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- [00:00]
Ioana Teleanu
There's this kind of trend of, oh my God, now AI can do that, let's do it. But it's obviously the wrong way to think about it.
- [00:07]
Rid
Like, anybody can go to lovable and just build a thing immediately after this episode ends. What about on the product side, though?
- [00:14]
Ioana Teleanu
You don't want to break that experience. So AI can break it, really. AI can make a good experience into something that feels widgety and like it's just adding sparkles everywhere and pointless.
- [00:26]
Rid
Were there specific experiments or lessons that added clarity in the midst of all this ambiguity?
- [00:33]
Ioana Teleanu
If you're just coming up with fantastical things that AI can do and then nobody can really build them, what are you doing? Are you helping anyone, really? When you have a product that solves clear scenarios, has a clear scope, has a clear way in which people interact with it, you don't want to mess that up.
- [00:51]
Rid
Anything come to mind that a designer can do in order to invest into that future version of themselves where theoretically they might be wearing a lot more of the product product had than they are today.
- [01:02]
Ioana Teleanu
If you don't do anything, you're definitely going backwards. So that's not maintaining the status quo.
- [01:09]
Rid
Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid and this is where designers never stop learning. This week's episode is with Ioana Teleanu, who was the first AI designer at Miro. And a big theme of this conversation is how to identify opportunities for AI as a designer. She shares a ton of stories and lessons learned from her time at Miro and honestly just has a fresh perspective on AI and design as a whole that I think will resonate with a lot of you. So let's start by hearing how she got the role at Miro.
- [01:42]
Ioana Teleanu
My journey into AI began within UiPath, which was my employer for five years. And for the past year I worked on a product called Clipboard AI. And this product turned out to be a very well received product. It also won Times Magazine best invention of 2023 award. And it was essentially, I think what was really interesting about it was that it was trying to revolutionize something very basic and straightforward. And I've learned as a designer that trying to change experiences that are very deeply embedded in our mental models is the hardest thing and the most exciting. So we were trying to change the way people copy and paste, but with the help of AI. So essentially we were adding this level of intelligence over the transfer of data between systems. I discovered AI as a material and all the new opportunities. And so that opened the world of AI and design to me. And then Miro reached out. They were hiring for their first AI designer on the AI team that existed already. So this talented team of people trying to make something with AI, and they were kind of having design support, support on and off from within the Miro design team. But they felt like they needed someone with experience and at least a framework for thinking about design problems. They opened up this role and I became the AI designer at Miro. It was also a very, very exciting learning journey for me. I think because of the open endedness of Miro. It's a whiteboard. So AI can literally be anything. It can be. So anything AI can do can in one way or another be surfaced in the context of Miro. So this open endedness was super exciting. Also a bit paralyzing for me and the team many times. Like, what do you do when you can do anything? Like, what do you do when there are so many options? How do you decide between them? AI is pretty hard to test without building it. So making informed decisions was a different kind of animal in the context of AI. So it was really a time of, yeah, just accelerating learning, a lot of experimenting, a lot of hypothesis that we were trying to learn about. And I'm very grateful for that.
- [04:03]
Rid
Let's drill into the beginning of the Miro journey because I think that is one of the challenges with AI is, you know, it can do anything, but then you're pairing that with a product that can also kind of do anything. So you have max ambiguity. So talk to me a little bit about what it took in the early days to identify opportunities even and get people aligned and get that momentum in the beginning of your Miro journey.
- [04:26]
Ioana Teleanu
What was the most difficult part about this was this kind of big picture thinking. How will AI look at Miro in five years from now? We couldn't imagine beyond that, anything beyond that, like even two years, to be honest, given the transformation in the industry was pretty ambitious. But we were trying to kind of have a North Star, right? Have that vision of where do we want to go with this? And then what are the questions we need to ask in order to get there? But also in the space of AI, you really need to move fast now, not just because the pressure of the market and everybody's doing AI, so that's one aspect of the problem. But there's also the learning, learning aspect because there's ambiguity and there's complexity and there's possibilities and you can do so many things. You really need to start learning fast. So every, let's say week or month, There is no experiment up in your product. You're not just stalling, you're being left behind in a way. There was really this feeling that we constantly need to have something that we're observing, learning a hypothesis that in the product, in the real world, reflected, built, launched, monitored. And so this was the biggest challenge. How do you balance tactical experiments and just quick moves with a strategic and mindful and intentional path? Right. And how do you build something that's very meaningful, but also move fast towards that when you have a hard time articulating that? And then if you can't really understand how to figure that out, how do you design this micro experiments and the next steps? So Miro is essentially a space, a whiteboard if you want, but it's of course, much more than that. But in essence, it's a canvas on which you visualize your thinking. And so for me, everything had to kind of connect back to this concept. Like if AI can help with parts of the thinking process or with parts of envisioning that thinking into something that everyone can look at and have a conversation about it, how does AI support that process of coming up with a concept, an idea, a reflection, insight, and then visualizing it in the best possible format with as little friction as possible for the users? We were getting stuck for a long time and it felt like, what's next? Which would. Because there is an opportunity cost, you can't test everything at the same time, right? You have to choose your battles and you really have to optimize for the most important next question. Like, this is how I was framing my design challenges and my design thinking within Miro, like, what's the most important next question in relationship to everything we know, like the context, but also the high level direction that we're going towards. So what's the most important next question? And then what are some other questions that we want to explore in the future? So we were trying to have these questions, these bets, right? Constantly up in the product, launched, answered, explored, the chat, right? We had it, they launched it before I joined. And then we learned about how people are using it and then decided to move away from an interface that kind of moved you in a different surface from the playground you're in. We already have a lot of real estate. We're essentially an infinite real estate, right? So do we really need another surface to send people to, to have conversations with AI? So we were constantly learning through these experiments. And so the process was very much, yeah, question, test, learn, change, adapt, evolve.
