The assembly layer is going away.

The assembly layer has been around since the beginning of digital product development. For engineers, it includes things like writing a function that calls an API and stores the results in a database. For PMs, it includes culling through experimentation data and collecting significant results into a slide deck. For designers, it includes specifying a button hover state for the thousandth time. For researchers, it involves going through open-ended survey results line by line and tagging each result.

“White-collar assembly work” is the digital equivalent of all of the various trades that go into building a house. It is not the conception and planning of the house, but rather the drywall, flooring, electrical, and dozens more essential, skilled functions. This work is noble and important, but in the digital world, a lot of it is rapidly being eaten by AI.

The next question to ask yourself then is am I an assembler?

I would argue that at least in design, most of us are some percentage assembler. It could be 5%, it could be 100%, but it’s rarely zero. I run the largest design team at Microsoft AI, and even I spend some of my time nudging things around in Figma, trying to make decks look sharp, and performing some truly lizard-brain level data entry.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

In order to prepare for a world where the nature of the work is changing so dramatically, Microsoft and many other companies are moving towards more of an Individual Contributor empowered environment. Some people assume this means all managers are going away. This is not the case. What it actually means is:

1. A true dual-track career path. Tech companies have been saying managers and ICs are rewarded evenly for 15 years now, but it’s often not the case in practice.
2. A requirement that every hire, whether IC or manager, is deeply involved in the product-making details.
3. A shifting of decision-making to the people closest to the work, where context is richest.

When people think of an orchestra of Individual Contributors, they picture everyone as a violinist. Perhaps you, as a lifelong IC, consider yourself a violinist.

What it really means though, is that everyone is a conductor now. It is your job to wave your arms expertly, and the machines will play the violins. As many violins as you want. And trumpets. And pianos. And sousaphones. Even in the dark, while you sleep, if you so desire.

What some companies are getting wrong right now is assuming those conductor jobs are mainly for PMs. Perhaps that is what’s behind this odd looking State of the 2026 Job Market survey. The data comes from a company called TrueUp, which I hadn’t heard of until today, but that’s probably just a me thing. Perhaps the data reflects reality, or perhaps design jobs aren’t accurately tracked by this company, but either way, this is not what I or a lot of my colleagues at other companies are seeing. If anything, most cross-functional teams are more underwater on design than on other functions.

Don’t You Forget About Me

Regardless, one thing that has absolutely changed is what we look for in the designers we interview. If you are in the job market now or will be at some point in the future, this post is designed to help you shape yourself into a better candidate for the design jobs of today and tomorrow.

As I first mentioned a year ago in The Future Favors the Curious, we are at a moment in time when orientation towards the future may supersede hard-earned experience with the past. Decades of wisdom in design can be a wonderful foundation on which to build even more expertise, but it can also mean unhelpful dogma about what the product-making process must look like. What’s helpful? A chicken-sexing like feel for identifying experiences that will and won’t resonate. What’s unhelpful? An insistence that static redlines be scrutinized by multiple levels of leadership and then handed off to engineering.

Some parts of AI-native product-making require rewiring your brain to know what is helpful and what is wasteful. How often have you seen a flawed project that an entire cross-functional team has worked on for weeks or months only for you to say “ugh, we could have saved thousands of person-hours if you did X, Y, and Z earlier”? How would your reaction change if you saw the same work but an enterprising designer got it working with live code in a single afternoon? “What a giant waste” turns into “That’s a helpful starting point!”

I should mention that the goal here is not to build a company full of product-makers who collaborate entirely with their computers and not their teammates. Ex-colleague Jess Rosenberg wrote a great piece that you should read in full. My favorite passage:

“I do think there’s something worth mourning in the transition from ‘we’ to ‘I.’ The solo builder, empowered by AI, is a kind of miracle and also a kind of loss. The miracle is obvious: democratized creation, reduced gatekeeping, the long-tail flourishing of ideas that never would have found support in the old institutional structures. The loss is subtler: the slow atrophying of the collaborative muscle, the gradual forgetting of how to think with others, the replacement of human to human dialogue & conversation with prompting.”

Let us not sit idly and create environments where people talk passionately to their computers and only reluctantly to their teammates.

