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This week’s episode is with Alejandro Matamala Ortiz, the cofounder and Chief Design Officer at Runway—one of the leading generative AI companies in the world today.
Runway had the vision to create a full-length AI-generated film over 7 years ago 🤯
So a big focus of this interview is digging into how AI is shifting the way products get built and what it all means for designers.
Here are a few of my favorite highlights:
Runway’s design rotation program
Frontend engineers at Runway can join the design team full-time for a month as a way to deepen collaboration across the disciplines.
This helps designers become more technical (something Alejandro cares a lot about) and makes it easy to skip out on the formality of a design system.
But there’s also another reason that’s definitely a trend I’m noticing in AI-native product teams 👇
Build first → UX second
When you’re building a non-deterministic AI product, it’s essential to figure out what’s possible as quickly as you can.
“We need to be able to test [the models] first rather than going too far in the purely design phase”"
The traditional handoff process breaks down for companies like Runway. Because there’s no way designers can truly figure out what’s possible in Figma.
Instead, designers work with research and engineering to identify capabilities and play with new models first. It’s totally normal for the LLM to unlock unexpected possibilities at this point in the process.
As a result, the finer details of the UX are often reserved as the last step in the process after much of the functionality has been built in code.
Flexible product strategy
Runway doesn’t use a traditional product roadmap. Instead they think of it as “research areas of exploration”.
On top of that, research operates on unpredictable timelines. Some breakthroughs may never happen while other unexpected discoveries might shift priorities rapidly.
This means designers have to be ready for anything. Because you might not know what your focus will be until Monday’s kickoff meeting.
Carving > Building
Alejandro describes AI product development as “carving the product” rather than building it.
You start with a broad hypothesis and gradually shape the product by testing and exploring the model’s capabilities.
There’s a lot more in the full episode. If you’re interested in AI’s impact on the role of design then this will be right up your alley :)
🤝 WITH PLAY
Play is no longer just a prototyping tool…
Because their next release introduces Play to Xcode.
That means everything you've created in Play (your styles, components, even full pages and interactions) can now be exported as a SWIFT package.
It’s never been easier to get your ideas into the App Store 🚀
Click the link to learn more 👇
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Dessn → How I ship like a design engineer
Framer → How I build my websites
Genway → How I do research
Jitter → How I animate my designs
Play → How I design mobile apps
Raycast → How I do most things on my computer
Visual Electric → How I generate imagery
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