- [08:08]
Rid
Real quick message, and then we can Jump back into it. So here's the thing. The last few prototypes that I've made haven't been in figma. Instead, I'm using Lovable. And honestly, it feels like magic to create real software without touching a single line of code. I mean, you could literally build whatever you can come up with. And it's good. Like, I'm genuinely proud of the prototypes that I'm making. And developers can't put believe how quickly I'm able to bring my ideas to life. So this is your wake up call. Don't stay stuck in Rectangle land. I mean, I promise Lovable is way easier than you think. And I'm having more fun designing right now than I have in a long time. So head to Dive Club slash Lovable to start building today. That's L O, V, A, B, L, E. All right, picture this. You're in design crit, getting a bunch of feedback from everyone on the call, and you're taking notes as fast as you can because that's what's going to fuel that next round of iteration. Sound familiar? Well, thankfully those days are over. All you have to do is run granola in the background the next time you're talking with people on your team. That way you can relax a bit, be present in the conversation. Granola feels like a notepad, so you can still jot ideas down so you don't have to be 100% reliant on AI or those creepy meeting bots. You can kind of think of it like Apple Notes, but it transcribes critical for you. You can even have a crit template to pull out specific action items or capture all of the questions you were asked. But I'm never starting a meeting without Granola again. And I strongly believe that designers everywhere should be using it. They're offering three months free for you and anyone on your team. All you have to do is go to Dive Club Granola to get the special offer. Okay, now onto the episode. Did it feel like the you were running those almost like localized experiments in an attempt to figure out what the top level strategy was or was there clarity around like the North Star and now we're just trying to figure out how to get there.
- [10:01]
Ioana Teleanu
So sometimes we felt like we figured out where we need to get to and it felt like we're aligned and our thinking has finally emerged into something that we can all be excited about and relate to. And then somehow we lost that thing again. And then we rebuild it and we lose it again. And so it was very dynamic. Even the Strategic direction. The thing is that you're not doing this AI thing in a vacuum. It has to evolve in relationship with the rest of the product. And of course, there are many other product teams within Miro working on other parts of the product. And so they launched Docs, they were doing all these big changes in the Miro world. So we always had to kind of tie back to where the product is going on its own. Because AI in a way is a facilitator of the use cases that Miro had conventionally.
- [10:55]
Rid
It's like the ultimate horizontal layer. I think that was a really key word that you said earlier.
- [11:00]
Ioana Teleanu
Yeah, exactly. And so it had to kind of support us. So we couldn't just have a strategy for here's what AI is going to do. Independent of everything. We constantly had to adjust to the rest of the moving parts in the system. And that added another layer of ambiguity. So now it's just not just technology is evolving in a very fast pace. Surprising way. Users are already coming up with mental models. So in research we very often found that ChatGPT was launched for six months and people were referencing it all the time. Of course, we were recruiting tech savvy people, so there was some sort of bias in kind of the profiles we were looking at. But at the same time, the chat with AI mental model was already something that we could identify and deconstruct and it was there. And so we were, the users mental models and psychology and expectations was evolving very quickly. And then the company strategy and we were also acquiring a lot of companies. So wizard was acquired while I was there, Cardinal was acquired while I was there. In the meantime, they also acquired Butter. And so a lot of moving parts apart from the ambiguity of AI in general.
- [12:10]
Rid
Can we talk about the learning piece really quickly? Like were there specific experiments or lessons that added clarity in the midst of all this ambiguity?
- [12:19]
Ioana Teleanu
Miro has a great product culture and the design and product team is very talented and they operate by very high standards. And so they were already launching things with a very clear framework in like nothing was random or not non intentional. So we were in a way plugging ourselves into this internal culture that was already there, which was a culture of experimentation and a culture of informed decisions and clear hypothesis. I really think that there's this kind of trend of oh my God, now AI can do that, let's do it. But it's obviously the wrong way to think about it. And so what I always did was kind of bring people back to the real pain points to the existing pain Points that we learned from research that people have when they spend time in Miro and then try to see if there are opportunities for addressing those specific pain points. So accelerators were a very good example of addressing those real pain points. People come to a white canvas and then they're like, what do I do here? Like, where do I start? I mean, I have an idea of where I want to get and what I like, what my goal is for today, but then how do I make it? How do I start? What's my first step? Or I'm now in a point where I have a bunch of data in different formats, it's unstructured, it's raw, it's like some things are stickies, there's docs, there's images, there's screenshots. How do I make sense of all this data? And then there's a moment of adversity and like a moment where the user feels defeated by their next step and then AI could come in and facilitate that next jump and kind of guide the user. I always try to connect everything to the pain points and then transform the combination of AI addressing that pain point into a hypothesis that we could test. And sometimes it didn't really move the needle, whatever that means. I think that many AI professionals have the same internal conflict or moral conundrum, which is how do you measure good AI? How do you measure the success of an AI?
- [14:22]
Rid
That was going to be my next question to you.
- [14:25]
Ioana Teleanu
I had a lot of challenges working in such an open ended and dynamic space. And with clipboard AI I had similar challenges as well. With clipboard AI it was much easier to measure because it was like people really hated to copy one field at a time and paste it into a form, one field at a time. It's manual, it's tedious, it's horrible. And just copying the entire, I don't know, passport and then pasting it into your check in form was obviously a successful thing and helpful and so on. But in the context of Miro, at some point in my journey I realized what should be our metrics, what are we optimizing for? Like if people start using more AI in the context of Miro, is that necessarily a good thing? Doesn't it mean that a product that should be very straightforward and based on these foundational blocks, elements that people come and play around with and they tap into their thinking and creativity and so it's very much a, let's say, human and collaboration effort and it could go anyway and you want to keep that open endedness and maybe I put you on a particular path and you lose that open endedness and you lose some parts of your imagination. And so if people use more AI in the context of Miro, is that necessarily a good thing? And I don't have an answer really. Using more AI isn't necessarily a sign of a successful strategy. So in a way, yes, it means that the things you're doing with AI have value. But at the same time, some products should be straightforward enough and well built enough that they don't need these kinds of. Yeah, the accelerator, right. Maybe that's not something that you need in there. Maybe you just want people to go through the grunt work of thinking. We've seen the studies where people are using a lot of AI and now they're externalizing thinking, even sometimes basic thinking. I do it myself. So I'm like sometimes I refuse. I'm so lazy that I just ask the most basic questions on ChatGPT and so. But is that the right thing to incentivize as a designer when you're making design decisions? So yeah, I don't know.
