Kedron Rhodes
I’ve been designing for the web since 1998, back when WWW stood for Wild Wild West. Today I build AI products people actually use. That’s the hard part: most AI pilots work, and then nobody uses them. In Crowe’s AI Studio, I sit where strategy, product, and change management meet to close that gap.
This is my corner of the internet, where I write, record the occasional podcast and newsletter about what I’m learning. Pull up a chair. More about me →
The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers by Maxwell King
Design thinking lost its teeth in business because people like me made the method the point. Drucker named the point in 1954: a business exists to create a customer. A confession, and an upgrade for designers and the executives who fund them.
In product circles, systems thinking usually means the machinery that builds the product. The system that decides whether the product matters connects a customer, a market, and a company's choices. Here's how I learned to see it.
At Gordon Food Service my team moved customer accounts to online ordering 20% a quarter, three quarters running. The target kept leadership investing. It also meant every new account landed on problems we had chosen to leave for later.
AI makes screens and prototypes cheap to build, so the scarce skill on a product team is choosing what deserves to exist. That choice belongs to design leadership.
Early hallucinations spent the trust professionals had in AI tools. We earned it back by splitting the work between the model and plain calculation, and showing people where one ends and the other begins.
My first blog post, in 2002, asked why we were rushing to use Flash. The questions I ask about AI products today are the same ones, and I still get them wrong.