Let us also not turn ourselves into output-obsessed monsters, spending 16 hours a day spinning up as many agents as we can, unable to sleep without wondering whether we could burn even more tokens on some other phantom obligations. AI Pyschosis appears to be real, and it’s important we modulate ourselves away from it, towards balanced lives in the real world. The goal isn’t to work 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week forever. It’s to work a healthy workweek — whatever that means to you — and have microchips carry out your well-conceived plans asynchronously. Don’t forget that the machines are supposed to work for us, and not the other way around.

Everybody Wants to Rule the World

So what has changed in the candidates we look for today? You probably guessed it, but it comes down to more conducting and less assembly. Essentially, can you guide a small group of humans and a large group of GPUs to produce the very best experiences in the world in timeframes unheard of until 2026? A year ago, it was enough to simply be experimenting and comfortable with LLMs. Now, it’s hard for me to imagine hiring anyone who is still just dipping a toe in. The uplift in superpowers is just too great to keep doing things the classic way. If you’re a designer and you bristle at this, think of how our friends in engineering are feeling. We may not even be looking at code at all in two years, but at least we’ll always be looking at, critiquing, and playing with design.

Aside from conductor skills, we’re also focusing on people who:

1. Take token design just as seriously as pixel design.
2. Are comfortable in engineering-dominated environments like VSCode and Terminal.
3. Don’t wait for others to tell them what to do.
4. Push the frontier forward, rather than just ape what very-online trendsetters are doing.
5. Make working software, not just the blueprints for it.

On that last point, Joel Lewenstein, my counterpart at Anthropic, had a really great answer to a question on the By Design Podcast about design being “downstream of engineering” at most companies. Joel said:

“Actual usable software is the lingua franca of Anthropic, and whoever can make that drives decision making, ideation, and roadmaps.”

Traditionally, the people who have ruled the tech world have been mostly engineers and very technical PMs, but leading roles are now available to literally everyone. Designers are in one of the best positions to raise their influence under these new conditions.

Let’s Dance

So how do you, as a design candidate, stand out and prove you have these modern skills that companies are looking for?

1. Do a self-assessment to see where you might be behind. Don’t rely on hiring managers to see your hidden potential. Other candidates for the roles you’re applying to are likely including entire working applications they built, not just static mockups of projects from five years ago. Don’t fret about who might be more advanced than you. There will always be someone. Just make sure you are comfortable with the new instrument panel and have some tangible artifacts to prove it.
2. Rebuild your portfolio site if necessary so it contains a very small number (3-5) of things you’re proud of. Using the LLM of your choice, you can rebuild your portfolio in a single night. You should probably spend more time on it than that, but the days of procrastinating weeks of handcrafted new HTML/CSS/JS are over. Coaxing an LLM to present your portfolio in a compelling way is itself proof of fluency.
3. Follow the tried-and-true format of presenting design work. What problem were you trying to solve? How did you know it was a problem? What variety of solutions did you try? What solution did you land on? Was it successful and if so, how did you know? This format is straightforward and hiring managers are used to evaluating it. It will ensure the depth of your process is communicated.
4. Many designers, whether right out of school, or 30 years into their careers, haven’t done “fully AI-native work” at their companies or on real projects yet. Don’t let that stop you. Build a casual game. Create a single-purpose app for a problem you’ve always wanted to solve. Hiring managers would rather see thoughtful, modern work on small or even imaginary projects than unimpressive work for billion dollar companies. Show what you can do, not just what the people who currently pay you ask you to do.
5. Don’t be shy about applying for positions you “are not qualified for”. Many companies (including us) post more positions at the Senior and Principal level because our systems follow an inflexible “one role, one level” policy, and we’d rather see seasoned candidates if we are forced to choose. That said, I’d hire a fresh-out-of-school designer with a great start and a demonstrably high ceiling over someone with 30 years of experience building unimpressive things. If your stuff is good, trust me that no one is going to laugh at your application. If anyone, you’ll probably stand out even more.
6. As always, applying cold is worth a shot but rarely the best way in the door. If you see a position or a company you’re interested in, find out exactly who the hiring managers are, and figure out a way to be helpful to them. Maybe you have an idea for a new feature or a way to fix a broken part of one of their products. Produce a working prototype of your solution. Maybe you are organizing an event they might feel honored speak at. Introduce yourself and ask them. They may be too busy to say yes, but the point is to break through the pack. Your ability to stand out with a hiring manager is really the first test of your creativity, and you’d be surprised at how many of your co-applicants (99%?) barely even try.

