Become a Fireproof Designer

Speaker A: Welcome to the Daily Sprint where today is a great day to design. You've heard about it. The US government created conditions where Anthropic decided to shut down its latest AI model fable five days after releasing it. Many people are talking about AI governance, the influence of government and regulating business. But I want to talk to you about the personal impact this has on your future as a designer. I'll show you the four ways you can become a fireproof designer. I'm Darrel Esterbrook, 30 years in product design and the founder of Designy, a platform for product designers who want to design with a why I coach designers into leaders through real time, interactive product specific guidance. Find out more and get on board with a free newsletter@designy.com that's Design with a Y dot com. Well, welcome. I'm so glad you're here. Episode 22 almost palindromic it's like seeing double. So I always mention the coach product designers through real time interactive product specific guidance. I just never really explained that in detail and I think it's important. Like what is that really? So I coach designers into leaders. That's not just a promise. It's the fact that if you're a designer, you actually have the potential to be a leader. Probably not the CEO. I mean you could be the CEO. There are CEO designers all over and you may not have to be the design team lead or some other kind of officer in the company. No, uh, it's really the position that you are in as a designer has potential for leadership all over it. You can rise up and influence the product in a very impactful way just by doing your job well. It's a critical role. It's always being argued about having a seat at the table and why is design always pushed aside or whatever. Well, you can demonstrate that you're needed, that design actually has an impact. And the question is, uh, the leadership part, are you aware that you have the potential to be a leader? And if you do, do you know how to use that leadership? Well, I can help you discover that aptitude and show you how it might work in your particular case. That's the core of that. The real time thing is that design is not a deliverable. Right. This is a daily process. It's something that we work on. We call it design. Yeah, there's a deliverable that is designed, but this is happening every day. So I'm available to answer questions in the moment. That's the real time aspect of it. The interactive part is that coaching is really a relationship So I have courses and those are good. There's lots of resources that I provide content, the daily sprint, things like that. And this is just one way, right? You're listening to me and hopefully we're connecting at some level. But I really can't respond to you, not interactively through the podcast, unless it's a real. Unless you're a guest on the podcast and I have an application on designing.com you can fill that out. But other than that, those are kind of static resources. But interactive here in coaching is a regular conversation and that builds context over time. And then the product specific guidance. So there are so many examples out there. You'll find in training materials and things about products. Like there's a sample product. In fact, every AI marketing thing has this super generic prompt like build me a marketing app for. It's like, okay, great, we get the idea. But you are working on an actual product and that product is very unique because the company you're working for is very unique and the people inside that company are very unique because each one is unique, has different experiences. The team that you're on is unique. So all of those factors come into play to where if you want to really accelerate your growth, you need to have that context where it's specific to your product. And if I'm working with you, then you've got that guidance right there. So I can help see what you're doing specifically and kind of the environment you're in and give you guidance that's really tailored to you. And that's the whole point of it. So check out the offer. I have this available at Design Academy. I'll mention it again at the end of this podcast. You can always go to academy.deziony.com and find out more. But we're here today to talk about what happened with Fable 5. Anthropic and Claude and all of that. So big in the news, right? Just almost four days of after the release of Fable 5, the super, super model of AI, the Mythos 5 was alongside that. And, uh, it's a big stir. The government issued a condition that they couldn't be certain they could fully administer. And so they just pulled it for everyone. So the funny thing with that, well, I mean, there's a post on LinkedIn. It says the, uh, US government shut down Fable 5 and Mythos 5 last Friday. Every customer worldwide lost access overnight. The takeaway for every company using AI model access is not guaranteed if your workflows depend on a specific model and it disappears tomorrow. What's Your plan. This is why AI governance matters. Know what you're using, have fallbacks and document your dependencies. And it's true. So that's a true statement. They're looking at it from, uh, a company. You integrate these models into your workflow. You're really dependent on it. You're absolutely dependent on it. That's critical. Uh, someone m A little more specific, someone posted on ZDNet. Uh, you can see the effect of that in my Claude code session. When I launched the session with Claude Fable 5, selected Claude responded that quote, Claude Fable 5 is currently unavailable. It then described the problem as, there's an issue with the selected model, Claude Fable 5. It may not exist or you may not have access to it, unquote. Gotta love. Even the AI company itself has pretty lousy, uh, error messages. So nothing's really improved. 