Natti Zick

New letter from Danielle Klein this week on quality as decisions: quality isn't really about pixel-perfection or design system adherence. It's about the decision-making behind it all. As Danielle puts it: "High-quality design is borne of high-quality decision-making, which considers multiple perspectives, data points, references, past experiences and more." With AI changing how designers work — and increasingly letting us get into the codebase ourselves — the implications for how we think about quality are shifting fast. Call me biased but it is definitely worth a read, especially if you are leading a design team. https://lnkd.in/gG6XyncP Also! Hit reply, we read everything and will gladly take requests for letters that we’ll address to you. Thank you for reading! ❤️

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Fellow UX/product designers have asked what actions I have taken recently to attempt to gain traction in this market: 1. I did this at the END, but I agree with Joe Natoli and Rajeev Subramanian - find your personal brand FIRST. I got a career coach from http://betterup.com who really helped me. She was able to extract what I sounded most passionate about. A lot of us are generalists (which is great) but what gives you energy and motivates you? I was asked this yesterday: "What is your super power?" 2. I interviewed 5 hiring managers (previous managers and folks on adplist.org) and asked what to highlight in my experience, what they want to see, and how they would describe you. (We aren't great at bragging or even describing ourselves!) 3. I attended Jared Spool's free sessions on leaders.centercentre.com — including doing a invaluable 1:1 with him—and did one paid month on the “Standout” program where they critique your website or resume against THE IDEAL job you have found out there. 4. Focus on an industry or couple industries that you match with well—because companies have the luxury to find people who already know their industry and don’t have to train them. 5. Updated my content—the longest version went on LinkedIn for keywords usage (as no one clicks “see more”), and made sure my most recent 6 here are dialed in. 6. Used shorter versions of this content for resume and portfolio. (make sure to not make your resume in Illustrator, AI can’t read it) 7. I have posted to LinkedIn about every other day—which has turned into journaling for me—about my design philosophy and experiences. I hope people find my posts useful, but It has really helped me work through things I learned and helped me stay grounded. 8. I'm taking an AI course from elvtr.com and since that isn’t cheap, go do SOMETHING to show you can incorporate AI, have an opinion on how UX/AI interplay, and talk specifically about it and you want to learn. 9. Add business outcomes to your content—Ive heard it almost doesn’t matter what your designs look like—just that you were able to convince the business it was the right solution, and once you executed it, there was a change for the better. These can be hard to source, especially if the org didn’t do a lot of measurement. 10. I've enjoyed chatting with fellow designers 1:1's. Past coworkers, people you meet in classes or webinars. We give each other energy and help us maintain sanity and confidence by sharing our wins and tips. Maybe doing small side projects during this time or learn and upskill together. Net net: not every product designer is a "marketeer." This downturn requires skills of marketing—branding, differentiation, targeting, message mapping, content creation, designing for scannability, infographics, etc. It may be counterintuitive, but it means instead of applying to 200 roles and getting 0, target and tailor to the best 25-50 for you, and start getting responses. #JobSearch #JobSearchTips #UXJobs

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How can you avoid the frustration of a diluted design vision? The design handoff process is one of the critical phases in product development. Keeping the design vision alive and intact until production is hard, and requires both excellent tools and deep understanding of the requirements. Jason Manns outlines both the recent history of design tools and the key elements that today help protect your original vision: 👇 https://lnkd.in/dfXMzT38 #uidesign #uxui #qt

