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A conversation with Yvette Cronje, Head of UX Design for HP’s unified consumer app experience
“AI can accelerate misalignment just as easily as it can accelerate execution.” – Yvette Cronje
In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Yvette Cronje, Head of UX Design for HP’s unified consumer app experience, about how design leadership is shifting as AI compresses production time. Cronje argues that AI hasn’t removed the hard part of design so much as relocated it: craft is shifting from executing pixels to judgment, taste, and critique, and teams need shared principles and decision frameworks in place before they diverge into AI-generated options, or misalignment simply accelerates alongside execution. She and Ferguson trace how this plays out in practice, from workshops that align teams on principles before production, to using AI as a critique partner and coaching tool rather than a production shortcut, to the delegation and communication skills leaders increasingly need as ICs manage AI collaborators. They also discuss trust, both customers’ trust in AI-driven product features and organizational trust in people through constant change, as a central design and leadership problem. The conversation closes on reframing AI anxiety as an opportunity for curiosity and growth rather than a threat to craft or job security.
This episode is part of the Facilitation Lab Podcast. See all episodes
Show Highlights
[00:02:14] Designers Fearing Job Loss To AI
[00:05:10] Learning While Doing, Not Separately
[00:08:40] Craft As Judgment, Not Pixel Pushing
[00:12:05] Aligning On Principles Before Production
[00:18:30] AI Can Make Weak Thinking Look Polished
[00:24:50] Friction And Conflict As The Pearl
[00:31:15] Customer Trust In Automated AI Features
[00:35:40] Delegation Skills For Former Individual Contributors
[00:42:20] Building A Personal AI Coach
Links | Resources
About the Guest
Yvette Cronje is a product design leader who currently leads UX Design for HP’s unified consumer app experience, bringing previously separate products and services together into an ecosystem used by more than 23 million people each month. She describes herself as a designer at heart and a leader by practice, someone who is happiest moving between big-picture product strategy and the smallest details of craft. On the show she speaks about cultivating team autonomy, running workshops that align teams around shared principles and decision frameworks before diving into AI-assisted ideation, and building psychological safety so designers can grow through difficult, conflict-filled moments rather than avoid them. She is especially focused on the intersection of design, technology, AI, and human behavior, including how design teams stay relevant as AI changes the nature of craft.
Transcript
Douglas Ferguson: Welcome to New Friction. I’m Douglas Ferguson. AI just made execution almost free. So, why are organizations still stuck? Because the friction didn’t disappear. It moved and it multiplied. It’s no longer in building. It’s in deciding what to build, how to align, and how to move forward when the path isn’t clear. That friction, the human side of change, is what this series is about. Each episode, I sit down with leaders who are living it, navigating the real challenges of AI transformation, not the tools, the people. The task that took two weeks now takes two minutes. The work isn’t the bottleneck anymore. The conversation before the work is. That’s the work this show is about. Today, I’m joined by Yvette Cronje, head of UX design for HP’s unified customer app experience, where she leads the work of bringing a complex ecosystem of products and services together into one experience used by millions of people. Yvette is a designer at heart and a leader by practice, someone who loves the messy space between product, technology, and human behavior, and believes the best design work happens when you’re willing to get close to both the problem and the people experiencing it. Welcome to the show, Yvette.
Yvette Cronje: Hi. Thank you, Douglas. So, good to be here.
Douglas Ferguson: Yeah, I’m looking forward to chatting. It’s such a fun moment to be in right now with all this change. And especially as a designer, I’m sure if you’re looking at that intersection between the problem and the people, it’s such a great moment to be thinking and designing.
Yvette Cronje: Yeah, absolutely. There’s always problems and there’s always people. We’re never going to be about a job here.
Douglas Ferguson: Right. What have you been noticing lately? I mean, there’s so much change in there. I’m curious, what are some of the things that have been popping up for you lately?