- [16:30]
Rid
And I think it gets at some of the challenges that you are facing with a very open ended product with Miro, you know, where it's like if there's a very, very clear job to be done and it's easy for me as the designer to imagine what the defined end goal is, then yeah, sure, it's like I can measure the time to that end goal and if AI as an accelerator can, can streamline that, great, that's a fantastic use case. But the less clear that end goal becomes, the more it's like, okay, like are we making things better? Are we creating new types of crutches? Are we actually boxing people in Even I'm sure is something that you were dealing with when the tool itself is so open ended and allows for such a level of creativity.
- [17:14]
Ioana Teleanu
Let's take a look. Sticky notes, for example, right? So after a workshop or a collaboration effort or you're running an interview and then there are a lot of sticky notes with different insights. If you synthesize them with AI, isn't the point of a sticky note and a collaboration exercise to go together through all of them, read the nuances, find like sometimes you defeat the purpose of a whiteboard where we come together to collaborate. If you're over focusing on efficiency, too much efficiency. Right. Defeats the purpose of collaboration and kind of that, yeah, even ambiguity that comes along with collaboration and getting stuck and then someone asks a question and maybe you want to keep that untouched. Right. So the point of a sticky note with a research insight on it is for a person to read it and think about the research insight that's there. Right. So you see something and you reflect on it and you decide if it's valuable or not. And so, of course, you can really train AI very well to decide that for you. But in a way, I feel it defeats the purpose of. Yeah, just operating with research insights and synthesizing and playing around with these ideas.
- [18:24]
Rid
I want to return back to something else that you said, which is you were talking about, like, the specific words and how you had to place a little bit more emphasis on that. Why do you think that language becomes more important when you're designing for AI products?
- [18:37]
Ioana Teleanu
I think for me, it had to do a lot with the ambiguity and then trying to ground into something that AI does. Like, how do you define the way in which AI is helpful? And for me, verbs became kind of that. So AI can accelerate, AI can transform, AI can create. But does AI create or do you create with AI? But for me, it was kind of like trying to put some structure into all these kinds of possibilities. And the verbiage route kind of put me into six kinds of things that you can do with AI. Edit and then evolve and improve or evolve and. Yeah, just transform completely into a new visual structure. It kind of helped me kind of clean up my thinking, if you want, but then also be able to communicate this in a way that everybody understood it. So when you talk about AI possibilities, it's sometimes it's very granular. So. Right. AI can, I don't know, add one thing in an image, or it can label stuff, or it can. Can do so many things. Right. And so you can't build. Like, when you. When you articulate a vis, that's encompassing a lot of things and a lot of possibilities. You have to go higher on the abstraction ladder and trying to find words that are encompassing but still mean something. Right.
- [19:55]
Rid
So I want to have you put on your consultant hat for a little bit and abstract this from Miro just a little bit. So let's imagine that you're brought on to help an existing product integrate AI. What are some of the ways that this experience at Miro would influence the way that you would identify opportunities in this other product?
- [20:15]
Ioana Teleanu
It's a very interesting angle, right, Because I thought you were gonna ask me, what's your process as a consultant? But your question is, how did Miro inform your process as a consultant? And it's. It's really interesting because of the ambiguity and open endedness and just being in the middle of a super interesting and fun and loved product in the middle of this AI revolution, I kind of got an understanding of the pressure that companies face, especially if they have a good product. I feel like AI is much easier to get and integrate and use and surface for companies that had a product with a lot of problems to fix or like didn't really have something to lose. Right. But when you have a product that's loved by people, people love Miro. When for my entire time at Miro, when I gave talks at south by or whatever, I was going around the world, people were like, oh my God, you work at Miro. I love Miro so much. And so it's a product that kind of makes people come up to you and tell you stories about how they designed their baby's room and the wedding party and I don't know what in Miro. Right. So it's really a tool that people connect with emotionally and so you don't want to break that experience. So I can break it, really. AI can make a good experience into something that feels widgety and like it's just adding sparkles everywhere in a pointless, mindless way. And you. The pressure is very high for these kinds of companies, I feel. And I was in a way lucky or at least privileged because I got a very deep experience of the battle, the internal identity, in a way crisis. It was an internal do we want to do this? Should we do this? Are we missing out on the future and how do we do it without breaking the product? And I feel that extrapolating from this and everything I've learned and experienced firsthand as the designer for AI, I feel many companies kind of have good experiences now, but they still feel like they need to experiment with AI, operate with AI, bring AI in some way, maybe in their internal processes, which is part of the consulting work I'm doing as well, Figuring out how you can apply AI internally, but also how do you surface AI in your product without making it a crappy experience or something that feels just thrown there so you can have AI. I have a lot of empathy and a lot of understanding for this kind of tension between wanting to progress and wanting to embrace new technologies and wanting to not necessarily be left behind in that kind of formal pressure like mindset, but just evolve, like evolve along with technology, like embrace the revolution or whatever we want to call this and be part of it and use it in a mindful, relevant, meaningful way. So these companies really have the best Intentions, but then they also get stuck when it comes to, okay, what now we want that, where do we get started? And so in Miro, we also kind of experimented that in some ways, right. We wanted to build a more meaningful experience for our users with AI. But then now what? How do we start? And we had to figure it out. There was no framework. Now I have a framework. Right. I've been through that process once. I have a lot more clarity on how to get started. When you're mapping out the possibilities that AI is presenting us with, that's also a big effort. Right. AI can do a lot of things. So I personally, in the workshops I've been running, I have this very big list of small cards in Miro with what AI can do in different categories, like generate or synthesize or label stuff. Yeah, all the things that AI forecasts and so on. And so we can play around with these kind of elements that we know AI can do well and then match them on the pain points. But there's also kind of a need for a deeper technical assessment. And