and I am totally signed on on, we're missing the other part of what this era is unlocking for designers, which is access to data, access to allegibility in the business that you didn't have before.

Their words

make a really compelling prototype and tell a story. I think that stands now. I just think that your ability to do that, it's honestly much easier.

Their words

Editing has been an important part of the job as of recently. um really focusing in on what is the most critical aspects of our experience and getting really really disciplined about that.

Their words

The thing I worry about with any new kind of tool explosion as designers are learning is that they'll start designing to their local skill set.

Their words

the thing that I hate to see are is when constraints start driving the design process, especially now.

Their words

design should be the tip of the spear for desiraability. And I think that's probably the genesis of like if you extrapolate that comment out to like taste, editing, deciding what actually matters, that's a skill set that has been naturally a home in the design practice since before computers were invented.

Their words

If you're trying to prototype a full feature, don't go for the moonshot of end to ending this and shipping it to production. Just render the whole idea and then use that as the thing you talk to engineering with.

Their words

The fact that you can't ship it to production doesn't mean that you've failed.

Their words

refocus on what makes you as a designer differentiated which is designing what's desirable. Don't worry about feasibility. Pick the tools that are going to allow you to render the idea in the most believable way.

Their words

you need to create the grounds to take some risk knowing that you're going to commit just as much iteration into the next thing as you did the the the incumbent product.

Their words

Any team who's had to optimize an onboarding flow and that one time you decided to redesign it, like it almost always loses, right? But it's having the confidence and the agreement to begin, like we're actually going out to beat the incumbent and we're going to reset a baseline that inherently might be a little lower than what status quo is today.

Their words

that's the big shift change is people come to do great craft work, but they leave really great product thinkers. And that to me is one of the most enduring skills in this era as we move out of like our central value being execution into being people who can shape great products that people love to use.