Yvette Cronje: Yeah, there’s a couple of things actually, but I would say the main ones is, I mean, I think this is a very natural response, is designers specifically thinking my job is going to be taken over by AI and the fear that is coming with that. And I think as a leader, what I’m trying to facilitate is rather than fear, how can you get excited about it? What does this change about how you do your job and the value that you specifically bring as a designer? So, that the only thing that I always say is the only constant in life is change. And the people who are able to work through that change and live with that change are the people who thrive. You want your people to thrive and design to thrive. And so, with that comes the ability to adapt with change and how I always think about be like water, go around the rocks, don’t be a rock. You’re not the rock, you’re the water that flows and brings all of it together. And that’s the real power of design and the value that they bring. So, I think to sum that up, just managing a lot of the emotional and mental thought around how AI is changing their world. And then once I get over that, it is, “Well, okay, well, how do we use this? The tool keeps changing under our feet every, I don’t know, couple of days.” It’s this constant change now. It’s not just about, okay, let me learn it and I’m once and done. It’s constant learning and how do you keep that going on your team while you’re delivering product? So, you want to be doing learning and curiosity and teaching, but also, and we have deadlines and deliveries, let’s keep going on that.
Douglas Ferguson: Yeah. How have you struck that balance between skating in front of the puck, but also keeping the trains running and the deliverables flowing?
Yvette Cronje: That’s hard. It’s not easy. Many years ago, I did Seth Godin’s altMBA workshop course, and the one thing that I found really valuable in that course was the work is in the doing. You don’t go and do a course and come back and you spend 12 hours on doing the course and then you spend another 12 hours on doing your actual work. “Hey, let’s compress that and let’s figure out how we can learn while we are doing.” And sometimes you have a bit of ebb and flow. Sometimes you need to just get in and get something done, and sometimes you have a bit more time. And I think it’s helping the team notice when you can explore a bit more, use the tools to help you get to your end deliverable. But basically it’s like learn while you’re doing, and maybe you’re taking a bit of extra time for a little bit, but that’s okay because you’ve learned something that’s going to help you accelerate in your next delivery. And making space for that I think is important.
Douglas Ferguson: I think also too, sometimes it’s not about efficiency, but finding a better approach or finding a novel new solution. It could be a whole new revenue stream that we unlock because we took the time to explore a different path.
Yvette Cronje: Yeah, that’s actually a really good point. Yeah, because I mean, in many ways we are reshaping how we do design and within that space comes, like you said, discovering new ways and new things. And if you think about generative AI, that actually made me think of something now is the paths and the use cases and the outcomes could be very different from what we traditionally would’ve thought because AI makes us diverge a lot quicker. And in that divergence, you’re like, “Oh, well, I never thought of that. Thank you so much.” But also what are our constraints that we’re working in and how do we keep the goal that we’re trying to keep? But I think it’s awesome. It’s great.
Douglas Ferguson: Coming back to the emotional piece, I feel that so many folks are in this moment of they’re feeling a sense of loss, like the craft is slipping away from them. But I would argue, and I see this in design and product and engineering, I think maybe engineering and design more so than product just because I feel like engineers and designers have a deeper sense of love of craft, right? And not that it’s not there on product, but it’s just super, super deep and almost like sometimes it’s like they’re zealots, right?
Yvette Cronje: Yeah.
Douglas Ferguson: And I think the issue is when the practices start to take a hole more deeply than the principles. That’s something I’ve found as helpful is helping root people back in the principles, because if we apply the principles in this new era and how these new tools are influencing how the principles show up, then we can throw away the practices and say goodbye to them and be okay with that.
Yvette Cronje: That’s actually, yeah, really good point. It’s interesting because actually we just had a really fun workshop on a new feature that we want to launch. And one of the big things in the workshop was discussing our principles, was creating that initial alignment because I mean, I’ll get to your point about craft in a minute, but it just made me think of how important that beginning part of the alignment is and experience principles very much falls in that initial bucket of, “Hey, do we all agree on these things?” And then it makes the craft and the production that much easier. But I’ve also thought that, I don’t know, the output of AI, I’m a bit of a zealot. The output of AI for me is not always super amazing. It’s not always around what I would call beautiful, innovative craft. And that’s where I think I want to help my designers and the team to not have that fear that their job’s going to be taken away because your craft is super important still. You have the eye, you have the taste, you’ve honed your judgment and your taste over years of being in challenging situations and living next to the customer and hearing from the customer and understanding businesses. And sure, AI can arguably understand all of that as well, but it’s only going to be as good as the input that you give it. And that’s where our design systems come in and the attention to detail and AI can definitely make our production faster. I mean I haven’t personally seen how it necessarily up levels craft as much as humans still can in many ways.
