Free Lesson
What It Actually Takes to Ship as a Designer
60 min
Sep 26, 2026 12:00 PM
What you'll learn
The Line Between a Prototype and Shipped Code
See where an AI prototype stops and a shippable app starts: the data layer, security, the parts a prototype never shows.
Where Design Work Ends and Engineering Work Begins Now
Walk through where AI moved the line between design and engineering, and what's left of each job once code is cheap.
What's Left for a Design Lead Who Only Directs, Not Builds
See whether that kind of role still holds up once the people it directs can tell good work from bad on their own.
Why this topic matters
A designer with no engineering background can generate a working prototype in minutes. Getting it into production is a separate problem: real data, a security review, and an engineering team that has to maintain it. That gap is what this conversation works through, with Rupa Chaturvedi, founder of Human Centered AI Institute, and David Eisner, VP of Product Design at Datadog and a longtime practitioner and advocate for design engineering.
