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Insights Unlocked
AI made design faster. Now leaders need to make it better.
00:40:36
Figma’s Pedro Hernandez explores AI in design leadership, balancing speed with craft, and why human insight still drives great UX.
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- [00:02]
Nathan Isaacs
Welcome back to Insights Unlocked. In this episode, Manu Bartlett sits down with Pedro Hernandez, Advocacy Manager at figma, to explore how AI is reshaping design leadership and creative workflows. Pedro shares why the future of design isn't just about moving faster, but about balancing speed with craft curiosity and customer understanding. They also discuss the evolving role of design leaders and what it takes to build better experiences and in the AI era. Enjoy the show.
- [00:34]
Podcast Narrator
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution.
- [00:53]
Nathan Isaacs
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, Principal Content marketing manager at UserTesting and our host today is Manu Bartlett, Senior Product Researcher here at User Testing. Hello Manu.
- [01:05]
Manu Bartlett
Hi everyone.
- [01:06]
Nathan Isaacs
And our guest today is Pedro Hernandez. Pedro is the Advocacy Manager for EMEA and Latin America at figma, where he partners with design leaders and communities to strengthen product adoption and elevate design best practices across diverse markets. With 15 plus years across UX product design leadership and design Ops, he has helped scale design teams at companies including Datadog, the Fork and Curto. He also contributes to design education and community building. Welcome to the show, Pedro.
- [01:38]
Pedro Hernandez
Hi everyone.
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Manu Bartlett
Pedro, you spent over 15 years across UX product design and design ops and now you're working closely with design leaders and communities across EMEA and latam. Can you share Start by sharing a bit about your journey and what's shaping your perspective on design today.
- [01:57]
Pedro Hernandez
Yeah, so I, I started a long time ago in ux, before there was even in ux. I was studying communications, I was passionate about film editing and film production in general. That was my jam. And I discover front end coding through school projects and from there that gave me my passion and love for everything that is digital. And so I if you can imagine of a title for a person working in design, I've had it. I was a front end designer. I was then a front end engineer, then a webmaster, then I interaction designer, UX designer, product designer and then Design manager, everything. So yeah, I've started in. So I started back in Mexico when I was living there. I'm Mexican born and raised. I started in Mexico in the National Institute of Public Health back at the time. And then I moved to France and I was doing a little bit consulting, working with agencies here until I landed at Criteo where I had the luck of creating my first team from scratch, the UX team. And from there I moved to the fork, or la fourchette in French, where I created another team and worked on both the B2B and B2C side of the fork. To then move to Datadog, working in observability, security, real user monitoring. Those were my major areas. To then move to design ops in datadog itself, because the team grew and I raised my hand to be a design ops manager because I, I'm, I'm. I'm passionate about pro, all the processes and all the idea of helping teams thrive. And then I'm doing that, but for many different companies at figma.
- [04:24]
Manu Bartlett
Very cool. Yeah. I was going to ask you what made you want to move from managing design teams to kind of advocating for designers across entire regions like you do at figma.
- [04:36]
Pedro Hernandez
I had a story of organizing conferences and events here in Paris, but throughout Europe. So when I arrived to Europe, I arrived for the first time to a community where UX was recognized. When I was working in Mexico, I was the only crazy guy talking about UX and quoting Don Norman and Jacob Nielsen and all that crew, and everybody just looked at me like, what the hell are you even talking about? Just do your designs. So when I arrived here and I discovered that community, I just wanted to be part of it. So I started attending all the meetups that I could, all the conferences that I could. From there, I started volunteering at UX Camp Europe in Berlin for maybe five, six years. I volunteered serving coffee or doing whatever, but just to be there. And there was this conference in Europe called Euro ia, or Information Architecture, not Inter. And so I was working with them first as an. I just went there and I loved it so much that I was there every year and at some point I took care of everything, that is finding the sponsors for the conference. So I think community has always been part of what I love. I love connecting with others, being able to help others through just maybe having a conversation that unblocks them. Especially when you're all day in, day out having conversation from work with your colleagues. Sometimes you just need somebody from the outside to come and say, hey, are you guys doing this? Have you tried that? And sometimes that unblocks the whole process. And so I really appreciate that and I love that.
- [06:41]
Manu Bartlett
Yeah, I really like that perspective. And I'm wondering, do you feel like the UX community in Latin America has grown quite a lot since. Since you left, or do you feel like Europe still has a much larger community?