Douglas Ferguson: Yeah, I agree. And I think of it less as upleveling craft and more that it’s transitioning or evolving craft. Because to your point, judgment, critique, attention to detail, these are what I would classify in the principles bucket. We have to hold onto those because you’re not doing design if you’re not doing those things. Whereas moving the pixels around inside of Figma, maybe that’s not really the craft after all. What are the principles that we need to hold dear to and what do we need to let go of, I think is an interesting conversation. And it’s awesome that y’all are having the conversation around principles in your workshop because rerouting, grounding in them is really helpful in this moment because to your point, if everything’s changing around us, what do we need to hold tightly and what is that footing that we can stand on?
Yvette Cronje: Yeah, because ultimately in those moments, everyone’s a designer, a product manager’s a designer, an engineer is a designer. We’re all going to be making little prototypes. I mean, our product managers, which has been pretty awesome actually, make little prototypes early on to illustrate their requirements. It’s not the final product by any means, but they’re using that. And engineers make proof of concepts. And so, the whole process is fraught with a lot of visual stimulation and input coming from AI. But if we align on our principles early on, when that engineer is sitting doing his prototype and the product manager is doing their version, whatever, it can cause problems if we don’t have those principles early on. But if you do have them, you’re like, okay, well, this is the approach that I’m going to take. I’m asking myself those five questions while I’m doing it, and therefore it creates more alignment actually earlier on, which is a really fun way of working because you’re making those thoughts tangible quicker into something that I can see and use quicker. And I think that’s really fun.
Douglas Ferguson: I love that. And it kind of gets a little bit into how there’s layers of principles, right? We can be principled about how we do our engineering. We can be principled about how we do our design. We can be principled about how we approach this project, how the organization operates, right? And in the examples you were just giving, it’s kind of in that category of being principled about how we work together as a team and how we make decisions, what happens when there’s conflict. And I think it’s really powerful for groups to have those conversations up front when you’re kicking off a new project or even just there’s a moment of reflection or review on a long-running project because so often, it’s easier for us to get in our little silos, whether that’s in our functional silo or our individual personal silo. And the more we can discuss these things and get clear about them, the more it’s easier for us to collaborate.
Yvette Cronje: Yeah. And it’s also easier to not over-index on our personal taste or our personal opinions. It up levels the whole team and we say, “Well, we agreed on, what can we come back that we agreed on? It doesn’t mean we can’t change those things, but let’s have a discussion around it.” And so, it becomes this constant bubble of a team, this organism that’s moving together through the process to get the work done. And one of the other really helpful things that we did in that workshop after the principles was thinking through our decision frameworks and decision matrices. And every org has its bias because it has to, it’s what it specializes in. But that’s another thing that helps us when we think about, “Okay, well now we’re all going to dive into AI and go create multiple hundreds of ideas and things.” But if we have that decision matrix, not only for our own brains, but also for AI to input that into the AI, AI becomes your teammate. It becomes another aligned teammate that can just superpower, make a hundred options very easy.
Douglas Ferguson: Yeah, that reminds me, we were just talking yesterday in the mastermind about how often the AI isn’t aware of the decisions we decided not to make because the context we give it is really kind of, I would say, idealistic or it’s clean. We filtered it down to here’s where we decided to go, here’s what we want to do, and here are the requirements, but we rarely come back to these things that we decided not to do and the rationale for why not to do them, right? And so, that’s a fascinating thing that the humans often have context on, but our AI companions don’t necessarily see that stuff.
Yvette Cronje: Yeah, exactly. The things that you didn’t think of or the things that you’re purposely leaving out, giving it that context. Yeah, really important point. And that’s one of the things that I’m also seeing is the ability to make sure that the AI is also asking you good questions so that it’s not just a workhorse, but you’re saying, “Well, go ahead and ask me these questions. Go ahead and tell me what gaps are you seeing, especially if you weren’t detailed enough upfront that it becomes a critical conversation before it becomes a solution.”
Douglas Ferguson: Yeah. I think often because AI is so powerful at generating pretty convincing stuff, I mean, you criticized it earlier saying that you still feel like there’s some gaps there and whatnot, but at the end of the day, it is pretty convincing and pretty finished, finite looking. And I think that’s another skill that, to your point earlier, this important skill of being comfortable with change and curious and constantly learning. But also I think we need to build the skill of planning and interrogating with the AI before just having it build stuff.
