Kevin Twohy

Most designers say they want impact. What they really want is proof. At scale, I had to formalize proof. I once built a quarterly UX strategy using Jared Spool's Persuasive Metrics to connect design decisions to revenue. A 2% reduction in onboarding friction translated into six figures in retained revenue. That was the language the room spoke. Dashboards. Quarterly reviews. Attribution models. Impact had to be quantified before it was believed. Now I’m at a tiny startup. Last week, a customer Slacked: “Magemetrics saves me days on campaign reports.” Following the rebrand, a prospect opened the site and said: “Okay. This feels serious.” These calls felt different: less explaining, fewer objections, more trust. No attribution model. No presentation. Just behavior changing in real time. Here’s what’s different: In enterprise, proof arrives as numbers. In startups, proof shows up as decisions. Enterprise feedback arrives filtered and quarterly; startup impact is immediate. Doubt slows deals. Confidence speeds them up. Immediacy forces clarity. You take fewer performative bets. You stop optimizing for presentations. You design to remove doubt. Because you’re not defending slides — you’re shaping what happens next.

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Daniel Wert chatted with Andrew Hogan on the FigBrew podcast. I've added Moneyball ⚾ to my Letterboxd queue, but the practice of building teams for depth over star power doesn't require a love of sports. https://lnkd.in/erSGWjdz

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Such a great post, sharing lessons learned by Akshan Ish. For anybody interviewing for senior design roles, or just presenting a great story, take a look. There aren't many resources helping senior / principal / staff designers prepare for interviews, so sharing 10+ experience from both sides of the table, is gold. https://lnkd.in/d4XprbS2

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This is a fantastic read on the evolving role designers must play. I love the section on the Inversion of Paradigms. How are you evolving your role as a designer? What's working, and why? What's not, and why? https://lnkd.in/eAMVaA7X

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If your personas describe users in isolation, you’re limiting impact. Real work is collaborative, constrained, and increasingly shaped by automated systems. Our design artifacts need to reflect that reality. This piece explores what it means to expand personas beyond the single user, and why relationships between actors matter just as much as the actors themselves. https://lnkd.in/g4dxrrHx #designexcellence #designleadership #userpersona #AIintegration

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In a thought-provoking new piece, Nate Schloesser argues that the UX industry is shifting away from its roots as a problem-solving discipline and turning into a factory for polished interfaces. https://lnkd.in/gdAMECzz #ux #ui #design #designtinking

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This is what investing in AI in design looks like. As with many other job families, the design industry focuses on what might the impact of AI be: will it lower the quality with slop? Will it replace humans? Etc But I don't see much focus on to understand and really capitalise on the potential AI brings to design. We are largely treating it as any other tool: a way to get incrementally better. At best it's a short course for the designers, at worst it's expecting designers to already know how to use it. But AI has the potential for making radical shifts and leaps. I'd love to hear, and learn, from anyone who is making significant strides to drive AI transformation in design.

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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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Jenny Wen from Anthropic was on Lenny's podcast recently talking about how design is changing & I've seen it shared a lot with very little pushback and lots of hyperbole so I want to add some balance. There are 3 things in here that are genuinely worth sitting with. 1) She puts numbers on the time allocation shift - she's gone from 60-70% of her time mocking & prototyping down to 30-40%, with the rest now spent pairing with engineers & shipping code directly. That's real data from her context & it marries with anecdotal evidence I see from others who've found genuine efficiencies in their personal workflow - but what you do with that reclaimed time is going to vary dramatically depending on where you sit, what you're building & who you're building it for. 2) She talks about vision horizons compressing - no more 2 or 5 year design visions at Anthropic, they're working 3 to 6 months out & the output is a prototype that points a direction, not a polished deck. 3) Her three hiring archetypes super interesting - the block-shaped generalist who's 80th percentile across multiple skills, the deep T specialist who's top 10% in 1 thing, & the craft new grad who learns fast & isn't weighed down by old process. That last one I'm a huge advocate of - the value of a graduate with strong foundational skills who hasn't yet been told how things are supposed to work is massively underestimated. However I think the conversation around this episode has been a bit uncritical. Jenny says the traditional design process is dead. But when it comes to what replaces it the answer is essentially... be flexible, pair with engineers, set short-horizon vision. And in my opinion she hasn't offered an alternative process with any real detail. I don't think she's claiming to, but the way people are sharing this you'd think someone just handed us the new playbook. She didn't. That vision compression, that faster prototyping all only works if your entire company is oriented to working this way and again, lets not fetishise the single domain product design/dev challenge. I think it's important to say - this is one designer's perspective from inside one of the fastest moving AI labs on the planet. If you're a design lead at a bank or an insurer or a healthcare company, where you've got regulatory constraints, slower release cycles and engineers who aren't running seven Claude instances... there is nothing in this episode that is going to dramatically change your Monday morning. The frontier is useful context. It is not a universal strategy. Take the main points but don't fall for the 'XYZ is dead' or 'XYZ role is no longer needed' The hard work of figuring out what the new process actually looks like for your team, your constraints, your product - that's still yours to do. You can dramatically shift how fast you move between value gates in your work. Saying that the double diamond is dead (not what she said) shows you never understood design in the 1st place.

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Why does it feel like designers are more focused on mastering technical workflows and endless AI tools than actually designing?

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The great thing about developers leveraging agentic coding tools, is that a lot of the same design best-practices for communicating with humans, are also really helpful context for LLMs. I hope this article is a helpful starting point for designers to set developers up for success, especially those using Figma's Dev Mode MCP server. https://lnkd.in/gNi92tmH

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The classic design process is evolving and fast. For African tech innovators, this is a wake-up call: the way we build products, design interfaces, and solve problems is changing globally. Leveraging AI, thinking beyond traditional processes, and embracing new design archetypes could be the key to creating world-class products from Africa. 🌍✨ Tech is no longer about following established playbooks, it’s about adapting, experimenting, and innovating faster than ever. #AfricanTech #Innovation #Design #AI #ProductBuilding #FutureOfWork

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GV (Google Ventures) have a long history of hiring former designers and design leaders to support their portfolio companies. Folks like Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Kate Aronowitz, Daniel Burka, Braden Kowitz, Vanessa Cho, and Tom Hulme. In my latests podcast interview, Kate Aronowitz explains why this is, and what designers bring to the table. Interestingly it's not about craft, but rather the way they see the world with a beginners mind.

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