- [06:54]
Pedro Hernandez
No, it has grown a lot now. Now that I. That I. Sorry. Now that I have been in contact with the LATAM community through figma, they are in a very different state. You have to also you have to know that I left Mexico 20 years ago. So in these past 20 years, yeah, they have catch up and in some respects they are even more advanced. For instance, at figma every year we have this state of the designer report that comes out every year. And I was doing the comparison of the data between Europe and LATAM for a live stream that we run. And latam, they have a lot more passion or at least, well, it's self declarative so it's worth what it's worth. Right. But they have a lot more passion for visual design, for interaction design, for motion, everything. That is the beauty of the UIs. Also they are experimenting a lot more with AI than Europe. When I, when I talk to Europeans here, they say, oh, that, that resonates probably because there is not LATAM union, while there is a European Union that has a lot more regulations and how AI should work and all of that. So over there, every country has their own rules and regulations so they can just go crazy, you know, as much as, as you can. And we in latam, we've always had this ask for forgiveness, not permission kind of mentality. So we just go until somebody says stop. And I think that has helped the whole market grow because they have grown through experimentation, through a very regional approach to everything that is designed. Even the other day I was talking to somebody over there who's doing his own thesis, master's thesis on decolonializing design in Latin America and he gave me an example that I love. In Mexico, when you are in a bus, the normal bus to go from point A to point B, there is no little buzzer to say to mark the stop to the driver. So the stop, stop sign. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, the little buzzer to say, hey, this, I'm.
- [09:38]
Manu Bartlett
Yeah, I want to get off, yeah,
- [09:39]
Pedro Hernandez
I want to get off in the next station over there. It never works. So what drivers have been doing is, is taping one of those rubber chickens that you can squeeze and do a weird sound near the back door of the bus and you have. And they actually, when you climb to the bus, they say when you want, just squeeze the chicken. And so you go there and you have to squeeze the chicken to tell the driver that you want to stop. But that is a design decision. It's very conscious, you know, that idea of I'm going to pick a rubber chicken, not a bike, little bell or whatever other, any other artifact that can produce any noise. So I can actually understand that this is specifically for me. So they have all these very different approach to design and so it's a completely different market and I love being able to work again with Latam because of that.
- [10:41]
Manu Bartlett
I bet. Yeah. I love the kind of informal creativity that can grow. Right. And the different kind of ways that you can iterate on designs through that freedom. Totally. And I think it is across ux we often do a lot of kind of. As I am a researcher and focusing research, we do a lot of research in English and I think a lot of the designs like that we get to see end up coming from English speaking countries. So it's really great to hear a different perspective. So thank you. So talking of that, you spend a lot of the time on the ground speaking with design communities across EMEA and Latin America and beyond. What are you consistently hearing from designers and researchers right now? Are there common themes, challenges or even shifts in the mindset that are coming up again and again?
- [11:28]
Pedro Hernandez
Yeah, AI has changed everything. That's short answer. But basically there's a little bit uncertainty in some markets. I think now it's becoming a little bit more stable. People are understanding better the limits and the uses of AI. But there is this whole shift from I'm a designer to I'm a builder, I'm a maker, I'm somebody who's going to go farther than ever beyond. And I think until recently the whole focus of AI was on speed. Many teams were wondering, how can AI help us go faster, produce more. But now there is this shift where teams are caring more about how can I produce better? Not necessarily more, but better. But overall I think the market is very optimistic or the community rather than the market. It's very optimistic. They start to understand their limits and how can they use AI. And I think something that, how can I say this? Something that is interesting to me is how the community kind of auto regulates themselves. Because like I said, there was this wave in, for instance, when you see all the social networks, you saw this wave of, oh, I made my app in five minutes. You know, through AI, I don't need any designer or whatever. But now even the people are reverting their speech and saying, well, I was wrong, I did that app. But that app is the equivalent of drawing on a napkin. So concerning US leaders, design leaders, I think there's also a shift in how leaders approach these. Um, so until now, many design and product leaders were very excited to see, hey, my designer or my PM is building this entire app in one hour, going Very far with all the little details and features, but maybe it's not even the right concept. So now leaders are starting to evaluate more and to understand that maybe that app that seems very complete is just a wireframe, is the equivalent of what we had before as wireframes in the sense that, hey, this took my designer up to one hour to build. So I'm very capable of just throw it away to the trash as I would do with a wireframe. And I think that has also required a shift from leaders, because leaders, like I said before, they saw a full app and they said, okay, the job is done, put it in prod. Now they are learning to say, well, that is a lot of job of work, but that was built by AI. So I'm happy to throw it away and start again because I'm not wasting more than 60 minutes of your time.