Yvette Cronje: Yeah. And then also to go hand in hand with that is the ability to critique it is like you said, AI can make, I don’t want to call it weak thinking, but for the lack of better words, let me just say that. It can make weak thinking look beautiful and look polished if you don’t have those clear boundaries and the principles and everything we spoke about earlier to be able to make good judgment of it and to say, “Well, this is not going to have the last say. How do we as a team come together and decide how did it think about it?” And that’s our value now is how are we thinking about the problem? Is it solving the right problem? Is it solving problems I didn’t even ask it to solve in the first place? Because it looks pretty potentially and it’s, “Oh, the pixels are aligned, therefore it’s great. No, no, what is the problem it’s actually solving?”
Douglas Ferguson: I think oftentimes that’s a real risk. I mean, we saw that before the arrival of AI where folks were starting with the solution and they hadn’t really articulated the problem yet. And I think the fact that you can build so many solutions so quickly now, people are at risk of continuing to skip that step. And it’s almost, I would say, amplifying that dysfunction around if we don’t have that alignment, we don’t have that visibility into the why. It’s funny, I’ve seen that show up a ton too around folks like, “How are we going to put AI into our product?” And I always say, “I can critique this architectural approach to using bedrock or whatever other tools that you’re considering, but we haven’t even begun to talk about the why yet. What’s the business need for this, right? And to your point, where’s the intersection of this problem and the people experiencing it, right? If we don’t understand that, then we probably need to stop and go.” And we might use AI to figure some of that out or help aid us in our exploration. We certainly don’t want to just spin up a bunch of AI agents to build that solution when we don’t understand it deep enough.
Yvette Cronje: Yeah, that’s a really good point. And it’s funny that you say that. Well, there’s two things that really stood out of what you said. The first one was how you jump to the solution too quickly. And that’s an interesting space for design because I feel like in many organizations for a long time, that’s kind of how organizations operated. They would come to design and say, “Hey, I need a screen with a blue button and a heading,” and the designer would do it or whatever. And I think the industry has worked so hard to get us to, well, are we solving the right problem? And the value, that upstream value of doing that, AI is just, like you said, amplifying the problem in a different way now because that designer that had to do that took a couple of days and now it’s instant. But it’s sort of the same problem that was before. And I think therein lies the opportunity for teams to be like, “Hey, no, no, this looks like a familiar pattern. Let’s go back to what we know we need to be doing, which is solving the right problem.”
Douglas Ferguson: So, let me bring us back to something you were saying earlier around how you were starting with the principles and purpose. And it got me to thinking about this idea of creating a symbiotic organization where currently a lot of what we see is engineers are experimenting with creating prototypes and they’re maybe moving a little bit more into the design space. You’ve got folks that are, to your point, designers can even create functional prototypes and whatnot. And if everyone’s just figuring that stuff out on their own, then they’re not necessarily operating in ways that are going to be most helpful to how the organization evolves together. And so, having these workshops that either start with principals or check-ins where we’re talking about this stuff means that we can influence each other’s thinking. So, then when we are experimenting outside of our classical wheelhouse, we’re doing it in a way that’s informed by what the others need and how the others are thinking. And then if we’re sharing our experiments and there’s touch points and moments where that stuff can get bubbled up, it allows us to be a little bit more symbiotic, even though we might be doing our own experiments. If we think of our own function as being an organ in the body, it’s like, yes, we’re optimizing for what the stomach needs to do, but we’re not doing it at the detriment of the blood system or whatever.
Yvette Cronje: Yeah, that’s probably the best analogy. It’s such a human analogy to this technical problem. I actually love it. I feel like you can write a book on it, Douglas. But no, it’s a really good point because it gets to that moment of look, AI can accelerate misalignment just as easily as it can accelerate execution, right? And so, for us to be able to get to this aligned space means getting those principles upfront, getting the decision matrices upfront, because everyone’s going to use a different tool. Engineering, product, design, everyone’s using different. It’s not about, “Hey, everyone needs to be using the same tool and in the same space.” And it’s not about the tool. It’s about how do we create shared context? How do we create shared evidence? How do we make sure that we are all sharing the same problem? What is the problem that we’re trying to solve? Shared criteria, shared outcome. It’s this shared, the body system has a shared holder, it has a shared constraint, your organs have constraints, and it’s the same for us. There’s a book called, it’s actually called A Beautiful Constraint, and it’s a beautiful book because it describes how it is the constraint that helps you make something beautiful and useful. And I think having those upfront before you unleash and go and diverge helps create a shared understanding of teams.