With those tips in mind, here are some of the many roles we have open at Microsoft AI right now:

• Principal Product Designer – News & Content Team (Puget Sound Preferred)
• Sr. Product Designer – News & Content Team (Puget Sound Preferred)
• Principal UX Research Manager (Puget Sound or Mountain View)
• Principal UX Researcher (Puget Sound or Mountain View)
• Principal Product Designer – Copilot Team (Mountain View)
• Senior Product Designer – Copilot Team (Mountain View)

Should I Stay or Should I Go

In trying to decide what legendary ’80s song to end this little post with, I think The Clash sums up the psyche of the modern designer best:

“If I go, there will be trouble. And if I stay, it will be double.”

A lot of us look around at all of the potential damage AI can cause and our first reaction is to turn away from it. Every time another slop cannon publishes a piece about how much more prolific they’ve gotten since getting the agents to fight each other, The Way of the Luddites seems more attractive than ever.

Then you think back to all of the previous inventions that threatened designers — lithography, the Linotype machine, Photoshop, the internet itself — and you remember this train ride has always been bumpy. Diving into the next part of the journey with both feet isn’t going to speed up or slow down the train, but it might end up taking you to places you never imagined… and that, for now, is worth the ride.

A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it. A thin desire is one that doesn’t… The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then deliver that reward without the rest of the package.

What a great way to delineate the two core types of activity we tend to pursue in life. Very similar to what Craig Mod calls “Tiny Loops”. Is there any doubt that the graph of these two types of activities have dramatically reversed over the last few decades? This is a great wake-up call to re-calibrate ourselves. No time like the start of a new year to begin.

In 1995, halfway through college, I determined I was going to be a designer. At that time, 99.99% of “professional designers” had no experience designing anything for the internet. You could have tasked some of the most accomplished designers at the time — Jony Ive, Paula Scher, David Carson, Paul Rand, Massimo Vignelli — with creating a simple 468×60 banner ad and none of them would even know what you were talking about.

Over the next five years, the world would discover what banner ads and the internet were, but most experienced designers stayed put in print, television, or whatever field they were already comfortable with. The designers who would go on to help shape the internet were from two groups:

• People brand new to the industry
• People who looked forward to starting over and getting good at something new

I was somewhere between the two groups, having spent a few years in print but leaning more into a childhood love for new technology than anything else.

Within a few years, the demand for internet-native designers exploded and created the thriving job market we have enjoyed almost uninterrupted until now. Analog design still produces some of the most amazing creative work on the planet, but the growth of that part of the profession has not been the same.

Running design at Microsoft AI and having done a decent amount of hiring lately, I can tell you that the patterns emerging now are exactly as they were in 1995. There is a giant population of designers who have a bunch of really great skills. Some of those designers will decide they are content doing the same sort of design they have done for their whole careers. Others will decide to learn as much as they can about AI and prepare for an industry that will look very different in 5 to 10 years. Finally, there is another group of people who have no design experience whatsoever but are so enamored with this new technology that they will teach themselves very useful skills in a short amount of time. Do not underestimate this third group as it’s easier than ever to fake it ’til you make it right now.

If you are content in your comfort zone, that’s perfectly fine. If, however, you are looking to lean into what’s next, here are some suggestions.

You are not (far) behind

One thing I tell people who are trying to get into running is “you are always only a month away from being in decent running shape”. What I mean by that is, your first run is going to be 5 minutes long before you tap out, but if you do it every day for a month, you’ll be able to run at least a mile or two.

I see so many people trying to fake their AI experience by adding those two letters to every job they’ve had for the last 10 years. You are not fooling anyone. 99% of designers’ “AI experience” has come in the last two years. You will very occasionally find someone who was super early, but even that doesn’t mean much, as they might not be very good. It’s like saying in 1995 that you had a Commodore 64 growing up. Cool, but not exactly an endorsement of your actual design skills.

Someone may have told you to pepper your résumé with references to AI so it gets past certain filters, but we run a big operation here at Microsoft with thousands of designers and we don’t filter like this. Furthermore, when I see someone doing this, I actually take it as a sign that I should be suspicious of what else is on their résumé. When I was in college, I was a rampant gilder of my résumé, so I understand the temptation. “Salad Bar Director” did not actually get me any jobs though. Don’t do it. Just be honest. In terms of calendar years, your competition doesn’t have much more AI experience than you do. The clock is ticking though, and designers are already learning to do extraordinary things each time a new model or technique emerges. Pay attention. Learn by doing.

