Article · design ·
Generative UI Still Needs a Designed Sequence
AI models can now generate the interface. In AI strategy tools, the harder problems are drift, numbers nobody can trace, and a model that agrees too easily.
Thoughts
Articles
Longer-form thinking on leadership, innovation, and design. Lessons from 25+ years of building products, leading teams, and helping organizations find what's worth making next.
Articles
Kedron Rhodes
Article · design ·
Design Taste Needs a Strategy
Now that AI can build almost anything, designers are calling taste the moat. Taste that isn't tied to a where-to-play and how-to-win choice sets the designer apart, not the business.
Article · design ·
Synthetic Users Need Real Research
A panel of synthetic CFOs matched my conversations with real CFOs because a design team built it from fifteen real ones. Synthetic users work when someone talked to real people first, and all research has a shelf life.
Article · design ·
What Design Thinking Was For
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.
Article · innovation ·
Systems Thinking Is Bigger Than Your Product
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.
Article · leadership ·
Twenty Percent a Quarter
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.
Article · design ·
When Building Gets Cheap, Deciding Gets Expensive
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.
Article · design ·
Designing for the Moment Someone Decides Not to Trust the AI
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.
Article · design ·
What 25 Years of UX Taught Me About Designing With AI
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.
Article · design ·
Conversational Design Is UX, and Most AI Teams Are Skipping It
The design work in AI products moved from screens to sequences, prompts, and output contracts. It's still UX, and it still starts with where people actually are.
Article · design ·
What if Everything We Believe About UX Is Wrong?
Why the UX community's obsession with user delight is killing business value.
Article · leadership ·
Culture Reality
Culture can deliver or destroy strategy. A distribution company's sales culture shows how resistance to change can undo a customer experience transformation.
Article · leadership ·
Competition and Cost Realities
When leaders refuse to choose—between legacy and future, service and scale, investment and cost—they fall into the tradeoff trap.