Douglas Ferguson: Yeah, it’s interesting that you’re talking about the constraint. It made me think about the pearl, right? It’s like the pearl doesn’t form under ideal circumstances. It’s like this impurity or this thing got in there that made it start to form. And it’s similar to this concept we talk about, which is conflict or friction can often point to the fact that the good stuff is happening. Or if we really attend to it, that might point us toward where we need to go. And quite often, people ignore it or they try to optimize around it, right? And if instead, if we open that up as a conversation and it’s an opportunity for the team to heal or to explore some new territory that was unclear to them, but that opacity was what was causing that friction. And until we confront it, we can’t really expose it, understand it, and move through it.
Yvette Cronje: Yeah. And if we want to call it conflict or misunderstanding or challenges or difficulty, I think it’s in line with what you’re saying, it’s reminding me of this notion of it almost can feel like because AI is so easy, I’m wondering, does it feel to people like, “Oh, it’s removing the conflict or it’s making my life so easy. I don’t need to think about conflict or difficult moments.” And especially if I think about junior designers and people, new people coming into the team and how we grow people, it’s like the fundamental things that you need to be good at needs to be learned in those difficult moments. We need to understand the conflict and how to navigate that and, yeah, how to stay curious. And what’s one of my biggest principles I think is, and it’s maybe a bit cliche, but it’s true, right? If you stay curious around the problem, it can lead to really, really amazing outcomes at the end of the day. Embrace your challenges, all those. And those are the skills that we’re having to learn up front, because if you think about it, when you’re in these workshops, and that’s where a lot of that stuff bubbles up, and then it makes production just fun and exploratory and getting to the deadline, and you can have those friction moments, which are growth moments upfront. But that’s the magic really, really. It’s the pearl.
Douglas Ferguson: Yeah. Yeah. We always talk about creating almost these temporary moments that feel very special or different. We’re asking people to step into behaviors that they don’t embody every day. And then I feel that gives them the freedom to maybe be more curious than they normally would be or to let go of some of the guards a bit. And so, I do think these imaginary worlds that we ask people to step into can be quite powerful. I think teams ought to do it more.
Yvette Cronje: Yeah. It makes me think of when we are using AI in our production and our ideation, all of that, you can almost think of it’s not going to be perfect out the gate. And how do we become comfortable with that? Because if you can become comfortable with “failure” or you tried something and it didn’t work, but what did you learn? And AI does a bit of that because it’s going to spit out, it’s going to create a hundred options for you. Not all of them are going to be great and that’s okay. So, then, okay, let’s work through this. Let’s decide, let’s hone our judgment, let’s work on our taste. Let’s be comfortable with that discomfort moment.
Douglas Ferguson: Yeah, I’ve been hearing a lot of folks shifting from, or maybe not shifting from, but adding to their typical metrics more of almost innovation accounting type of techniques where they’re measuring lessons learned. So, they’re using this moment to not only measure business outcomes and value direct bottom line revenue type goals, but also what are we learning? Especially in this moment right now, it’s like, are we leveling up in a way, not only as far as what the tools can do and how we might function in this new AI world, but also what are we learning about the customer? What are we learning about the market? What are we learning about where the business could go? Those are all very valuable things because those are things we can build on top of.
Yvette Cronje: Yeah. And I think arguably because AI is making some of our production easier and taking away some of the slog work, it allows us to focus on those aspects a lot more potentially and to highlight them to the organization and once again, share it with each other. It’s so easy to sit in a silo and have this understanding, but you’re having to come together more with people and share that understanding. And if I think about research and getting to know the customer, this is that moment that that can be highlighted way upfront in the process strategically and we can stop changing even how we make strategic decisions. What is this product that we’re creating? Why are we doing this? Are we solving the right problem for the customer? Who is our customer? Our customers are changing as well. As much as what we are changing, our customers are also changing. And that’s kind of a full circle moment for us to realize.
Douglas Ferguson: And I think we’re only in the beginning there. You think about AI LLM adoption, it’s somewhat gated by… Well, I’ll just say this. Once it’s pervasive across mobile devices and embedded in really significant ways, I think we’re going to start to see expectations from consumers in ways that are unprecedented, right? So, that to your point, the customer changing, we’re just in the beginning there.
