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- 🤿 ai-native product teams
Remember ElevenLabs? It’s the AI audio platform that keeps coming up in Dive Club episodes…
Well today we get to hear from their Head of Design, Ammaar Reshi 🙌
So a big focus of this conversation is learning what it's like operating as an AI-native product team. We go deep into topics like:
The backstory of Ammaar’s viral AI experiments
What it’s like collaborating with a research team
Predictions for the future of voice as an interface
How he’s designing novel interaction patterns for AI
What Ammaar looks for when hiring startup designers
What it’s like designing at multiple hyper growth startups
+ a lot more
🤝 WITH DESSN
You know what I’m excited about… Cursor for designers 👀
That’s why I’m all in on Dessn. It’s not another 0-1 tool for side projects and prototypes… it’s a visual interface that gives you access to your company’s existing codebase.
That way you can make updates to things like components or typography and push your designs to production without having to go through an engineer
This is what the future of product design will feel like and you can start experiencing it today 👇
🎓 KEY TAKEAWAYS
What it looks like to be an AI-native product team
1 — Impact of an in-house research team
The more I talk to AI product teams, the more convinced I am that “solutions in search of a problem” isn’t a bad thing anymore… especially when you’re working with an in-house research team like Anthropic or ElevenLabs.
Designers in that environment are constantly presented with new technological capabilities and it’s their job to translate these breakthroughs into something the world actually needs.
It reminds me of this tweet from Henry Modisett:
2 — Tinker first, design second
As a result, AI-native product teams typically place a greater emphasis on experimentation and demo culture.
“anyone from the company can come and demo something that they think is compelling”
“often how we start by just making fun demos of stuff before we even begin to design”
Figuring out “what’s possible” has become an increasingly large element of the design process. One of my favorite examples from the interview is how Ammaar made an onboarding bot for new employees as a way to experiment with a new model.
“And then you start to see, oh, that's a really cool application. How would people go about making one of their own?
Only then do you start the traditional design process.
After writing this email, I saw Karri from Linear invited Henry to come talk to their team about AI design and he shared some interesting takeaways that support these ideas. One quote in particular stood out to me:
“This flips traditional design best practices. Normally, you start with design to explore possibilities, and the tech follows. But in this domain, or this new era of software, LLM/AI is the tool for exploration, and design comes after.”
Henry describes it as “strategy → prototype → productize” and it ties in beautifully with the future of handoff video and also this week’s episode about ElevenLabs.
3 — Everyone becomes more technical
If you want to identify the intersection of new tech and existing user needs, then you have to roll up your sleeves and get into the code.
“Almost everyone, messes around with the APIs now because it’s so much easier with Cursor and other tools”
He’s not only referring to designers btw… Ammaar says that even the comms and growth people are building demos. AI-native product teams have a hacking culture that spans the entire org.
“creative ideas can come from anywhere when people have the right tools”
This concept of an “AI-native product team” is one of my favorite things to study right now. The list is small today, but I believe companies like ElevenLabs are creating the playbook for the rest of us to follow in the years ahead.
There’s a ton more in the full episode (also it’s just generally high-energy and a fun listen so I think you’ll really like it) 👇
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