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Design, even more so now, is the differentiator between how you win and lose in business. A big claim, but in the age of AI the barriers and friction to build, support, sell, protect, secure, regulate, and scale are being eroded. This enables not just your fiercest competitors, but anyone, to ship the new hot thing, changing the status quo and shifting the baseline. In this world, sustained growth and success comes from using new technology to increase efficiencies and focus more energy on improving the depth of human experience and the impact of lasting, trusted interactions. While you sharpen your knife at the thought of design being the only outlier and a binary to success, I also want to talk about feelings. I know. Really pushing my luck, but hear me out. Feelings are more important than you might first think. It’s why design is the outlier. And to be clear, it’s not Design the specialism that’s your secret. It’s design the methodology. How we as humans create novel ways to influence decisions, behaviours, and actions for ourselves and others (hopefully for the better). Designers have always worked with this methodology as part of our role, but it’s now important for all roles to step back from execution and think about the human effect they wish to change. 😬 How did someone feel before this experience? 😃 How should they feel during this experience? 🤩 How should they feel after this experience? 💪 How should they feel the next time? This simple way of thinking about your work will elevate your ability to design the systems between humans and computers. The tools of the job will change, and so will titles but, without designing why and creating meaning, it’s all just a box of things.

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It’s easy to think of compliance as just something to “get through.” But sometimes, it’s exactly where the best product ideas hide. Take MFA. Strong authentication isn’t optional in most regulated markets. But here’s what happens when you lean into it: 💹 Push-based MFA works best through your native app. 💹 App installs give you a direct line to re-engage your users. 💹 Framing MFA as a trust feature (“We keep your account safe”) boosts opt-ins and reduces churn. Not every compliance requirement is just a cost of doing business — sometimes, it’s the unlock. This has come up for me more than once. Always good to swap ideas if you’ve been there too. #MFA #Compliance #Product #Growth

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Having scanned through (I won't say "read") about 600 product management resumes in the last few weeks, I can say this: Please say what kind of product you work on at each job. It's great that you wrote PRDs, helped designed a UI, or improved margin by 20%, but for what? Security software? A mobile game? Most companies are not immediately recognizable (and the ones that are recognizable are often so big that you could be working on one of hundreds of products). Just a tip!

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The 2-pizza team: Dead in the age of AI? I ran across a great article from Julie Zhou (famous from The Making of a Manager among other things, highly recommend it if you haven’t read it). It made me wonder, as AI becomes more capable and accessible, how will product teams evolve? https://lnkd.in/eXwbD2fg - How do product teams engage with AI as a partner, and then what parts of the process don't make sense anymore? - Is a tool like v0 good enough to start with a prototype I can present to a customer and test live? - Is a PRD just a really good prompt? An example: I wanted to create an image for a presentation today, in the past, I'd have tried really hard to find a template or dragged some rectangles in Figma. Now I go to Anthropic to get a prompt, feed it into Gemini, and of course give up on both because it was easier in ChatGPT. But eventually, it'll just work (maybe in 15 minutes with the speed things change in LLMs now). What are the roles of a product team in 6 months or two years, how big will they be? I always loved the 2-pizza rule, but what's the rule in 2030, or even 2026? I'm excited to find out! Curious to hear what others think, and yes, I am 100% a sucker for the Captain Planet callout, I wish I saw that more!

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A lot of conversations I have with design teams start the same way: “We’re moving fast… but we keep circling back.” It’s rarely a skill issue. It’s a timing issue. Most misalignment doesn’t come from bad design. It comes from discovering truth too late—after engineering starts, after a sprint closes, or after launch. And the cost of that delay is enormous. A late fix can be 100× more expensive than catching the issue early. But the teams that validate upfront—concepts, prototypes, even simple assumptions—consistently move faster, not slower. I’ve seen: • 25% fewer iteration cycles • Clearer rationale behind decisions • Less friction between design, product, and engineering Early insight isn’t a tax on velocity. It’s the engine of velocity. When we test earlier, we spend less time reworking and more time progressing. And our teams feel it—not just in timelines, but in confidence and morale. These themes are showing up across the teams featured in our newest Leadership Signal. It’s a great pulse check on how leaders are tightening alignment earlier in the process. https://bit.ly/4ixuGp2