Yvette Cronje: Yeah. That workshop that I was referring to earlier, some of the initial concepts, there was a lot of AI baked into our concepts of, let’s say, automated things that it’s doing for you upfront because it knows who you are. “Oh, Douglas, I know you’re on Zoom between 9:00 and 5:00. I’m just going to make your lighting and audio and everything perfect for you and pull that all together with your devices.” And it was very interesting, the mixed feedback that we got from customers, because I would say the majority of them had massive trust issues before they were excited about what it could do for them. And now we are having to learn, okay, it’s not just about, oh, this is a really cool feature. How do we get people to use it? Or getting excited about that. It’s also about how do we build trust and allow people to keep the control, help them feel like, okay, I’m still in control of this. This thing isn’t taking over my life. It’s going to become an interesting problem, I think, with the pervasiveness of AI and products.
Douglas Ferguson: Trust is such a fascinating one because there’s so many layers and so many attributes to think about, because you talked about folks having a sense of loss of control, so that’s an element. There’s also people under trusting it, and so then they don’t want to necessarily. In some cases, it’s not lacking control. It’s a fear of it’s going to blow up on them and cause them huge headaches. So, they’d be happy to let go of the control if they actually trusted it. And then the other side is over trust where people think it can solve all these problems and it can’t. So, it’s a fascinating one. And then also I’ve seen trust come up in these conversations too around trust in the organization. Is the org going to support you? Are they going to continue to invest in finding ways to keep the humans around? Trust is a huge complex issue as it relates to all this work.
Yvette Cronje: It is. It really is. Yeah, the org is a difficult one as well, I think, because there’s a lot of that that you’re not in control of as a team. You live at the edge of after the decision has been made, and then having to work within that constraint and figure out, “Well, okay, how are we going to work with that?” It’s often not as ideal as you would wish. I think employees are always like, “Well, I wish this if I had my ideal world.” But that’s rarely the case. And so, yeah, once again, being able to work and produce and be really proud of your work in environments that are constantly changing because the orgs are now changing about as quick as the technology in many spaces. It’s people coming and going and there’s a lot of change. So, a lot of our role I think as leaders is change management, not only of how the work’s being done, but what’s happening in the company and our organizations. But the other thing I was thinking about was also the value of designers. And if we think about these experiences in our customers and how they think about trust in AI, I wonder if it’s also just shifting a lot towards, “Okay, now we as UX people need to help the customer understand what is the AI doing? Why is it doing it? How do you correct it if it’s doing the wrong thing? How do you control it?” But it needs to not be a laborious extra thing that you now need to manage in your life. It needs to feel easy and light and delightful, and this is helpful in my life. It’s not another chore. Great, thank you company X, you’ve given me another chore with your product that I didn’t want.
Douglas Ferguson: It makes me think about how, especially the builders, so the engineers, designers, if you’ve gone down this route of being the IC, the principled engineer, the distinguished designer, you maybe made that choice intentionally down that path because you didn’t want to manage people. And so, you’re never trained on delegation skills. And now you have to delegate pretty effectively to get the best out of these tools. And so, I think as leaders, the more we can help people get comfortable with delegation, I’ve seen that be a big point of friction with some of the folks that are actively resisting. Once I peel back the layers, the delegation is a big piece of it. It’s like, I didn’t sign up to be a manager. And it’s like, okay, well the future of creating this stuff is going to demand some of these skills.
Yvette Cronje: Yeah. You hit the nail on the head because one thing that I’ve always tried to cultivate on my teams is the ability for team members to give input into each other’s work. I never want the leader to be the be and end all of decision making. And if it hasn’t passed through me, we’re not doing anything. The team needs to become autonomous enough. There’s this thing that I keep saying is I want a team that is so strong that no one knows who the leader is. And so, I try to hone that. I’ve always tried to hone that ability for people to, okay, well tell me what you guys think of it. Give each other critique. And now to your point, it’s becoming give the AI critique. It’s making you almost be a bit of a creative director and a manager to your point. And don’t just accept what it gives you because it looks good. It is such a good point actually. Yeah, you’re right. The strength of the craft is shifting.
Douglas Ferguson: Yeah. Absolutely. And I think it’s only going to grow over time as people get more comfortable using agents and sub-agents and there’s just a lot more things will happen in parallel. And so, how do we describe the work? How do we evaluate it? All these things that are going to be critical to managing a fleet of these coworkers, if you will.
Yvette Cronje: Yeah. But I also think it’s helping us be better communicators when we are in those initial alignment workshops, and especially in a world where many of us are still working virtually. Many of us, I mean, most of the people I work with are not in my location and communicating and creating connection over a virtual space is really hard. We all know when you meet a human in person, it becomes different, but you need to learn to communicate well so that one meeting doesn’t turn into 10 meetings. And arguably the skillset with AI is going to help us also. I think it could help us be better communicators.
