DLSAI01

VP, Design & Research

Mark Sherrill

Your role is evolving. This is the playbook.

Chief Design Officer | Advisor | Author

PayPal

Expedia Group

Bank of America

Amazon

Samsung

Rachel Kobetz

Chief Design Officer, PayPal

The AI-Native Leader

Design Leadership at Scale

<h3>Why I enrolled</h3>
Context: In my previous FT role, I led a team of 40+ product designers, content designers, and UX researchers who worked closely with product and eng partners in a very traditional product development environment. The company's appetite and adoption of any AI tooling was low and restricted to a very limited implementation of Glean. The Legal team had in effect instituted an AI scarecrow that turned away any attempt to experiment or adopt these new tools for daily use. Currently, I'm working in a fractional capacity with a much smaller mid-stage startup that has adopted Claude heavily throughout every function and department within the company. Although adoption is very broad, there's no real order, unified enabling infrastructure, or guiding first principles (like quality) that unite and govern usage beyond access to Claude. I categorize it as the "AI every person for themselves" model.Now that I've seen complete opposite ends of the spectrum, in each case it's felt as though there's been very little organizational thoughtfulness or rigor around how to implement, scale, and derive meaningful value from these tools. More so, just the mandate to either use or not use them. Thoughts: I keep coming back to "just because you can build something quickly, doesn't mean you should". But in the current state of "everyone is a builder", more often than not, it seems that speed and velocity is the only measure of success. As the pre-read metrics outline, I've seen very few instances of success stories that are articulating actual customer or business impact value - only speed, not debt/bugs created, retention impact, etc.. Sound judgement, prioritization, and balanced decision making all seem somewhat out of fashion, whereas in my mind, it's more critical than ever. Goals:To bring a more thoughtful and well-rounded approach to how these tools do add significant value up and down the chain, but with the right organizational model, guardrails, and team in place. Not only articulating it, but operationalizing it in a fundamentally sound way that brings back some of the balance we seem to be missing like discernment and quality standards.Continue clarifying my POV on the functional shape and skill competencies for the teams I work with and how they continue adding value in this quickly evolving state of the world. Help inform my thinking on the shift in designing products for exclusively for humans to a blend of humans and A2A headless systems. 



<h3>What I’ll apply</h3>
Redefining the the entire model, top to bottom.

Certificate

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