Know how our field is changing

For as long as design has been a profession, there has been a debate about the relative value of generalists vs. specialists. My view has been that in digital product design, you usually want generalists, but every so often, there is no substitute for a specialist. Some people are looking at AI as a specialty right now, and that may be true in some parts of engineering like model training, but for design, it’s a tool that will make generalism more common and accessible. Even pre-AI, I have always preferred hiring designers who I can give an entire project to. I want people who can frame up a user problem, explore the solution space with functional prototypes, produce high fidelity production designs/code, and also be involved in the testing and refinement of said solutions. This is a LOT to ask of most designers, but the best generalists can usually play all four quarters of the game.

With the help of AI, there are fewer barriers to designers participating in all parts of the product making process. Want to quickly research a problem you suspect exists in the world? There are now tools to help you write and analyze that survey. Want to quickly mock up a dozen high fidelity interfaces just to get a discussion going? Now you don’t have to spend days on that. Need hundreds of illustrations in a consistent style? Plenty of tools for that. And perhaps the biggest barrier for some designers over the last couple of decades: turning your ideas into functional code. That future is now here.

For all the excitement about these advancements, they also raise uncomfortable questions. The most obvious is: do we need fewer designers now? To that, I would say yes, we need fewer designers (and engineers, and everyone else in product development) for the same amount of output. Do we need fewer designers overall though? That remains to be seen. The growth of the economy since the beginning of time has been based on productivity increases leading to greater total output of our population. So if you think we have already maxxed out our total output of products and services in the world, I would expect a nosedive in the amount of designers and engineers needed. But if you think we are only scratching the surface of product development, you should expect a future where millions of designers and engineers continue to do great things but much more prolifically. Think of the farmer 1000 years ago who could feed a few families vs. the farmer of today who can feed an entire town.

In order to prepare for this, you should anticipate companies initially employing fewer designers (and engineers, and PMs) to do the same amount of work they were doing yesterday. Managers aren’t going completely away, but organizations will flatten somewhat as companies concentrate their budgets on people close to the metal. As my colleague Jon Friedman said the other day, “there will be people directing AI, and people directing people and AI”.

Companies will increasingly ask the question they should always be asking regardless of technology trends: what is the smallest team of people I need to create the best version of this product? The difference this time is that we now have a transformative technology that can turn an inefficient team of 3 designers, 2 researchers, 2 PMs, and 50 engineers into a one-pizza squad of 1 designer, 1 researcher, 1 PM, and 7 engineers. Furthermore, the lines between job functions are blurred such that each member of that team can do some of what another member can. Engineers can help with design, design can help with research, research can help with PM, etc. There will even be one-person startups where the same person does everything and eats the whole pizza!

Another way our field is changing is that the term “product designer” will encompass more of the humanities than it did before. Our currency used to be mostly pixels, but now it is also words, personalities, and other emerging areas of focus. Content Designers and UX Writers may argue this has been the case all along, but until now, the market for pixel-focused designers has been much stronger. The best thing you can do to prepare for this expansion of design’s role is to poke around and get comfortable with all of the new powers you have at your fingertips. Go “program” the personality of a GPT for an hour. The process requires nothing more than plain English.

Learning is free

When I got into this industry, you needed to buy books and take expensive classes in order to learn how to use tools like Adobe Illustrator. There is nothing about designing for AI that requires you to spend significant money to learn. It’s all about the time you are willing to invest.

Furthermore, learning about the general field of design requires years of getting familiar with hundreds of concepts, but AI is such a nascent technology that you can count the new essential design skills on two hands right now. Image generation, prompting, evals, generative UI… there aren’t thousands of AI-specific concepts yet, so get started now.

From an employer perspective, I also don’t want to hear that you want a job here so you can start getting into AI. Just start. The most impressive applicants I’ve seen are people who have, on their own, created personal experiments with the sole purpose of learning the technology. I don’t need to see that you have used AI to help a multi-billion dollar company increase its profits by 200%. I’m also impressed seeing a series of album covers you made for your garage band using Midjourney, or how you have used a combination of your design skills, Recraft, and Lovable Dev to build a site for your non-profit in a weekend. There is no better quality in a teammate than initiative, and by showing you’ve cleared your own trail into the world of AI, you’ve shown me you might be curious enough to be an industry great one day.