Douglas Ferguson: Absolutely. Never have we been in a better position to tell good stories. I argue that a good story really hinges on our ability to understand the audience and to meet the audience with adapt the narrative to the audience, right? And so, gosh, if you built the prototype and you’re going to share it with engineering, heck, even three different engineering teams might care about different things, right? The security team might care about hearing about different stuff about that prototype. They might have different questions than the front end team or even leadership or the customer. I think these tools can help us adapt the narrative, the pitch, et cetera, to whoever we’re speaking to. And that’s something I really encourage folks to lean into is it doesn’t have to be one size fits all now because we can generate so many different versions.
Yvette Cronje: So true. And it also elevates us being able to explain our thinking because how you explain your thinking to an engineer is different to how you explain your thinking to a leader who’s trying to sign off on the project. It might be similar thinking, it might have a similar outcome, but that thought process and what matters to that person shapes very much how you describe your thought process about the solution. And I think that’s just awesome. That’s fun. It’s like iron sharpening iron is what it’s doing to us.
Douglas Ferguson: I love that. You’re making me think about metacognition, thinking about thinking and not a lot of people are comfortable with that. Some folks just, when it gets too introspective, maybe there’s a quarter turn of the crank and then they just jam up and stop. Whereas some people just take to it very naturally and they can describe how they do things and how they came to conclusions. But others might be a little more inherent or they can’t necessarily put words to it, but they can arrive at the answer, at the conclusion. They can maybe back it up with some evidence. But I’ve found AI, if you interrogate it well, can help you with some of that reflection, especially for folks that get a little stuck. It can be that thing, that coach that keeps nudging you and asking questions to get you to find those deeper answers. And I just encourage folks to find those novel ways to use it versus just say, “Build a thing for me,” because there’s so much more you can get out of it if you keep nudging at it and finding novel ways to explore maybe almost even personal weaknesses.
Yvette Cronje: Yeah, that’s a good one. That’s a really good one. You’re making me think of something that I now want to go do immediately after this.
Douglas Ferguson: Love it.
Yvette Cronje: Is what if you had every person on your team create a personal coach for themselves, like a business coach or a, “Hey, I’m a junior designer. I want to become a senior designer. I want you to be a coach to me.” And have that constantly running for themselves. Because one of the things that I want to start doing as my team, and we’ve been working on a structure for this, is this sort of couch to 5K program is looking at each person on the team and thinking, “Okay, what does this team need?” Every designer is different and you have a visual designer and a UX designer and a creative technologist and a researcher, and they all have different needs and purposes within the process. How do we say we’re going to use AI to our advantage as a team? And a lot of that came down to the craft was really the very last step. All of the beginning stuff was, how do you think? How do you get it to be a partner for you while you’re thinking? How do you get it to ask critical questions to you while you’re going through your thought process? The base of that took a lot more of that sort of program than the actual production of it. And it made the production a lot more fun and less frustrating because also you’re getting to this place were you’re like, “Oh no, that’s not right, make this green. Oh no, that’s not right.” And you’re getting super frustrated versus all of the fun of the thinking process. And it also makes me think of psychological safety, how you mentioned some people might not be comfortable with thinking and talking through that thought process. It’s like, okay, so how do we as leaders really hone in on creating safety within our teams to be able to just say what you want to say? That’s how you learn. Let’s not shame it. Let’s not critique it. Let’s correct and ask good questions to the person to help them really grow.
Douglas Ferguson: Yeah. And to that point, you were making me think how valuable it is as a one-on-one tool. A lot of people record meetings and then use the meeting summaries, but I highly recommend leaders before, don’t just send out the summary, have a conversation with the agent about the transcript and shape it as a leader. Include things you know about that individual and push back on things that they’ve determined. Don’t let it just pick the next steps. Work with it as a companion, as almost like your coach to then give better coaching to the individual. And then if they also have their coach set up, they could take the transcript from the one-on-one plus your additional thoughts and bring that in. It’s like your one-on-one turns into a much deeper interaction because it’s not just the 15 or 30 minutes that you can spend with each employee. It’s like that plus the three to five minutes you spent with the agent refining it and then plus the time they spend with their agent refining it. And I don’t know, it can go much deeper and folks can maybe find better footing.