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Richa Kaul recently shared how we’re taking a different approach to GRC. More trust, less noise. That same philosophy drives how we build at Complyance. As CPTO, I lead both engineering and product. For us, security, scale, and performance are table stakes. What sets us apart is our obsession with usability. Enterprise UX is broken. Too many tools are complex because they can be, not because they should be. We’re changing that. Every feature we release is designed to feel obvious, fast, and powerful. Underneath that simplicity is a lot of craft: architecture that scales, security that holds up under scrutiny, and a design system shaped by real conversations with real users. Here’s a small example I worked on this week. It may look simple, but it’s the result of weeks of research and iteration. We’ve been building a visual and interaction language for GRC that respects the complexity of the domain without overwhelming the user. I care deeply about how things work. But I care just as much about how they feel. That’s how we build trust into every click. #GRC #UXDesign #Cybersecurity #B2BSaaS #ProductCraft #EngineeringLeadership

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Your org isn’t too big for autonomy — it’s designed to dismiss it. Autonomy already exists in most enterprises. We just haven’t intentionally designed or optimized for it. Scale come less from control, and more from: • Direction over permission • Alignment over oversight • Trust over hierarchy A good, anecdotally grounded weekend read 👇 https://lnkd.in/g-wVUePn #Leadership #OrgDesign #Autonomy #LearningInPublic #FutureOfWork

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Most User Access Review notifications overwhelm people. Veza makes them work for you. Immediate alerts for what matters, quiet digests for everything else, and nudges that move reviews forward. Less noise. More action. Better compliance outcomes.

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Hot take: Regardless of what the org chart says, product and design are peers. And at a certain level, the word leader matters more than the function in front of it. At Buildertrend, my product and engineering peers are my first team. We lead the business together just from different angles: ✅ Diagnosing business, customer, and technical realities ✅ Staying focused on outcomes over outputs ✅ Coaching teams to vertically slice work and ship value early and often ✅ Raising the bar on customer truth, not just pixels or roadmaps Strong orgs don’t collapse these roles. They elevate both to operate with the same level of context and accountability. And the teams under them feel it — because alignment at the top multiplies clarity and velocity everywhere else. That’s the point: not one job, but shared leadership and better business outcomes because of it. Watch this video to learn about the philosophy behind leadership first teams: https://lnkd.in/eJQwd5Q5

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Share Early. Share Often. (Even if your inner imposter is screaming.) There’s this myth that once you become a “senior” designer (whatever that means), feedback stops being scary. Spoiler: It doesn’t. Even with two decades of experience and a teaching background, I still have that voice in my head whispering: “What if they think I have no idea what I’m doing?” Spoiler #2: They won’t. Unless you start using Comic Sans. Again. Here’s what I’ve learned - both as a designer and an educator: You are always just one brain. One set of eyes. One very personal pile of biases. No matter how many books you’ve read or wireframes you’ve wrangled  - you can’t test your work against the world if the world never sees it. That’s why I will always say: Share the draft. Share the mess. Share the weird idea you think might get you kicked off the project. Because sometimes it’s not about “making it perfect.” It’s about getting that one comment that shifts your whole perspective. That magical “aha” moment you can’t have alone. Design isn't a solo game. It’s a co-op mission. (And no, you don’t unlock the good stuff until you party up.) So yes - it’s OK to fear feedback. But don’t let that fear keep you from the one thing that’ll make your work better: Other people. 🧠 What’s one piece of feedback that changed the way you think about your design project? #DesignLeadership #FeedbackIsFuel #DesignMentorship #CreativeGrowth #ImposterSyndromeClub #UXDesign

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⚡ 💡 For two decades, the data center industry has been obsessed with minimizing waste (PUE). But in a power-constrained world, "less overhead waste" isn't enough. We need "more output." The grid isn't growing fast enough to meet AI demand. It’s time to look inward and ask: Are we truly using every watt effectively? I am proud to share the new framework we’ve developed at Verrus, which moves the goalposts from efficiency to total energy productivity. By taking a holistic view of data center architecture, our integrated design unlocks massive amounts of otherwise stranded power, allowing customers to deploy more workloads within a constrained utility feed. It’s time to move Beyond PUE. It's time to squeeze more out of every watt. 👇 #AI #DataCenterDesign #DataCenter #Sustainability #EnergyEfficiency