21st century. We still struggle with communicating, uh, what's actually going on with the software. But all of that talking very generically, hey, yeah, they're losing access. Your company could go down. If there is something that disrupts access to these models, forget about the U.S. government. Uh, it could be anything. It could be any reason that that goes down. You're connected to it. It's like an API, right? You're relying on that interconnectivity. And that's true for companies and businesses. And okay, so decision makers, they got to have strategies and figure that out. But like this person, if you were using what, one of these models as part of your workflow, what are you going to do? And so there's so much talk about, uh, designers, Claude design. It's revolutionized my world and I can now do all these things. Great. But there's more to it than that. This is not like losing a tool like a figma goes down. I mean, that's pretty bad. You could still run it locally if you have some of those files. But if the AI is how you design and it can be shut off, you are sunk because all your thinking and your design process is tied up in that platform. AI is unlike any other tool that we've seen. It's this quote, thinking aspect of it. And that's more than just saying, uh, calculator is able to do this math quickly. It's actually taking this very complex process and putting it in a black box and saying, here's your output and why wouldn't that be attractive? And so people that are giving themselves over to that, you're also disengaging what you would ordinarily use to design with. And That's a. That's a process. It's kind of funny, I think we're in such a modern age. I don't know where you live, but where I live, it's possible to lose power in storms. So windstorms that come up, uh, in the winter, ice storms again on power lines, and just trees that fall on power lines, things like that. And so it's not constant. But when storms are coming up, you're always starting to think like, okay, so how can I. How will he live the next few days if the power goes out? You know, we've got well water. So it's like, oh, well, how will we get, you know, can we get the power? Well, the good news is with that sort of thing, as long as there's a generator to run the pump, you know, we can get water, unlimited water that way. But, uh, then we're dependent on the generator. Right. Something. When the power goes out, there's this uncanny feeling I have to want to eat all the food in the refrigerator. It's like, keep the door closed. But yeah, somehow it's like, oh, I guess we gotta get rid of it before it spoils. But, you know, your cell phone. How are you gonna charge your cell phone? Can you cook? Get the little gas burners out. And like this summer, it, uh, got really hot at one point. What are we going to do if the power goes out because of heat kind of overload, the winter gets super cold. How is it, you know, how are you going to heat your house? All sorts of things. All those things are, okay, so how do you survive? Well, we're talking digitally, professionally, mentally. How do you survive? If you've put all of that capacity of thinking into this platform, that can go down. It's just very strange, this world we live in. So it's really not about the tool. It's your ability to think. And there's a point where dependence on this gen AI for product design may be the only way that someone does product design. I don't know where this is going. Uh, it seems plausible because it's not just a tool upgrade. You're like, oh, I'm just giving more and more of the process away to this thing. And if that model fails, regulatory shift doesn't have to be a government thing. What can you do? I have four ways that you can become a fireproof designer. Fireproof is a great way. You're protected from the fireways, that the fire is burning around you. But you know you're safe. Whatever it is, you're Safe. Here are the four things. A fireproof designer knows the design process, knows the medium they're designing in, knows how to receive and interpret stakeholder requests, knows how to communicate design to stakeholders. So let's break these out. A fireproof designer knows the design process. So there's a design process that I promote. It's, I call it the Designy Framework Framework. But the premise is there's purpose, context, options, choices and measurements. Those five components of the design process are not just universal outside of product design, but it's very scalable within product design. You can apply that to the smallest infographic of a portion of the screen or all the way up to a, uh, product strategy. And it's really critical. Those are not just little waypoints that you might find optional, though. These are things that, if you don't know the nuances of them and how deep they go and how to really leverage them in the moment, they're, uh, fundamental to what you're doing. You can ignore them, but it won't be good. You're going to run up into these every single time you go to design something. So it'd be really good to know it. The thing is that each of these drives you to the right input. Right? You need to have something in order to design something, and it creates a structure with some expectation to it with the people you work with. So