Yvette Cronje: That’s so true. That is such a good point. I did something, I myself also record meetings and have AI tools summarize them for me. And the other day, I was reading through one of them and I was like, “I feel like the summary is missing some things here.” So, I fed it into another AI that knows a bunch of stuff about the project and the people and whatever, and it was like, “Yeah, it’s missing a couple of things.” So, that summary came back quite different. And then I was like, “Ah, yeah.” I think there’s a couple of other things also. There’s nuance that it doesn’t pick tone of voice and skill sets of who the people are. And that’s where you as a people manager, you know these things, use them to grow your people and to move the project forward. And that’s your superpower now.
Douglas Ferguson: Yep. It’s funny because the same person that says, “This thing’s coming from my job,” is the same person I hear saying, “It’s not getting everything right.” And it’s like, do you realize how profoundly disconnected that is? You should realize that, “Oh, it’s not coming from my job because I’m noticing it’s leaving things out, but yet I can use this as a way for me to refine my thinking.” It might’ve pointed out something I had forgot because unless you have a photographic memory, you’re probably going to miss some things. And honestly, it’s a great stimulus for being reminded of the things that it left out because it mentioned X, Y, and Z. You’re like, “Oh, but we talked about A between B and C,” or whatever. And so, I feel like rather than being over judgmental on it or overly worried about it, why not lean into it and think about, “Well, what can this do for me?”
Yvette Cronje: Yeah. And this reminds me of that principle, since we were talking about principles of, maybe this is because one of my core skills is being a learning, I enjoy learning. I could have been a student the rest of my life and been happy if I could get paid for it, but it’s that notion of nothing is ever wasted. If you have the perspective of always, literally always trying to take something out of something, there’s nothing that you can say, “Nothing gets wasted in my life.” Sure, I might not have used the 10 rules and or the 10 steps exactly like that, but what did I use and how did this shape me as a person and how did this impact or influence another person or a project or whatever? And sometimes, it’s things that you’re not going to see right now. You’re going to see them come to fruition months or years from now in a person or probably whatever that might be. And it’s like that sort of skillset to be able to say, “Well, I believe that I’ve learned something anyway.”
Douglas Ferguson: I love that. It comes back to that growth mindset and curiosity, and it also reminds me of the adage, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” And if you can be the kind of person that finds as many models as possible useful, how can I apply this versus the kind of person that’s like, “Well, this is garbage, it doesn’t work,” right? It’s like being overly critical and dismissive of too many things doesn’t really leave us much ability to wonder and repurpose and reapply.
Yvette Cronje: Wonder.
Douglas Ferguson: And that’s where most innovation comes from, is when we’re able to take something and reuse it for a new purpose. The microwave oven is one of the prime examples of that, right?
Yvette Cronje: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, notability, I love what you said about wonder. One of our leaders constantly says that, they say, “Always keep your sense of wonder.” And even was it Leonardo da Vinci that said, “I’m not really a good artist at all. I’m just extremely curious.” And it made him do amazing things, and that’s a pretty amazing space to be in, I think.
Douglas Ferguson: Absolutely. Just hang around with kids more if you want to tap into your wonder. They have endless amounts of it. Somehow we lose it over time or it gets beaten out of us or something. I’m not sure. Well, we’re kind of coming up on our end here, so I want to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.
Yvette Cronje: Yeah. I hope that designers and folks in our industry can get really excited about this versus fearful that they can move into a space where let the AI do all of the production and the slog work for me, but really get excited about how this changes the value that you bring towards the world, not just your product or whatever, really the world, because we’re applying all of these things in the rest of our lives as well. And it’s a very exciting moment. I think, like you said, if we can lean into the excitement and the opportunity of it, I think it’s going to open up a lot more doorways and innovation, thinking about new products or new ways of doing things. I just think there’s a lot of space for that and I’m hoping people can get excited.
Douglas Ferguson: Totally agree. Well, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you and hopefully, we’ll chat more again sometime soon.
Yvette Cronje: Yeah, absolutely. It’s always good to chat with you, Douglas. Thanks for the lively conversation. I really enjoyed it.
Douglas Ferguson: Thanks for listening to New Friction. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a leader who’s in the middle of this right now. They’ll thank you for it. And if you want to go deeper, we bring leaders together through executive dinners and virtual masterminds. To learn more about our work or to inquire about exclusive executive events, visit voltagecontrol.com. I’m Douglas Ferguson. See you next time.