- [15:02]
Manu Bartlett
Totally. So kind of the expectations are recalibrating, but the way that you kind of described the community adjusting and getting kind of used to the new reality, but also kind of the new ways of working, I think is really important to pull out. Thank you, Pedro. So now I'd like to talk a little bit about a project that I heard that you launched this year, where you're exploring what leaders are really looking for when it comes to design. Can you tell us a bit more about it? What sparked the idea? What are you learning as you have these conversations?
- [15:37]
Pedro Hernandez
Yeah, so when I joined figma, I noticed that all of our design. So all of our advocates are practitioners. So designer advocates are designers, developer advocates are developers. And most of them haven't been in a position of leadership until they arrive here. They are very good on the IC part, but there are some cases where I'm always wondering, what are leaders thinking about? What do leaders want in design? How does a leader read a Figma file? What are they experiencing when they read it? And so I wanted to approach that through research. I'm a firm believer in research,
- [16:38]
Manu Bartlett
which
- [16:39]
Pedro Hernandez
makes sense for user testing.com podcast. So my whole idea was to go to those leaders and interview them. What are you looking for in design? How are you living the shift of AI? How are you experiencing this whole moment? And how can we at figma also help you? Because it is said it's a common saying that Figma is a tool for designers. But what if it's also a tool for leaders? You know, how can. How can Figma help a leader make a decision? How can they help track decisions? How can. So I really wanted to learn more about what leaders care about because I myself, I used to be the figma admin at Datadog when I was over there. So I myself have had those questions before.
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Manu Bartlett
Yeah, right. I love that you're using a research methodology to work on a design problem. That seems very meta and also very apt. And you know, as a researcher who sometimes, you know, as you said, kind of figma seen as a tool for designers and researchers, we kind of have figjam and we can go into the files and understand it to a certain extent. I think it's really cool that you're thinking about different users for figma and how those leaders can like have a holistic understanding of what goes on inside it. That's very cool. And so as the project evolves, what are you hoping it becomes and what should people in the design space be watching for or expecting next from the project?
- [18:31]
Pedro Hernandez
For now, I don't, I, I want to see it mostly as a repository of knowledge about leaders. That's my first goal. We at figma, we have in parallel, and this has nothing to do with me, this was there before I joined. But we have also this series of events called the Leadership Collectives where we invite leaders. It's not open to everybody, but we invite them and we get together with leaders from the different regions to understand precisely this thing that I'm, that I'm also doing in my research. So my hope is that both projects can feed each other on one side. Whenever I go to a leadership collective, I try to connect with one of those leaders individually. Say, hey, do you have five minutes after, can we have a little chat? And also the other way around, that the next time we organize a leadership collective, it's the themes that we present, the speakers that we have on stage, that they are better, that they are more oriented towards what leaders need and want to know. So I'm working more on this kind of double track, trying to allow one project to feed the other project.
- [20:08]
Manu Bartlett
And as we were sort of discussing earlier, you know, the data coming out of the report reports both done by figma, the State of Design report, as well as reports done by user testing Design leaders and designers themselves are under a lot of pressure to move faster while still delivering high quality, impactful work. Based on what you're seeing across teams and regions, how are the best organizations balancing the need for speed with clarity, especially when it comes to making confident design decisions?
- [20:42]
Pedro Hernandez
I think it's very interesting because every organization is tackling these in different ways. So you have smaller organizations focused more on speed because, for instance, smaller Startups or even younger scale ups, they try to go fast, they try to put products out there to get some feedback on those products, to experiment with new features, new technologies. And they are all about speed. Bigger organizations are all about consistency and the craft of their brand, protecting that craft. They have earned their reputation because they are good and they want to protect that a lot more. So it's interesting to see how they change and oh, it's a shame that I cannot share you a slide, but I have a slide that I use in my leadership collective where I changed the double diamond process, which is very rigid and static, into this more fluid process. And I didn't made this up. We have collectively built these slides. But just to say that there are some, there's some teams and organizations who focus more on the production side. They want AI to produce more for them, to go faster, to go, to go all the way for them. There are some others that are more about planning and about understanding how to maybe slow down a little bit, go slower, understand what they want to build. And so this slide that I have, this process that we think, the way we see it is that it's almost as a flexible rubber band that you can pull in either direction depending on the project. So I think organizations that are going to be more successful in this new space and balancing process, production and speed with craft are those who are going to learn how to pull that elastic band on one side or the other, depending on project and context and everything. Not even every project is the same thing. Sometimes you have incremental projects where you just make a new feature to an existing product, you can go faster on those. But if you're putting out there a net new product or a net new whole set of features or vertical, you might want to go slower, understand where you want to go, go with a more secure foothold, you know. Yeah. And I think something that I also like is that every team is exploring AI and that notion of speed and craft. I don't think this applies only to design. You can see, for instance, when I was at Datadog with the researchers, they were very, very AI savvy and they would use as much AI as they could to accelerate the research, accelerate the insight to production kind of workflow in every way possible. And I see this in finance teams, I see this in HR teams. Everybody's trying to figure that out. And I think this flexibility of understanding which project, which specific feature requires more production or more planning, that is the part that is going to take companies to the next level.