it's a good thing that if you are speaking this process as well as doing it and demonstrating it, you'll start to get the reputation of you've got the structure. You are providing a, uh, reliable way of producing things that work, things that have outcome. And that's a great thing because people are just going to go naturally to what they think needs to happen for design. And yet there is a process. So know that design process AI can make things for you. And even they might guide you through a process. I mean, you could ask it. You ask me questions, that's good. But it's going to just come up with a process. It's not going to be reliable. Uh, it might make sense in the moment. It's generative, it's not going to be consistent. Even so, it has no concept about the people you're working with. That's an MD file you won't be able to put together because you don't know everything about the people you're working with. That's a factor. Uh, it won't know whether it's wise for you to go one way or another, like how far to push this thing or where to Pull back. No, it's taking you on a journey. You're going to go where it tells you, even if you think you're in control of it. So knowing the design process is huge to being a fireproof designer. A second way you can be a fireproof designer is to know the medium you're designing in. Commanding the medium is critical. Right? The medium. Pick a medium. We're talking digital, we're talking product design. I mean, digital is a medium. Painting is a medium, Drawing is a medium. Architecture has a medium. All these things commanding that I always think of Bob Ross, if you're familiar with Bob Ross, the painter, oil painter, and he had a command of the medium. He knew how to take color and mix it in a certain way and then how to apply it with what type of tool, in what type of manner, and then how to manipulate it in order to achieve, uh, a look, uh, a rendering, a composition. Like all those things, that's command. So the question is, are you in command of the medium of product design? Some of these are fundamental too. Like, do you know the rules of typography, color, composition? There's many more. Fill in the blank. But, like, those are the fundamental components. Do you really know them? You should. Do you know UX patterns and when to use them? It's always good. You could go to Maubin and other places and get references, Nielsen, things like that, that have UX patterns to them. But knowing them and knowing when to apply them, even outside of their quote usage, you could really command the medium. If you know that. Do you know people and human nature? People are funny, they are unpredictable, and yet they are driven by, um, kind of this motive to make things easy, make things simple, do less work. Right? That's something. You can know that and use that in your design to help them along the way or to prevent them from making mistakes. It's really important. And the people that you're designing for in your company or organization, those particular clients are going to have very specific motives. So really knowing those, discovering those. Do you know how data moves through a system? That's huge. The engineers are really awesome. I've worked with so many fantastic engineers. It's like watching a master chef, uh, create something. To see these engineers think through data and how it should, uh, arrive and where it should go. I've picked up a whole lot just by being around them. That doesn't make me in any way an engineer, but it surely makes me, uh, know that if I make these certain choices in this interface, it's going to have some kind of impact in the engineering realm. That's important. They're a stakeholder just as much as anyone else. Knowing that, though, prompts this other question of can you think at scale and efficiency? Designing for the moment is great. You have to start there. But that's not the only use case. And what if you could take what you designed and it can be reused elsewhere? That scale design, once used many times, it's fantastic. And its efficiency comes out of that. It also helps the engineers, it lowers costs, it does all these things. Can you think that way? That's part of commanding the medium. So AI can do all this for you, or it can at least appear to do all this. But unless you understand these mechanics of the medium, you're going to always be at its mercy. Whatever it says will have to be true, because there's no other reason to question it. You don't have any basis to question. So, yeah, a fireproof designer is going to know the medium. A third way. The fireproof designer knows how to receive and interpret stakeholder requests. So that's huge. You might get a brief or you might get your design MD file, whatever. You're going to get this, uh, here's what we want the app to do. That's great. You need that, you need that vision. But that's never the full story. There's always more to it. In fact, a lot of times stakeholders request things in a very prescriptive manner. They'll say, build this thing. And unless you kind of dig in there and understand how. Understand how to dig in there and, and ask them what their real goal is, you may be designing the wrong thing. And not just that. It always involves more people. There's always someone else, uh, some other person in the workflow that's important. Always more variables, things that you wouldn't expect in this type of product. Oh, I see. You do it this way. You've got that business rule. That's odd. I've never encountered that before. And yet that's important to their