this is why my agency would not work without a very strong technical partner in it. Because a lot of it is just technical knowledge and not technical knowledge, because nobody knows all the possibilities that AI can have, but technical research, if you want. So at some point, what you end up with is this kind of intention in a way, or let's say a problem statement for AI at the end of this exercise. And you might have a feel for it. Like this is where people have to put in their data. So we might bring it with AI, I don't know. Or they have to write a bio in their onboarding process and we can generate it with AI. So it's generation, it's bly, it's. And. But then what? So if you really want to bring that vision to life, you need a very strong technical partner that doesn't come up with the answers. Because they have spent 100 years working in AI, but they have the capacity to run proper research in how to apply that and work with the technical teams and work with the internal teams in those companies. If you're just coming up with fantastical things that AI can do and then nobody can really build them, what are you doing? Are you helping anyone, really? So those things need to be feasible and they need to turn into a plan that can map on the roadmap and then plug it in the roadmap. Otherwise it's just design theater. Right. We don't want another design thinking innovation theater. And companies and Other like kind of McKinsey doing things where you feel like you're innovating, but then they translate into absolutely nothing. I gave this workshop at a conference in Berlin a couple of weeks ago and I was kind of like, how can I be in a room with 120 designers, each of them with their own problem and problem space and product and team and background, and how do I build a process that feels valuable for such a diverse group? Right. Because I can't work one on one with all of them. And I might have some breaks where I'm telling them, look, come up to me and let's do this thing together. And that happened during the workshop, but also it had to be like, flexible enough. Prerequisite for this workshop was to have your laptop with you because we were working in Miro and not everybody had it because not everybody read their email from the conference organizer. But so this one person, at some point when we're doing a break from the workshop, he stands up and he comes at me and he says, I don't have my laptop with me, but this is so valuable. I made three connections. You really helped me connect the dots. And I was like, what? I'm trying to get with this, for me, that kind of made my day, obviously. And then a lot of people came up with the feedback. It's very actionable, it's super useful. I know exactly what to do with these things. Tomorrow when I go in my team and I'm like, so the, the thing here is just helping people think differently about their problems, what facilitation has always meant. But in the context of AI, I think many people are already thinking about those possibilities because you're in that problem space deeply, you know it very well, and you can see what AI can do just by scrolling through your LinkedIn feed. Right? So many people come up with, with AI, use cases and tools they're experimenting with and so on. So they kind of know, but they don't trust themselves because everything. I have trouble trusting myself and this is what I do for a living. Right.
- [27:22]
Rid
Are there examples that we could kind of compare and contrast where maybe a team that you're working with, or maybe it's Miro or you're where you feel like, yeah, we were able to use AI to reimagine a certain flow or area of the product and it actually works. And like, I can point to that and say that was an effective implementation of AI, whereas over here, you know, maybe it's something you've even noticed in the industry. Where it's like, ah, that feels a little bit more like AI for AI's sake. And are there examples we can point to to kind of understand where it makes sense versus where there's this temptation to just kind of slap it on because you feel that pressure as a.
- [28:01]
Ioana Teleanu
Company, recently I've realized that I've been using WhatsApp and my entire life, and now they have this new thing where when you're searching for something which is either a person or a conversation with a keyword, what it does is there's a field that says ask AI to search or whatever. And I'm okay with AI powered search, although I'm also a bit annoyed by the Chrome experience of it generates an answer with AI now. And most of the times it's not very accurate. And so it's trying to that thing that the search interface of the future will do, right? So give you a very custom, just in time answer to your problem, but it's not there yet. And for WhatsApp, it was the most ridiculous thing I've seen. Like, it just gives you suggestions of things that I don't even understand in what format they would be produced. So examples would be create a candy dress. Imagine a candy dress, or give me barbecue playlist ideas or gener generate sci fi movie names. And it was like the most useless thing I've seen in the AI space in the past couple of years. Like people with a very clear goal and user task and the scenario is clear, you're either searching for a person or you're searching for a conversation. And then you get these suggestions that I, I clicked on them to see what would they even translate into. And they send you on Instagram. They're like they're trying to connect their platform, but in a way that feels just ridiculous. Like you don't even have to run research to understand that that field will feel like AI for the sake of AI, because it doesn't solve any friction point. And then on the other side of the spectrum, I loved, for example, Loom. When they launched our AI experience. It was just useful. It felt like, yes, creating chapters with proper titles. The title of the video was generated in a way that felt good too. On point. It worked well. It was like a small thing to win. They didn't want to revolutionize or change the experience too much, but kind of speak to very tangible friction points that people might have had, like editing, splitting, spending. There was a lot of effort that would have gone into that manually. And they did it in a very nice, almost Invisible way. And that's what prompted me to talk about invisible AI, which is, I think what AI should eventually be like, just this kind of thing that doesn't say, I'm AI, I have sparkles on me, so I'm probably experimental and will return weird results and outcomes. But something that is invisible, smooth, kind of embedded in the experience is just a different way of solving problems.
- [30:59]
Rid
I like those examples because it does kind of put your finger on this tension that I think a lot of teams feel. Where on one hand it's like, okay, what are all of the workflows happening today? And how can AI accelerate those? And then there's this other pull where it's like, okay, but we have all this other new capability and users are never going to ask for this, but it's in theory, amazing. And how can we tease that and introduce some of that? And I'm sure there are times where AI has been introduced to something that wasn't already happening, where the user's like, whoa, I didn't even think about this. This is really great. This helps me achieve X. But that's where it starts to get so much more difficult, is when you stray from the existing user paths and try to introduce things that kind of do fill out in left field a little bit.
