This Week's Updates: AI-native organisations, product judgement, research guardrails, design systems and the changing role of code review.
Are We Designing Interfaces Nobody Will Use?
I've been spending a lot of time refining the UI of a product I'm building, while also connecting every service I use to ChatGPT and Claude so I can interact via chat. I suspect 80% of users will eventually interact with our new product through an AI agent.
Notion recently called its MCP integration its fastest-growing product ever. And it got me thinking about the shift to mobile.
When mobile took off, established companies bolted on a mobile app. But new mobile-first companies emerged, and because the market share was on their side, they eventually began to dominate established desktop products.
I think the same will happen with AI. Agent-first products, built without traditional interfaces, could become the next generation of competitors.
What does this mean for product teams?
We might need to rethink what we're optimising for. Great interfaces still matter, and designing them helps us improve our workflows and APIs. But increasingly, the real value might come from how easily agents can use our products. Maybe our biggest competitors won't have a better UX but a better AX.
This Week's Updates
Enabling the Team
AI Is Changing Work. Now It Has to Change the Organization by McKinsey
AI productivity gains rarely translate automatically into business value. Companies making progress are redesigning end-to-end work, accountability and team boundaries.
2026 Manager Effectiveness Survey: The Multiplier Most Orgs Haven't Turned On by Betterworks
Managers are being asked to coach, lead change, develop people and adopt AI all at once, but the biggest barriers are organisational friction rather than skill gaps, so improving performance means redesigning expectations, priorities and support.
Product Direction
How to Manage the Inevitable Mess of Running a Company Where Everyone Is a Builder by Jeff Gothelf
When everyone can ship, weak ideas can overwhelm customers. Jeff proposes evidence gates, clear owners, success criteria and regular feature retirement reviews.
Why Focus Still Wins: Hubert Palan on Product Strategy in an AI-Driven Market by Productboard
Productboard’s founder explains why clear market focus and customer context still determine product success when AI makes it faster to create specifications and code.
Continuous Research
AI in UX: Work Is Faster, But Practitioners Have Mixed Feelings by Maria Rosala and Rachel Banawa
A survey of 521 UX professionals finds AI speeds up individual tasks, yet output checks, mandatory adoption and higher expectations can erase the gains.
False Doors, Dead Ends, and AI Agents: A Framework for Evaluating Agentic Research Workflows by Kaleb Loosbrock
An Instacart researcher tested his own 30-agent research pipeline and found missing audit logs and consent failures, prompting a six-part quality framework.
Continuous Design
How Are Professional Practices Adopting Generative AI? by Thom Luke, David Mesa, Linus Tan, Jo Kuys and Anita Kocsis
Generative AI can speed up ideation and concept development, but adoption depends on more than the tools themselves. Teams also need clear governance, practical training and workflows that address security, IP and skill loss.
Autonomy-Preserving Guidance: How to Improve Adoption Without Turning Experts into Form-Fillers by Yi Tang
A practitioner case shows why forcing expert users through rigid guidance can drive workarounds. Design for useful support without removing agency.
Continuous Development
Why Are Good Developers So Wary of Agentic Development? by Rachel Laycock
Experienced engineers aren't necessarily resisting AI. They're recognising that faster coding doesn't remove the responsibility for building reliable software.
Patch the Planet: Global Response Coordination as Agents Uncover Critical Vulnerabilities by OpenAI
As frontier AI starts finding critical vulnerabilities before attackers do, software teams need scalable disclosure, patching and coordination processes that turn faster discovery into faster protection rather than simply increasing the volume of security findings.
Seen an interesting article? Share it with UXDX.
Meet the Partners Behind UXDX San Francisco
As UXDX San Francisco kicks off this week, we want to give a huge shoutout to the partners making it all possible:
- Miro: Streamlining cross-functional collaboration and visual workspaces.
- Optimal: Empowering teams to ground critical product decisions in customer insights.
- Knapsack: Accelerating how organizations build, manage, and scale design systems.
Whether you're joining us in person this week or tuning in from afar, we encourage you to explore how their tools can elevate your team’s workflow.
Community Events
Upcoming online event
11 November: Agenda Setting in Enterprise UX, free online workshop.
Upcoming in-person event
17 November: Chicago
Want a UXDX Community event in your city? Apply to become an ambassador.
Video of the Week
Data Visualization & Generative AI: Human-Centered Principles For Building GenAI Data Experiences
Kent Eisenhuth from Waymo shares a surprising finding from consumer health research: traditional charts often reduced people's understanding of correlation insights. The team only found a more effective approach when they moved away from conventional graphs and explored infographic-style designs.
Kent walks through how research and iteration helped the team design clearer explanations, guide attention with labels and annotations, and give users more control over the evidence behind AI-generated insights.
Watch the full session to learn when visualisations add value, when they create unnecessary complexity, and how to design data-driven experiences people can actually understand.
Want to explore how careers and leadership are shifting as AI changes product work? Read Managing Your Career in the Age of AI.