Wolf Brüning 💙 Design Systems
@wolfbruening.de
490 followers 400 following 540 posts
Lead UX designer, blogger, speaker, connector of dots and bricks, casual photographer. Creating digital experiences for OTTO. Writing for @produktbezogen.de ✏️ Topics: UX Design, Design Systems, Product Discovery, eCommerce, Lego 🏠 Hamburg, Germany
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Pinned
wolfbruening.de
Don't compare your work to what Design Systems Teams of 15 built in 5 years and as many iterations.

Don't compare your work to cleaned up "success" stories.

Don't compare your work to stuff from completely different contexts.

Listen to your users and build the right Design System for them.
wolfbruening.de
Vermutlich die selben Leute, die damals immer das Zeug von Content-Farmen gelesen haben und davor SEO-Texte. Der eigene Anspruch an Qualität ist dann doch vielleicht nicht so weit verbreitet, wie man das denkt. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
wolfbruening.de
Would be an ironic twist of fate, that humankind won’t be obliterated until 2027 just because banks lost faith in the technology. 😉
wolfbruening.de
Weil bei Konzernen fast alles darauf abzielt den Status Quo zu optimieren anstatt einen Wandel zu gestalten. Die sind gut darin, aus einem Milliardengeschäft noch 0,2% mehr Rendite rauszuquetschen. Wer neue Sachen startet wird da immer kritisch in Richtung eines möglichen Scheiterns beäugt.
wolfbruening.de
Und dann kauft in 10 Jahren sowieso noch kaum wer nen Verbrenner und dann stehen sie da mit ihrem toten Pferd.
wolfbruening.de
Wenigstens haben die da drüben keinen Reichstag, den man anzünden könnte.
wolfbruening.de
It's non-tech but I like this product "innovation" example. Let's solve problems no one ever had: like being unable to decide between flat and wave cut chips.
wolfbruening.de
If you tell ChatGPT to be the world’s best doctor or investment banker, keep in mind: it won’t actually become that. It’s more like an actor trying to mimic what it thinks the world’s best doctor or banker would say. So be mindful of which advice you take from an actor – unless it’s about acting.
wolfbruening.de
Maybe Lego has to pay licensing fees to Santa Clause. 😉

I bet the multitude of large leaf element makes it expensive. And likely it’s a massive built. Yet it feels rather small for 300… and the tiny Santa sled doesn’t help.
wolfbruening.de
I'm quite irritated. That doesn't look like a 300€ set by far…
wolfbruening.de
Et voilà, you have your AI future learning environment.

At least this is how I would do it if I were leading a larger product organization. How would you approach it?
wolfbruening.de
6️⃣ Over the course of months, you can extract useful practices and tools and bring them to other teams or the organization. You can bring in external experts, and you can switch out team members to integrate new perspectives, using the departing members as AI ambassadors in other teams.
wolfbruening.de
5️⃣ While the focus is on learning new ways to work, the team should work on a real product with real users and real company goals – not on fake or speculative projects. To generate meaningful learnings the team should feel accountable for its decisions, and face genuine user outcomes.
wolfbruening.de
4️⃣ The team should hold retrospectives frequently (weekly, for example) and document successes and failures.
wolfbruening.de
3️⃣ Even though there are different disciplines involved, everybody is entitled to work in every step of product development. The team should agree on who contributes what before each sprint and be encouraged to test new variants every other sprint.
wolfbruening.de
2️⃣ Give the team leeway and budget to explore a broad set of AI tools and models.
wolfbruening.de
1️⃣ Take an existing product team or staff a new one. Choose people who are open to new approaches and who already have experience working across disciplines. Make sure to integrate the usual disciplines like Product Manager, UX Designer, UX Researcher, Tech Lead, Developers, etc.
wolfbruening.de
Some roles will disappear, others will grow, and entirely new ones will emerge.

If everyone just optimizes their own role, you only improve at the micro level and miss the big shifts possible at the team and organizational level.

So here's what I would do:
wolfbruening.de
Let’s face it: AI will fundamentally change how we work in digital product development. Learning to work with AI is essential. But just plugging AI into existing methods won’t be enough. What’s your responsibility today may be someone else’s tomorrow.
wolfbruening.de
Only looking at how to use AI to augment the work you did in recent years won’t cut it. The change brought by AI will be so profound that it will redraw the lines between disciplines. So, how can you prepare your product org for the AI era? 👇🧵 (1/10)
This image is purely meant as illustration and is not additional content. It shows a group of experts and a robot (the AI) working together. The experts have mixed roles like "Designer & Developer", "Business Analyst & Test Automator" or "UX Researcher & Software architect".
Reposted by Wolf Brüning 💙 Design Systems
wolfbruening.de
In my experience "full stack" often means: backend dev who reluctantly does some frontend but most of the time neither really good nor efficient because she/he never thoroughly learned frontend because frontend is still looked down upon by many devs as "not real programming". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
wolfbruening.de
I‘d make them use only products with terrible UX. Even toilets with shitty UX.
wolfbruening.de
In zwei Wochen gibt’s wieder Lebkuchen und Weihnachtsmänner im Supermarkt.
wolfbruening.de
Hiring only full stack developers is a solution for a management problem (staffing flexibility) but at the cost of product team efficiency and user experience.
wolfbruening.de
What a nice office! I wish you a successful journey there. 🍀