- [31:48]
Ioana Teleanu
If I extract the themes from, from these two examples, it's like connection to friction point and lack of connection to friction point, like, all the time. I think it all comes back to, does it really solve a problem? And I hate to talk in cliches like, but it's the reality of these times. I feel that we've seen a lot of products just do technology for the sake of technology in a way that's also necessary. Like, that's research, right? That's technological research. We need to have that as well. But when you have a product that solves clear scenarios, has a clear scope, has a clear way in which people interact with it, you don't want to mess that up. You're not in the position to run technological research at WhatsApp. I think it has to do with the market pressure. I've talked to many companies that say, look, investors really demand that we have AI, and our companies that say, our leadership wants AI. And my CEO came up to me and said that you have to do something with AI, find a way. So we can also have AI in our product, so we can communicate it in our next marketing event or communicate it to investors, or there is a pressure. I recognize it and I feel for these companies, it's Hard to operate in this world where like most of the problem spaces that companies are solving for are challenged right now. So I, I don't know one company that isn't worried that some new tool may sometimes completely out of their problem space might attack them like become a direct competitor. Right. And design tools, you see that a lot. So Figma is threatened by so many tools like lovable framer. Everybody's trying to become everybody else in a way, like converge towards this unique, absolute tool that offers everything in one place. And I think it's the same for other industries as well. The only way to win this if you're, is if you're really providing value and you actually decrease your chances of being successful when you add random AI in your, in your product.
- [33:55]
Rid
There's a lot of different themes going on that I want to kind of just zoom out and get your perspective on. On one hand, I do think you're hitting on an interesting point which is, you know, I talk to a lot of people that work at these foundational companies, you know, the runways of the world, Anthropic, where there is this common theme that's coming up where it's like, hey, yeah, we're working from user problems, but also we have to respond to these new capabilities because we have to be the ones that push these new frontiers forward. And I think that your perspective is one that I'm glad to have on the show, which is, yeah, and the thing to point out with these teams is like those also are kind of research companies. Like there is a real AI research element to those product orgs where the majority of teams don't live in that scenario where it's tempting to stray away from friction points and user problems and existing journeys and jobs to be done and that kind of a thing. So that's one thing that is interesting. And then you're also talking about this convergence of tooling. And that's another theme that I've kind of still just been developing my thoughts on a little bit where if everyone integrates AI, then AI can do so many things. Do we have this broadening of product surface area? And the specific example my head right now is Canva, how they introduced effectively like the V0 or lovable feature. And it feels like everyone's doing that. And now you have the leak that Figma is doing that and it's kind of this like, well, were people really asking for that at Canva or was it just this? Well, it's possible. So we have to continue to expand and I think that's like such an interesting example of this pressure that companies are feeling. And we'll see if it ends up being a good strategy. But regardless of what industry you're in, everyone's kind of feeling that tension right now.
- [35:47]
Ioana Teleanu
Sometimes maybe you just need to pay for that experiment. Like, it's a very. It's a very expensive experiment, but you need, like. I'm extrapolating from my mirror experience now. We were running experiments, but they were like adding, writing, editing with AI, Your small writing experiments in mirror. Or, I don't know, generating an image or generating a diagram with AI, Right. So they were, of course, a cost as well, but they were in, like, these really large transformational bets. And maybe companies, in a way, pay for the experiment. Like pay for the knowledge that. Or the knowledge on one hand, but also like the missed, potentially missed opportunity. So maybe they really can't afford to not try those things because. Because of the ambiguity of the space and like, how the mental models are changing, maybe they just, just. Maybe it's the right thing to do now, I don't know because I'm not in the position to make these very large decisions for companies, but I feel that this could be something like, look, we're gonna spend a million trying this thing, and we accept that it might be completely useless, but we really need to break the barriers, break the frontier, try to move beyond our current scope. Right? There was this mantra, grow, lead, expand. Like, maybe now everybody's just trying to expand and then see the classic example of throwing spaghetti on the wall. Maybe this is what everyone is supposed to do in a way, right? Like, what's your best strategy now? Do you just sit and wait? Are you mindful and meaningful like I'm advocating here? Or do you just mindlessly do things and accept that risk because the risk of getting eaten up is higher? And so, yeah, I don't know. This is a question. I don't have answers here. My bet here is still on mindful, meaningful, and so on, but speedy. Like, have some speed. Do something. Because if you don't do anything, you're definitely going backwards. So that's not maintaining the status quo. You're. You're getting left behind, whatever that means.
- [37:56]
Rid
I'm a big believer in the power of video to explain my thinking as a designer. So when it's time to get feedback, I'll drop a loom link and slack and another link to a Figma prototype, and feedback will be scattered everywhere. And I mean, it's a mess. So I'm building the product that I've always wanted to exist. And it's called inflight. You can kind of think of it like an async crit. It's an easy way to share a video walkthrough along with an interactive prototype or whatever you're designing. And then AI interviews the people on your team to get you the feedback that you need and organizes everything for you in a beautiful insights page. So right now I'm only giving access to dive club listeners. So if you want to be one of the first to use inflight, head to dive, dot club, slash, inflight to claim your spot. This feeling of not wanting to be left behind, you know, we're talking about it from a company landscape perspective, but I think a lot of individuals feel that as well. So maybe we could even turn the conversation towards, like, how the individual practice of design is going to involve. And I know you're thinking about this from a lot of different angles. So what are some of the ways that you anticipate the value proposition of design will shift in this world where more and more teams and individuals are adopting AI as a core part of the product and also the practice of design?