- [25:07]
Manu Bartlett
Yeah, I Think it's really interesting how you're kind of describing this relationship between how AI is accelerating speed and relationship to craft. Could you tell me a little bit why what you understand as craft? Because in the example that you gave earlier about how now designers are able to, you know, create whole kind of app prototypes in an hour. The kind of speed element's very clear. But, like, how is AI changing how designers relate to their craft?
- [25:40]
Pedro Hernandez
Wait to answer your first question about what is craft? Craft is. I don't know how to explain it, now that I think about it. I was having a discussion with one of the DAs earlier today, and I was telling them that I see craft as the care that people can put in a project. We were talking about the rebranding of the Amazon River. Have you seen that?
- [26:14]
Manu Bartlett
The actual Amazon River?
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Pedro Hernandez
No, no, the. The new branding for the Amazon River. No. Go and look. Amazon branding. And you're gonna see. So I'm gonna tell you a little bit of the story. So they. In Brazil. I think it's in Brazil, they take satellite photos of the Amazon river, and they found four patterns that can resemble letters, and. And they built the word Amazon using those patterns. And it's a very beautiful, almost cursive, very natural, organic way of writing. Of course it's a river. It's the bends of the river that form the word Amazon. And simply the fact of taking the time in looking at different satellite photos, finding the patterns, transforming those into a typography, and making that an absolute beauty, because I'm in love with that new logo. Go and check it out. That is craft. Craft is just caring enough that you want to do things the right way, that you want to do things beautiful, useful, perfect, that you want to go the extra mile. For me, that is craft. Now, how can companies balance those? For instance, even if you use AI, even if you're a designer and you sit in front of AI, you say, hey, help me build this. The craft is going to come from you and your ability not to accept the first response that the AI tool gives you, but for you to be critical, for you to understand what you're actually wanting to build, for you to care about your users, about the research that you produce by talking to those users about your design system, about your brand, about the message that you want to share, but also about the functions and features that you want to put out there and being able to. To guide that AI into the solution that you yourself would actually build. For me, that is crafting the AI era is being critical of those Answers that you get from AI in a way that you can still be the controller of things. So I think teams were designers are just excited about the possibility of going faster without ever thinking about the quality and the exact message of what they want. I think that is not craft, that is just speed. But once again those projects, sorry, that craft is not necessary for every single project. So you have, once again, you have projects where you can go very fast. You just want to put things out there. There are some projects where you want to invest more in the crafting of it. And that is something that you want to be able to balance. And that is the thing that is going to make you successful is this idea of you as a leader, you as a designer, you are as a pm, you are you as an engineer, you as whomever, you, you know enough of your context so you can actually understand what you need to build with AI. And AI is just going to give you the speed to go faster, but also AI is going to give you new, new and exciting capabilities. So I am personally excited about seeing designers who never touch code to do some coding, you know, to do to produce something in code. Because me as a former front end engineer, I have that double hat of knowing my code and knowing my design heuristics and rules and all of that. But many people don't. And I think it's the result of this specialization that we have had in the past. I think you're very, very young. I'm very, very old. But in my time, I grew up in a time where there were no design schools. We all came. So when I was talking to you about the different conferences that I organized, the people that I met used to be communications people, architects, stage designers. I met stage designers that, who became UX designers just because it's like, hey, you know how to design come over. And so there was no specialization. So we, we were kind of like this renaissance people who knew a little bit of everything. And I think now the industry has asked for more specialization of people. So you have specifically a bachelor's degree on interaction design. And so people who take that bachelor's degree, maybe they never learn how to code, maybe they never learn how to do proper research. They're just doing the design career path. And I think AI is very good at expanding those capabilities. So if you studied interaction design and your program didn't include research, you can very well talk to an AI and say, help me build a research plan for this. And it's going to expand your capabilities a little bit more. And the craft is going to come from you to be able to say, well, the research plan is good enough, but I want to be better, change this, change that. And I think that helps a lot. But yeah, crafting the era of AI is being more critical, being more pushy towards the AI and say, hey, I'm not going to accept the first result that you throw at me. I'm going to accept what is right for me and I'm going to keep asking you questions and refining you. And this is why it's so important right now to personalize more the AIs as much as possible. So I, I, I'm working with different agents and every time I'm saying, hey, please learn this for the next time, you know, and having projects, you know, basically all of the agents have projects. So you, you keep there certain files, certain things that are recurring. So it's, it's your craft is being able to transmit to that AI as much knowledge as you can. So then the AI can reason with you, not for you, but with you.