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In product development, the biggest myth is that progress is linear. Write the PRD. Hand it to Design. Then to Engineering. Wait for delivery. But anyone who has built products knows the best outcomes don't come from handoffs, they come from collaboration. At project44, we have built our process around that truth. Product, Design, and Engineering work together from day one, shaping the problem and the solution in real time. The PRD is not a static document; it is a shared understanding that evolves as we learn. AI plays a large role in that evolution. It helps us move faster, explore more options, and uncover insights earlier, not by replacing expertise but by amplifying it. In a recent blog, I explain how this collaborative, AI-enabled approach has transformed how we define, design, and deliver solutions, and why the future of product development depends on making discovery a shared responsibility. Read it here: https://lnkd.in/g5seXSzh

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Scammers are evolving, but so are our defenses. We at Google are excited to announce six new ways to protect you from sophisticated threats and eliminate the frustration of account recovery. We are fortifying our products and outreach efforts with major updates, including: • New Messaging Protections: Key Verifier and Safe Links in Google Messages to verify your contacts and proactively flag malicious links. • Simplified Recovery Tools: Recovery Contact (designating a trusted helper) and Recovery with Mobile (faster recovery using your phone number). • Expanded Awareness: New public education programs like the Be Scam Ready game to help everyone spot and avoid fraud. Your account safety is our priority. These six ways ensure that securing your digital life is easy, and recovering it is painless. Learn about all this here: https://lnkd.in/eS7bB4Fz #Cybersecurity #Google #TechNews #AccountSafety #Phishing #SaferWithGoogle

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The AI-First Product Organization: What We Need to Build Today Product organizations need fundamental transformation. Now. I have some thoughts on what we need to embrace, from my time as both an IC and product leader that I’d like to share: 1. PM orchestration as competitive advantage In my experience, the best PMs are now spending 30-40% less time on toil than they were a year ago. When PM work can be automated, our real value can shift to strategy, judgment, and coordination at scale. 2. Real-time prototyping replaces backlog bureaucracy I expect my PMs to build functional prototypes before and during customer conversations. "We'll add it to the backlog" is no longer acceptable. If you're gathering requirements, you should be able to validate concepts with working code before the meeting ends.      3. Democratizing development across the organization I’m supporting and training marketing, ops, product, design, and sales teams to build their own tools and features. This isn't shadow IT at all, it's intentional empowerment. When every team can solve their own problems, product velocity compounds with every platform-level improvement. 4. Establishing the vibe-code/production boundary We need clear definition of what can be vibe-coded to production versus what requires engineering rigor. Security cannot be a gate, but must become an embedded capability that drives trust with customers. Platform teams are building the rails that make safe, rapid deployment possible, and we all need to take advantage. 5. Design systems for agentic deployment 80% of a design team's time needs to transition to building systems that maintain quality when features are AI-generated, designing for consistency at machine speed, not human speed. Design tools need to catch up here, with many struggling to implement existing design systems into their AI builds. 6. Roadmapping in the age of abundance Traditional roadmapping is dead. When feature development compresses from quarters to days, planning becomes about capability building, platform investments, and strategic bets as opposed to feature lists. 7. Engineering velocity through agentic coding targets Setting measurable targets for AI-assisted code contribution. This will challenge existing cultural norms, but the teams adopting agentic coding tools are shipping 20-30% (or more) faster. The question isn't whether engineers should/should not lean in, but whether an organization can afford to tackle this transformation slowly (or not at all). The bottom line: Organizations that view AI as a productivity tool will see modest gains. Organizations that fundamentally restructure around AI-native workflows will define the next era of product leadership. The transition will be uncomfortable. The upside will be exponential. If you're leading product in 2025, which of these shifts feels most urgent to you?

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“Comparison is the thief of joy.” As an IC designer I compared myself to other ICs. As a design manager I compared myself to other managers. None of this was helpful, and at times led me down the wrong path. No matter where you are in your career, there will always be someone better than you. Don’t let that influence your career decisions. Just keep developing your craft. I talk about these and more tips I learned from management in my latest newsletter. Link in comments below.

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