- [39:15]
Ioana Teleanu
Yeah, well, I have a theory. There's a lot of conversation in the industry now around taste as the differentiator. So the thing that will save you is to have taste. And I believe that. I really stand by that as well. I feel that, that we will all be technically capable of producing beauty in a much easier way. So the cost of beauty will be as low as it ever was. But then how do you define beauty? How do you understand? And when I say beauty, I don't mean necessarily pretty ui, I mean just a beautiful experience. And of course there is the visual component in that, but it's also like, it feels right and it's useful. And so I mean beauty in the very large scope of the this word. And I think taste will be very important for designers. But also I'm pretty confident that our role will converge with product management and at some point even. And it's happening already with engineering. And many people talk about the rise of the design engineer. Google is hiring for design engineers. So it's happening already, but I think that in 10 years from now, we will have this kind of one person that can build and maybe the title will be builder or architect or strategist or thinker. I think the barrier of going from a problem to unpacking that problem to solutioning and then bringing those solutions to life, learning, building and so on, I think it's Going to be the tooling will be so easy to use and so capable that really what will you need as a designer is a very strong critical thinking and just in a way a product mind, which is what does product mean? But I think design and product can mean the same thing if you look at it from a different angle. And in a way they did mean the same thing. Right. So. And because we were also always concerned with making sense within the larger business goals of a company, and then we were always also concerned at the end of the, let's imagine the best design possible with feasibility and how do we adjust that design with the technological limitations and constraints and so on. So we were doing in a way, product. I think what is, why do we keep differentiating between design and product? And in a way, they're the same thing. They optimize for an experience. They build experiences that make sense, that are relevant, necessary, wanted, pleasurable. Right. So I think that the lines will blur very quickly between these roles. And so what will change for us? We'll move closer into actually building, leading that building as well, getting involved with prompting interfaces to build whatever solution we come up with. And what does it mean for product or what does it mean for engineers? I think they also have to become designers and we have to be become engineer. So again, my bet is that we will see this one big tech role, which is the creator, if you want. Maybe this is the best name possible.
- [42:28]
Rid
I kind of like that. Actually, I haven't, I haven't thought about that specific word before because in a sense, that is what it is. You're designing it, you're executing at least the front end of how this operates and what it feels like to the user. And anybody can have ideas and anybody could build them in theory.
- [42:49]
Ioana Teleanu
So then your keyword here, at least the front end, this is a very important mention. Right. So for complex products, let's take My past employer, UiPath, they're doing robotic process automation for companies with like 11,000 employees. Like, of course a designer will not build a solution that I'm in a lovable prototype. Yeah, exactly. That's never going to fly. So I'm not, I don't want to minimize is what the engineers and like, of course, that's very complex work and the level of complexity will, will remain. But in terms of thinking, I mean in terms of what is the thing that we're producing with our mind, I think it's in a way converging. We, we will also think more about technological possibilities now that the AI world is becoming more disambiguated to us. And again, product and design, I think they're in a way slowly merging. And yeah, it doesn't fly for complex products and complex orgs, of course, but for like a weekend project. We've seen so many medium articles of people who have launched their app over a weekend with cursor or replit or. Right. And it's happening for smaller scope projects. We can definitely put on all those hats stats as designers now. So now maybe not that much, but in the future we're going to get there.
- [44:10]
Rid
I want to make this practical for someone who's listening, who believes in theory, everything that you were saying, but doesn't want to just sit around and wait for that future to come and is actively looking for strategies that they can use to invest into that future. I think there's kind of two things that we've been talking about. One is the more technical side. I think the next steps there are a little bit more clear like, like anybody can go to lovable and just build a thing immediately after this episode ends. What about on the product side though? Anything come to mind in order that a designer can do in order to invest into that future version of themselves where theoretically they might be wearing a lot more of the product hat than they are today?
- [44:51]
Ioana Teleanu
Yeah, that's a very interesting question. And if you remember, I don't know if you noticed that trend. It was a just a little while before OpenAI launched ChatGPT and the entire AI frenzy emerged because of course AI was around for a long time. But it became a huge conversation along with ChatGPT and it's amazing adoption story and so on. But before that, right before that there was an ongoing conversation in the design industry about how if you want to elevate as a senior designer, the next thing, the next barrier of senior designers is, is business thinking, understanding business, the business acumen, the vocabulary. And I feel that we kind of missed on really expanding fully on that conversation. And now everybody's talking about you should learn AI and like that's how you grow. Not necessarily. I still feel that if you want to become a more like product person, you really need to understand those business elements as well. Like I think this is the next step step for a designer if they want to become more product. Right. Understand, I don't know, maybe P L like understand how business decisions are made. Like what are your stakeholders? What's the strategy of a company? How does that strategy closely relate to design decisions? What are the objectives? What are the relationships within that system and just understand more business like what's the go to market strategy? How does it, does that reflect back on design decisions? What are our growth plans? What are our growth experiments? What's the marketing for this product and how does that again work with product marketing or the marketing team to kind of build a more seamless experience between the product and the product design and then the other ways in which this product is being taken out there in the world. Right. Born in the world. So, so I feel that if you expand your perspective, that's the first step to going closer to what product is in a way supposed to do. Right. So product sits at the intersection of all these disciplines and all these kind of cross functional teams and try to align everything. And as designers we also should get involved with many of those parts, even with like development. Okay, the product manager is the one who makes sure that things get implemented. But designers should be at that table as well. Obviously we're doing it, we have been doing it and we should, should do it. We continue to do it. But that's one example. How about going into marketing meetings or conversations which of course like you have 24 hours in a day and eight hours to work on. You can't really be everywhere and do everything and then what do you design? I totally understand that, but I think that's an opportunity for growing, broadening your scope and your understanding or systems thinking, mapping the system in which your map, you're making these design decisions and then trying to connect them deeper with the rest of the parts of the system, which might sound very abstract, but it's in reality it's not that much. It's just probably having a bunch of conversations with people outside of your close circle, outside of your triad, product engineering, design, and then moving beyond your triad to people in business or people, whatever that is in your company and people in marketing or growth or whatever and, and getting a grasp of what's going on in there. And then is there any way in which you as a designer can optimize, can factor that in your design decisions while of course still optimizing for the user. But is there a synergy or an opportunity in these worlds? And so I think that means going closer to product. And I don't know, I'm not sure about frameworks or explore templates for writing PRDs and I'm not sure about that. I think those will also are subject to change in the next couple of years the way we do product. But I feel really just moving closer to the company vision and leadership and the way, like, who's setting that direction and how can you bridge that and inform them better? Right. I feel that one of the biggest problems is that many companies and designers and product teams, and I've seen it again, again in my career, we wait for leadership to tell us, us, what's the strategy, where's the vision, where are we going? But they have no clue many times. And it's very hard when you're, like, leading. You're the cbo. And so that's a place where you can really make an impact as a designer. When you spot opportunities in the product, when you go beyond your. I'm gonna fix this usability problem here, or I know a pain point. We can like going deeper into, like, even business opportunities look, what if we explore, I don't know what completely new area in our product and so really have that agency. And of course, I'm now talk about probably things that a principal designer would be. You have to be at a certain level and you're. It's hard as a junior to spot these really large business opportunities, but once you're in your seniorship and you're like, at principal level, you're expected to make an impact on the company strategy and like on. On that level of influencing people and influencing stakeholders and. And steering the product in one direction or another so that. That's what you will do anyway, evolving as a designer. And I think we can do more of that. And I think one of the problems, one of the reasons for which we're not doing that enough is that we in a way wait for permission. In a way, the system doesn't empower us. So for many years, like, our problems a couple of years ago was that people called us at the end of the process when everything was decided, the solution was decided, and like, just make a screen here, sprinkle ui. And we had all those jokes and memes and so on. So we're going from that. That to like, kind of influencing the product. It's. It's a high ask for everyone. I understand. Like, we weren't even called in conversations. We. We were just seen as the pixel pushers and so on.