business. And this is always imperfect at the beginning. So you could sit down and have the longest workshop and it's still going to fall short. And that's fine. That is what it is. Feeding all these things into AI, though, won't produce a perfect output. You're going to have to continually be updating it as you learn things. And it's kind of funny, you think of it as if you were working with an intern, uh, shadowing you. And that's the AI, Right. Are you constantly going to be whispering in their ear, like, what to do next. I mean, they should be watching what you're doing. You should be giving them little, uh, assignments, things they can own and, and try make mistakes on. But we're talking the AI as our intern. Uh, the life of the product is going to be constantly changing and so many more complications down the line when, if you're just a fireproof designer, you can interpret these things directly. And the fourth thing, a fireproof designer knows how to communicate design to stakeholders. So receiving and interpreting stakeholder requests is one thing. Translating that into design is part of mastering that medium. But can you now take those designs and communicate it back to the stakeholders? It's not enough to just show them a screen. It's not enough to show an engineering stakeholder a screen. There's so much more that goes behind it. There's, there's time. And yes, AI, ah, can generate these proofs of concept prototypes and all that, but there's so much depth necessary that even those fall short. It might be good for concepts, but we're talking about you have a design and you need to get it across, like in an expanded way to these stakeholders. Users, of course, are just going to use the thing, but we need to know more, we need to dig deeper on that. So the challenge for you is, do you know why the design decision was made for every item on your screen? There's no reason you should leave any of that to chance. I just put that there because it looks good or, I don't know, it needed to fill space. There should be a reason for every element that's on the screen, why it's there, all the attributes of it. If you don't know why an element is on the screen, then the stakeholder is not going to care. And in fact they'll challenge you on it and probably cut it or change it in some way. That wouldn't really help the product. You know, AI is generating screens and you can go as far as to ask it heuristic feedback like, give me a report on this, critique my design, and, um, it'll go through and it'll give you a description of what it is. It may tie it into some design principles and things, but it doesn't have wisdom as to why that was made. It can explain the thing it's looking at, but why was it put there? What's the benefit? Why wasn't something else done there? Why not? Why shouldn't we do something else there? Let's do the thing that we didn't think we should do. Let's do both. Let's have both of these as options. Let's explore the broken design because that is just as important as getting a perfect design, if that's even achievable. You have wisdom, um, through your experience. The more you do this product design career, the more you're going to pick up not just about the tool, not just techniques, not just patterns, but people. How they work, how they communicate, what to avoid, what to embrace. Like all of that goes into being a product designer and it's huge. So those are the four points. You can be a fireproof designer regardless of whether AI stays up or goes down. It's a wild world. We've seen these models change hugely in the past six months. I mean 2026 is the year of the AI and what it's doing to everybody. But that's always been the case. Technology is always going to change. So content changes, but the principles are constant. Design will always survive. And it benefits you to learn the foundational things because uh, once you know those, you can be ready for everything. You can pivot where it needs to pivot and embrace the things that are going to really help your process. So I have two resources for you that could really help in this line. They're both on Design Academy and I've got a course called Design for Value and it's a masterclass level course on um, this design process that I mentioned earlier. And it includes how to talk with stakeholders. There's 14 video lessons and a way to connect with me personally throughout if you need it. So go to academy.designee.com and look for the masterclass. And then there's also coaching which I mentioned before, which is interactive guidance. Right. You go back and listen to the really detailed explanation. But it amounts to 12 weeks of one on one sessions. You can always continue that for another 12 weeks. It's depends on what you're doing. It's a quarterly type of thing. Uh, but it can start anytime. Doesn't have to start on the quarter. Uh, one on one sessions. Huge. Right? That's that interactive aspect of it. And you get a private Slack coach access. So you'll have access to me that way if you pay up front you'll save $550 on that. So that's a pretty big thing. Academy, uh.designee.com go there and enroll and we even have a free, uh, if we're a match we'll have a free discussion. So no obligation that way. Looking forward to talking to you. That'd be great and you can sign up for the free newsletter@designing.com you'll stay up to date on all these topics and initiatives monthly, if not more. It's Design with a Y.com so thanks for listening to the Daily Sprint. Remember, today is a great day to design with a why. See you next time.