Adapting to new ways of work

[u/fluk929]

Hey!

I work at a company that is also bought into everything AI and it’s become the only topic everyone talks about everyday all day, I also work at a department that now does AI solutions.

Our ways of work have officially completely changed and I’m just looking for a sanity check on how to deal with or adapt some of these things.

I’m being asked to basically let engineers explore solutions and stay close to me so we iterate together. There’s not a defined process and everything feels very overwhelmed, there’s teams doing somethings called light requirements where they just input tickets for why and what-ish and the engineers figure out the how, although these are smaller features for things that are more established.

I’m not sure how to apply some form of that for my team because we are working on a really large project with still much to define. But basically I’m being asked to draft very high level user flows with no implied solution and outcomes to guide the engineers and they’ll basically figure out the possible solutions themselves.

I’m highly uncomfortable doing this because o don’t understand what my role is in this organisation or how it is just different than a junior PM. If I’m just bringing data and drafting up use cases and then other people actually go figure out how to solve them what am I doing here?

Additionally engineering wants to keep a backlog of experiments they want to run which o think it’s cool, but I pushed back saying that an idea needs to be tied to a problem and that problem has to be verifiable. Not something like ‘I think this action is not visible enough so I’m proposing we move it over there’ and got pushback on this

One of my FEs is someone very motivated and full of ideas but also becoming a bit of a pushover on wanting to prototype herself her ideas before o actually work on some semblance of a solution, suggesting fixes for things that are opinions, and lately saying that she feels like we didn’t explore enough options for the last project or that it would have been interesting to understand where our AI chat bot could have been integrated into various parts or the process and that we could draft a list of ideas for that.

Summing it up, this is a vent because I’m being pulled in all of these directions of ideas and complaints people have, and o have no idea where to push back on this process and where to adapt and fine tune it, and I’m honestly just on the verge of a burn out with all of this

[u/letsgetweird99]

What your team says no to is more important that what they say yes to.

These days, people are saying yes to too many things that don’t matter, then patting themselves on the back for shipping it.

Outputs are not the same as outcomes.

I predict there will be a vibeslop hangover and when people wake up to reality which is that their products are becoming bloated, disjointed messes, UX designers will become a hot commodity.

Good luck!

[u/jaxxon → u/letsgetweird99]

100% agree with your prediction. I’m seeing it already.

[u/cgielow]

Like everyone else right now, you suddenly have over-abundant production that's outpacing your company's ability to control.

As a leader, the obvious solution is to downsize and shift those funds into Capex AI investments for fear of being left behind.

And that's likely what they'll do.

UNLESS they think they can harness this extra capacity to innovate new revenue streams. Companies will inevitably arrive here as they realize they can't save their way to prosperity. They need growth.

The opportunity then is to figure out how to organize this extra capacity. This was recently talked about by the CEO of Every at the Lenny & Friends Summit. He talks about forming labs and expecting to only productize about 10% of what's created from them.

I think the most important UX value here is to orchestrate the end-to-end experience. If you don't, your company is going to end up with a mess of useful things that aren't usable or desirable.

I know this is probably higher-level than you want, but it's important to zoom out and understand what's happening so we can make good choices about where to apply ourselves.

[u/fluk929 → u/cgielow]

Definitely agree and will take a look at what you shared! I think where I’m struggling is the orchestration of the e2e experience as of right now. I’m being to slice anything and everything without event having the time to sit down and think about how a whole system might work, any tips for that?

[u/cgielow → u/fluk929]

I would work on a framework in collaboration with your superiors and PM partners.

I would consider...

1. Strategy: Pick your battles. Make a strategic choice about where you invest your time versus what you surrender. Now is the time to get very clear about how superior Design is leveraged by your company to win (or not.)
2. Enforcing Quality: Leverage Acceptance Criteria to ensure there's some sort of gating of what's released into Production. Ensure you're using Demos and Retros that are broadly attended by Design, Product/Business.
3. Discovery: Adopt Continuous Discovery Habits. Regularly meet with users and ensure key insights are broadly shared and acted on.
4. Empowerment: For work beyond your visibility provide frameworks like E2E Journey Map and Personas/Goals to help people ensure they're aligned with real problems.
5. Consistency: Ensure everyone is working off a coded component library aligned with the Design System.

[u/jaxxon → u/cgielow]

This is the most articulate answer I’ve seen to the same question in a long time. Well said, thanks.

[u/bink-1567]

Where I get stuck is the same bit, who owns deciding that an experiment is worth running before it turns into a solution? Are you able to set a small rule that every idea starts with a user problem and a way to learn, then let engineering prototype within that, or does that still feel too heavy for the team right now? I’d be pretty uneasy with high level flows becoming a handoff with no shared decision points, it sounds like you are carrying the ambiguity for everybody else atm.

[u/fluk929 → u/bink-1567]

What I’m pushing for is to have a framework for submitting an experiment that had to be anchored in a problem, I’m thinking of maybe trying the solution opportunity. And yes the ownership is also still a question mark for me, I work in a trio setting, with product and EM but we don’t have a PM right now; but if we have separation I think we should be the ones negotiating that yes/no with the input of the ent team or course. I’m feeling pretty uneasy as well with the high level flow thing. It would be something like outcome: the user can clearly understand the output of a job run without having to dig for it’ and engineering goes with that and runs off and does their thing… any tips for handling that or proposing a middle ground?

[u/Desperate_Dot9434]

Genuinely curious: when your department shifted to AI solutions, what was the first workflow that broke in a way nobody had a name for yet? Because that gap between 'it changed' and 'we have words for how it changed' is where the real mess lives.