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🤿 hunting for curiosity

🤿 hunting for curiosity

design career strategy in the age of AI

Ridd
February 09, 2026

How do you future-proof your design career when everything is changing so quickly?

I get asked that question a lot so I interviewed Hannah Hearth (the new Head of Product Design at Vercel) to talk about design career strategy in the age of AI.

Some highlights:

Hannah’s #1 trait for great designers
The most underrated storytelling tactic
Doing more with less while not burning out
Examples of how AI is changing the design process
How design orgs should think about adopting AI tools
How much coding is happening on the Vercel design team
Preserving craft and design thinking with collapsed timelines
+ a lot more

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

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🔑 KEY TAKEAWAYS

In with the new, out with the old

1 — New era of design leadership

When interviewing at Vercel, Hannah had to do a take-home assignment for the first time in 10 years. Gone are the days of pure people managers who just hire smart people and get out of the way. Hannah says we’ve entered into the “new era of design leadership”.

2 — Mandated AI adoption is a “necessary evil”

Every company of a certain size will be disrupted by AI. The only real choice is whether you proactively disrupt yourself by leaning in early. That’s why you see AI usage is showing up in performance reviews. Eventually the market will settle, but in the short run we can expect more aggressive adoption tactics.

3 — The design sprint is dead

I used to work in an agency that specialized in the traditional weeklong design sprint. Those days are pretty much over. We’ve taken the five days of theater and compressed it while creating ample space for deep work.

“nobody is spending five, eight hour days in a room together collaborating…it might be five days, but you're actually only doing one hour of synchronous time in the morning to kick off each day with some context…but you're spending the other seven hours doing independent work and going in a million directions of prototyping.”

Hannah Hearth

4 — The cost of speed

Hannah isn’t worried that craft will suffer as timelines compress. Craft is a product of people who care, not process. The bigger risk is skipping alignment on “are we solving the right problem?”

5 — The #1 trait of the best designers

I asked Hannah for the #1 trait of the best designers she’s worked with… she said “sharing work early and often”. Waiting for the weekly critique or Friday sync is too slow in today’s world. Strong ICs are comfortable showing half-baked ideas with clear context (which ties directly back to #4).

“as long as you're sharing the right context, you should be getting feedback as early as an and as often as you can. because the more feedback you get, the more you're gonna learn quickly.”

Hannah Hearth

6 — Technical fluency is table stakes

Vercel’s designers regularly use Claude Code and Cursor. Hannah even shipped a PR in her first week on the job!

“[designers are] significantly more successful in getting their work shipped by being part of the shipping process.”

Hannah Hearth

Sometimes that means owning the final 1% of polish before a feature goes out the door. Or maybe it means creating a functional prototype that jumpstarts engineering.

7 — It’s time to rethink the portfolio

We spent years viewing portfolios as a static catalog of case studies. Following that playbook today is a surefire way to get passed over.

Hannah echoes Matt Seller’s belief that your personal website should be an experience and an expression of who you are (not just a list of case studies).

“I am so glad we are past this era where every case study was like “here's how I wrote a sticky note”

Hannah Heart

Like many other hiring managers right now, Hannah is hunting for curiosity:

“much more so than two years ago, showcasing in your portfolio that you tried something new lately and you used a new tool or a new process, it's like table stakes at this point.”

Hannah Hearth

There has never been more alpha in side projects 🔥

8 — Design systems are having a quiet renaissance

Turns out, that documentation your design system team made was actually for LLMs. The teams that invested in guidelines, usage rules, and anti-patterns now get outsized leverage.

“I think that design systems got a lot of shit for. Slowing things down or making things less exploratory. And now because of these tools, the best and most robust design systems might actually make your team significantly more efficient and be able to experiment and explore with the design system in a way that they couldn't before.”

Hannah Hearth