AI companies have spent the past year hiring forward-deployed engineers: engineers who sit inside a customer’s team, hear the problem firsthand, and ship against it. One count of 1,000 listings found the role grew 1,165% in a single year. This year I did a version of that job for my own newsroom, without the title, and it changed how I think about listening.
Being heard runs on two clocks. Listening should be slow. Response should be fast.
Nobody feels heard by a report →
image.to.design – Convert screenshots into real HTML →
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Editor picks
Borrowed slopes →
When newsrooms reach for the oldest kit in digital design.What I told the CFO when he asked why design matters →
How to show the impact of design outcomes.Designing for an idea before it exists →
On the useful parts that don’t quite fit.
The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.
On M.F. Husain and the meanings of orange →
Make me think
Worth building →
“Before, a project like this needed justifying. I’d have asked whether I’d use it enough to make the time worthwhile. If I expected to spend weeks on it, I’d have started thinking about other users, pricing, how it could pay for itself.”Design owns coherence →
“Established functions are defined not only by their activities, but also the decision rights they own to something that the business considers important. Finance owns capital allocation. Legal owns risk. Marketing owns demand. Sales owns revenue. Engineering owns reliability. What UX/Design typically owns feels like small potatoes—consistency, usability, accessibility. None of which addresses meaningful business value at scale.”Grieving the loss of details →
“Before the term “vibecoding” was coined and the industry shifted to valuing programmers primarily for designing architecture, I proudly called myself a coder as opposed to an engineer. In my eyes, this highlighted the way I focused on the details, performance optimization, knowing the intricacies of the language, and being able to explain how things work, as opposed to juggling Java-esque abstractions.”
Cool finds
Energy icons: a free, open-source library →
Prompt motion: videos made with Claude Opus 5.5 →
Careers & more
Getting good at your job can stop you getting better →
Many experienced people plateau out of sight.The AI experience doesn’t care about your org chart →
Our ways of working haven’t caught up.Taste is not a design methodology →
Our favorite answer to AI-generated sameness.
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