- [50:43]
Rid
I want to speak to another very specific listener right now who's listening to your talk. And they're like, yeah, I was. I was already planning on doing that more traditional principal path. I wanted to grow my product muscles, learn more about business. And. And I'm experiencing AI fatigue already and maybe even a little bit skeptical where it's like, the question I'm asking myself Is, do I even have to think about this stuff? Like, do I have to invest in keeping up to date with AI at all? Or is this just a little bubble and if I keep focused on the traditional principle path that I already had set in front of me, I'll be fine. Any advice for that person?
- [51:21]
Ioana Teleanu
Yeah, I have. I, I feel you. My advice is I totally, I am you. I feel that a lot. I feel afraid, fatigue, I feel I'm drained. I, I, I was in some sort of burnout because my career really accelerated in this AI space. And I built the AI for Designers course on Interaction Design foundation. And I'm doing a lot of educational things, talks, traveling, blah jobs, consultancy things. And so I also, I, I feel I was burned out by AI and all the hype and all the kind of the, like the, my own internal pressure and rage to not be left behind. I have this opportunity now. I have to take it. And so I really resonate with that kind of drain in a way. Exhaustion on, on everybody's writing. Like I'm tired. Sometimes I feel this really deep guilt when I'm posting something about AI on LinkedIn because it's like the 1000 posts about AI that will go on on my feed in that day, right? So there is a lot of content about it and everybody's trying to kind of be part of this or at least seem to be part of this. And yeah, it's, it's a weird, very weird space. My bet is that we will normalize this concept hopefully very soon. Like, I think that in a couple of years we won't need to talk about AI so much because it's just there. It's one of the other technological things we do, we use. I think the appetite is now very high because there's a mixture, like at a society level, there's a mixture of fear, excitement. Yeah, just anxiety, curiosity, energy, drain at the same time. So it's a very mixed combination of elements that kind of pushes into CRE and also that kind of. I don't want to miss out on whatever this train is. I'm not sure what it is, but I want to be part of it. I think we've seen it with design theory and design thinking and tech in general. Like mobile first, first there were so many UX versus ui. And so like this is just bigger. The scope is bigger because it touches on more people than just UI or UX designers or the design industry. This is beyond anything we've ever experienced in terms of scope. But at some point we will Exhaust all topics and things to say. Like, we can, we're all tired of something that I also said in my course and sometimes it's attributed to me, like, AI won't replace you. A person using AI will. And when I said it, it was, it was like three years ago. It felt like that's a very interesting angle. And now it's just, I'm. I can't stand it anymore. I see it everywhere.
- [54:03]
Rid
LinkedIn post now, I swear.
- [54:05]
Ioana Teleanu
And like in two years from now, you're going to just be probably taken down by your audience if you say that. So like, I think it will kind of normalize in a way. We can't keep saying the same things and observations and wow, lovable is great. You can now build things. Okay, you say in one strike twice. It's a couple of months and then we have to move on. So hopefully we will move on from this AI hype and we will not have to mention so much that something is AI, that this is what AI does that, like, maybe we will talk more about experiences like, look, I just created something and we don't have to say I created something with AI, I created this. And this was the process and this is how I felt and this is what were the limitations or the friction points or what I would do different or what I've learned. And so it doesn't have to be so explicit in everything, like not every caption. And of course, again, I'm guilty of that. But now I'm an AI consultant, so I have to talk about AI. We have to stop at some point because it's becoming untenable for a person who is looking to navigate this, I think pick a couple of people that you trust, pick six, 10 people that you trust and just, just cut out all the other noise. Like with 10 people who are proficiently doing AI and design or whatever, you can really stay up to date as much as you need. There is no being up to date. And in terms of this kind of internal conundrum, should I start exploring these tools or should I just stick to my conventional process and things will organically evolve and I don't have to do something intentionally and stress over. I'm not sure about that, that I'm personally the kind of person who doesn't jump on new things. Like, I'm pretty change adverse, I'm resistant, I'm mostly doubting things instead of trusting new things. And I said, you know what, I'm not going to stress over what all these new tools can do every day. Even Though this is the space I'm in, I'm just going to go and experiment. Whatever. I'm attracted to what feels interesting. Like just let it flow and let it be something fluid and natural and not, not planned and forced. And now I realize that you really need to play with these technologies and I hate to say it, I really feel that we're creating the future. And like, as an industry and maybe the result of you exploring lovable won't mean anything other than you learning where technology is heading earlier than other people. And that's a win in a way. But also what I've been trying to say in my talks is that I think, I feel we have a moral duty to experiment with these technologies because we're designers and we should be curious about the world and we should be curious about the future. And not just that, but we can also make an impact if the collective speech of designers is pointing towards important themes or important fears or the ethical conversation that comes with this new world of possibilities. If we're in this space, we're contributing to shaping it and everybody feels like, yeah, what am I contributing really? I'm gonna just post something and I'm gonna get two likes. And how is that contributing? But like, just think of the scale, like it adds up if everybody comes up and says the right thing. It pressures companies, it pressures leadership, it pressures people that are in important positions in design and product companies. Like, we really have an opportunity and I think again, a moral duty, some sort of responsibility, I guess, to try to participate. Of course not the expense of our mental health and our own well being and catering to our families and so on. I'm saying you're burned out. I don't know, I don't care. Just try lovable. Go, go experiment with replit or cursor or whatever. No, but as much as you can, you are a contributor to the future.