- [33:35]
Manu Bartlett
Yeah, I love that. And I really love how you explained how having both the care and the context is still so important. Right. I think those are two really important things when we think about AI changing the way we do design and research. And I also love the way that you described, you know, how the discipline of UX came from this group of very diverse, kind of different types of designers and thinkers. And it became so specialized and now we're kind of coming background again. Right. We're having the opportunity to learn other things and I think that's, that's very exciting. So, yeah, thank you for explaining that so well. And so for design leaders and teams who are listening right now and who are trying to move faster without losing sight of what really matters, what's one practical shift that they can make today to stay closer to their customers and build better outcomes?
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Pedro Hernandez
I'm a big advocate of research and doing it themselves. So two things that I always tell these leaders is you need to know your subject matter. So that is your research. And research can take many forms. You know, you can go through surveys, you can talk to people, you can even study activity logs in your application, in your product. But you need to do your homework to understand how humans, because at the end of the day, it's humans using those applications. It's not another AI. You're not building an MCP bridge between two AIs. You're building something for a human. So understanding those humans, that is key for you as a leader. So you can also share that with your teams, because once again, maybe your team comes from a culture or a career path where they have been more specialists. So we, as leaders, we need to change and we need to adapt, and we need to lead the way through that research in whichever form it takes. And the second part, I think we, as leaders, we also need to roll our sleeves up and, you know, get out there and experiment with those new tools, with those new workflows so we understand how to guide them better. This is something that I personally. Me personally, Pedro, I feel very concerned or very not concerned. Maybe that is not the word, but I feel very interested by it. The notion of until now, I have been leading teams who didn't have AI access. So me as a leader, how can I be a better manager for them? How can I help them get better at using AI at their work if I never did it? Because until now, we managers, we have been growing on the career path because we were good designers, and then we decided to mentor others, and maybe that took us to management. But now I'm managing a designer who doesn't, who does a whole new thing that I never dreamt of, you know, so how can I prepare as a leader to guide those new designers? And I think we go back to soft skills. I think we're getting back to the importance of soft skill. So we were talking about craft and how craft is this caring for good things. I think that is a soft skill. Not everybody has it. And now we have to transform it almost into a hard skill. Now, care needs to be something that people know how to care, how to go further, how to bounce questions and answers from the AI agent they are using or from whatever tool they're using. And I think that is what we, as leaders, we need to provoke in our teams. And for that, we need to understand those new workflows. We cannot be like, well, I've done my time doing the IC work. I think we need to explore so concrete, circle back, so do your research, experiment yourself. And that is the thing that is going to prepare you better as a leader to understand how to drive others to the next step in this big shift.
- [38:15]
Manu Bartlett
Totally. And I think for all of us working in design and product, knowing that there are people at different levels of the organization who are exploring with AI, but who may not be kind of as knowledgeable as people who are kind of setting the standards of how to use AI, it's all just getting shaken up, right? And I think that it's a really, really important lesson for leaders to both get in touch with the tools themselves, but also not lose sight of the fact that we're who we're building for. You know, we're not building for the AI, we're still building for humans and understand how to use those tools. But keep that in mind. That's a really good way of describing it. Thank you, Pedro. So we're coming to the end of the show and I just want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. I really enjoyed our conversation and getting to know you a bit better. How does someone learn more about you, your thought leadership and the latest goings on at Figma?
- [39:17]
Pedro Hernandez
Well, I'm on LinkedIn, so I think that's my. That has been my major platform these days. Other than that, at Figma, we have a. So if you go to figma.com events and webinars, you're going to see all the past webinars that we have done and sometimes we record in person events. So it's. That's where we are. And yeah, awesome. Send me a message on LinkedIn.
- [39:50]
Manu Bartlett
Cool. Great. Well, thank you so much. And for anybody who hasn't read the Design the State of Design report, we'll probably be putting that in the link. There's a lot of really interesting stuff in there. So, yeah, thank you again, Pedro, and I hope you have a great weekend.
- [40:05]
Pedro Hernandez
Thank you. You too.
- [40:06]
Manu Bartlett
Bye.
- [40:08]
Podcast Narrator
Want to keep the conversation going? You can find the show notes@usertesting.com podcast if you haven't already. Don't forget to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast or Google Play, so you never miss an episode. And if you enjoyed today's show, please share it with a friend or leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And until next time, this is Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing.