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🤿 design's identity crisis

🤿 design's identity crisis

right (and wrong) strategies for AI design

Ridd
May 30, 2025

There are two types of companies today:

Startups birthed out of AI
Existing companies figuring out how to adapt to AI

Over the last few months we’ve spent a lot of time hearing from the former (Granola, Lovable, Anthropic, etc).

So this week’s episode is all about the latter because we get to learn from Ioana Teleanu who was the first AI designer at Miro and is now a dedicated AI+Design consultant.

So a big theme of this conversation is how to identify the right opportunities to design AI into a product that’s already working. Ioana shares a bunch of stories and lessons learned from her time at Miro as well as a refreshing perspective on AI and design as whole that i think will resonate with a lot of you.

Some highlights:

What to do if you’re already feeling AI fatigue
Why invisible AI is the future of product design
How you measure the success of integrating AI
Examples of good and bad implementations of AI
How the value prop of design shifts in an AI world
Ways to invest in your product skills as a designer
+ a lot more

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts 👇

🤝 WITH GRANOLA

Alright picture this…

You’re in CRIT and you’re getting a bunch of feedback from everyone on the call so you’re taking notes as fast as you can so you know where to iterate…

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 (don’t worry there’s no creepy meeting bot).

You can kinda think of Granola like Apple notes but it transcribes CRIT for you 😮

You can even make a CRIT template to pull out specific action items or capture all of the questions you were asked.

I never start a meeting without Granola and I strongly believe that designers everywhere should be using it.

They’re offering 3 months free for you and anyone on your team all you have to do click the link to get it 👇

🎓 KEY TAKEAWAYS

Design’s identity crisis

There’s a feeling of “wtf is a designer anymore” floating around…

I think I experienced it most acutely while scrolling r/uxdesign immediately after Figma Make was announced at Config. For some people it simply didn’t compute that an AI prototype could be considered a design artifact.

“Our roles are getting redefined. We’re all in the middle of an identity crisis in some level. We all feel anxiety around what our roles will become”

Ioana Teleanu

But I’ll let you in on a little secret…

A few days ago I visited a well-known design leader in NYC and he said that in the last 6 months, ~40% of their design artifacts are now created in Lovable, Bolt, etc.

That’s kind of crazy, right?

So Ioana and I went deep into this topic during our interview and I want to share a few ideas I’m still thinking about.

But before I want to preface by highlighting the fact that Ioana defines herself as someone who is “pretty change averse” and “the kind of person who doesn’t jump on new things”… which makes her opinions even more interesting 👇

1 — AI designer won’t exist in the future

We’re in a weird moment in history where there are AI designers and non-AI designers. But this is a blip on the timeline as adoption accelerates.

“We’re all gonna be thinking about some sort of AI angle in the way we do our work. I don’t even feel that the AI design role will exist in this explicit format in a couple of years. All the designers will be AI designers”

Ioana Teleanu

ICYMI I talk about this in “You’re an AI product designer now” 👀

2 — Product and design will fully converge

A lot of guests on Dive Club talk about how designers are becoming builders (which is definitely true). But Ioana is more interested in the convergence of design and product roles.

“I think design and product can be the same thing if you look at it from a different angle”

Ioana Teleanu

Preparing for an AI world isn’t just about building code prototypes. It’s getting closer to business systems, go-to-market strategies, growth experiments, marketing, etc.

And the best way to grow those product-y muscles is to be proactive vs. waiting for leadership to tell us where to focus.

“Once you're in your seniorship… you're expected to make an impact on the company strategy and influencing stakeholders and steering the product in one direction or another.”

Ioana Teleanu

3 — Designers have a moral duty

Ok so now remember how I prefaced all of this by saying Ioana is generally “change averse”?

That’s why her initial approach to AI was a bit less intentional…

But now she’s changed her tune:

“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.”

Ioana Teleanu

There’s a lot more in the full episode so if you’re interested in what it looks like to design AI experiences within your existing product then I think you’ll really enjoy this one 👇