- [58:08]
Rid
I appreciate that coming from you specifically because it's really easy to invite people on here who are working on a startup and chronic early adopters and yeah, it's noteworthy hearing those things, but then having the kind of the opposite perspective in many ways where it's like, hey, you said it yourself, default skeptical. I'm not going to immediately assume that I should invest time into these tools and yet to still arrive at that conclusion of like, you know what? This is a critical time. It's a critical time of being a designer and we're shaping the industry, we're shaping the future of our role. We're shaping what our day to day Looks like years from now, not to put pressure on people, but, like, yeah, that's a real thing, you know?
- [58:51]
Ioana Teleanu
Yeah, I feel that again, it's very much. People are discouraged by this feeling that it's pointless, it's meaningless, it's just one drop in an ocean. But that's what everything is in a way, right? That's how we build principles and structures and philosophies and even, I don't know, arts trends and so on. So we can. We really, when we come together, we have power.
- [59:15]
Rid
Well, we've covered a lot of ground. So before I let you go, is there anything else that we haven't touched on? Anything that you were kind of thinking about lately or random lessons from Miro that you want to leave people with before we head out?
- [59:29]
Ioana Teleanu
For me, it was very hard to give up on my identity as an employee. I always felt like, I don't know, I'm coming from Eastern Europe. We were part of the communist bloc. We had a lot of. You get a job at 20, and then you have that job until you're 65, and that's your life, one job. And so I was. I grew up in this mentality that you need a job, you need that. And even when I, like, I left My first employer, ING Bank, I worked in a bank for 10 years or something. After I left it for after 10 years, it was like. Like so much guilt and anxiety and like, it was horrible. It's really different from the American culture where you're encouraged to kind of switch your job a couple of years into. Into your career and so on. So here we're not like that. And so for me, redefining my identity as someone who is not under the umbrella of a big, sexy brand in. In tech was very difficult. And now that I'm reflecting a couple of months into it on how that felt, of course there was a lot of anxiety and personal. Yeah, just turmoil. And I realized that it was an important part of this age, if that makes sense. So the last message I want to leave people with is that we're all redefining ourselves in a way. So if anybody feels like they're having an existential crisis, will my world exist? Exist? Will design still be here in five years? I'm a UI designer. Am I going to get replaced? And all those questions. Right? So I think we're collectively in an identity crisis. And I've experienced it firsthand, individually, in, of course, my very concrete scenario, going on my own. But I feel that it speaks in a way, I think it's quintessential for the entire industry. Now our roles are getting redefined. We're all in the middle of an identity crisis. Everyone on a different degree. It's a gradient, but I think we're all experiencing it in some level. We all feel anxiety around what our roles will become. Although I still have a place, many people decide to exit tech completely. I have a lot of friends who are fantasizing about becoming farmers, opening a small boutique shop for I don't know what hobby they have. And so there's a lot of change. There's a shift. There's, again, an identity crisis, both individually and collectively. And the last thing that I want to say is that many people come up to me and tell me, you have everything together. Have it. You're always. You seem to have clarity and direction. And I'm like, it's really interesting how social media kind of transforms your. I wouldn't say Persona, because it's not. I don't control it. I don't aim to be. To seem like I have my stuff together, but I don't. And that's what I want to tell everyone. Just embrace this technological change shift, like this new age we're all moving towards with anxiety and ambiguity and. And a lot of questions and noise and drain and burnout and like, it. It really feels like we're in this together. And I don't know if anybody feels like I'm not yet an AI designer. Will I ever be? How do I not lose this opportunity? I don't even feel that the AI design role will exist, like, in this explicit format in a couple of years. All the designers will be AI designers. Right. We're all going to be thinking about some sort of AI angle in. In the way we do our work. So I don't know. I just want to tell you that we're in a very weird moment in the design history. And I think it will be okay in the end, but we have to embrace it and be flexible. I think open in a way, fluid.
- [63:12]
Rid
Well, I appreciate you putting words to these emotions that a lot of people are feeling right now. So just coming on here and saying, you know what, I'm maybe on some semblance of a pedestal right now, but I still feel that. I think that's really impactful. So I appreciate you sharing that and honestly just taking the time to come on today, pull back the curtain, explain a little bit about the story, some of the challenges, how you think about these different opportunities. It was super valuable. So thanks for coming on thank you.
- [63:39]
Ioana Teleanu
So much for having me.
- [63:40]
Rid
Before I let you go, I want to take just one minute to run you through my favorite products because I'm kind of constantly asked what's in my stack. Framer is how I build websites, Genway is how I do research, Granola is how I take notes during crit Jitter is how I animate my designs, Lovable is how I build my ideas in code, Mobin is how I find design inspiration. Paper is how I design like a creative and Raycast is my shortcut every step of the way. Now, I've hand selected these companies so that I can do these episodes full time. So by far the number one way to support the show is to check them out. You can find the full list at Dive Club Partners.