Aside from understandable demands on your free time, there is nothing structural holding you back from knowing just as much about designing with AI as your competitors in the job market. If you’re looking for a couple of good newsletters to get started with, try Heather Cooper’s Visually AI or Xinran Ma’s Design with AI.

Don’t get discouraged by the hunt

I’ve worked at some of the smallest and biggest companies in the world and let me just tell you that we all have significant problems with our interview processes. If you get rejected by a company, it might be you, but there is just as much of a chance that it’s them. We’ve said no to hundreds of incredibly qualified candidates for a number of reasons, and only a fraction of the time is it because someone screwed up in their interviews. More often it’s because we are choosing one person between many qualified candidates. Or because we had to pause our process for any number of reasons completely unrelated to the candidates. Or because we screwed up in our evaluation of someone’s strengths and weaknesses.

If you’re not getting calls back from your applications, it could be because your portfolio needs work, or it could be because your approach needs work. More on each of those below. If you aren’t getting selected after interviewing, it could be because you truly didn’t interview well, but more likely it is because one person interviewed better than you did. That’s all it takes. Even at a giant company like Microsoft, it’s usually one person chosen per position. In other words, we are rarely able to hire every finalist who was qualified.

Get your book in order

These days, hiring managers will often pass judgement on your portfolio in less than 30 seconds. When you have 50 portfolios to go through in an afternoon, there are all sorts of things that will put candidates in the “No” pile quickly. If I can’t figure out how to navigate your site? No. If you have basic errors which show a lack of attention to detail? No. If I need to type in a password that you haven’t provided? No. The best portfolios show off a small handful of projects (3-5) straightforwardly, but deeply. Tell me:

1. What problem were you trying to solve?
2. Why did you think it was a problem? Research? Gut?
3. How did you explore the problem and solution space?
4. What did you end up with as a solution?
5. How did you measure if you were correct?

Importantly, remember to show a taste of #4 first for those of us with very short attention spans or a ton of stuff to get through. Wow me with the end result first and then show me how you got there.

Getting in the door is the same as it ever was

When I was in school, I remember being determined not to get jobs because of who I knew. I only wanted to get hired based on my portfolio. Only a couple of years into my career, however, I realized that that simply isn’t how the world works, and there is very little you can do to change that. There is no substitute for a trusted reference vouching for how valuable of a teammate you are. Do the social archeology to figure out the shortest line between you and someone close to the hiring manager. The reason this is so important is that what’s in your portfolio is only half your story. What you are like to work with is the other half, and to determine that, there is no better source than others who have worked with you.

To show you how important networking is: I’ve been lucky enough in my career to never be unintentionally unemployed. Every time I’ve left a job, it’s been on my own volition, and every time I’ve re-entered the job market, I’ve lucked out with multiple options. After I left my last job in 2022, I took a few months off before peeking my head up again. Within a few weeks, I ended up getting to offer stage with 5 companies, including Microsoft. I happened to be on LinkedIn one night and randomly saw a Head of Design post for Major League Baseball’s digital division in my feed. There was a one-click “Apply” button, so I hit it, just for kicks. 24 hours later I got a canned rejection notice. This whole paragraph contains enough cringey braggadocio already, but having specifically designed for ESPN, MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, the Mariners, Twitter, NBC, and even having a current offer in hand from Disney/ESPN, you’d think I would have at least gotten a call back! Nope.

The point is: no matter how perfectly matched your qualifications might be, applying to a position cold is like buying a lottery ticket. You might get lucky, but the chances are incredibly small.

Creating opportunities for your future self starts many years before you need your next job. Build relationships inside the industry, especially with recruiters. I always shake my head when I see people in tech speaking ill of recruiters. Sure there are some bad ones, but in design, the best recruiters are often in charge of filling the best positions. Treating them badly is not only unkind, but it’s also specifically bad for your future self. Whether you are an early career individual contributor or a longtime design executive, make an effort to know the very best design recruiters in the world.

If you think that you, a member of the creative class , are somehow above the world’s best talent matchmakers , think again. They have furthered the careers of thousands of people who are better than both you and me… and the best ones are some of the nicest, most interesting people on the planet.

These are the fun times

When it comes down to it, your future in design is the sum of all of your actions that got you here in the first place. The skills you’ve built, the artifacts demonstrated in your portfolio, your helpfulness as a teammate, your reputation as a person, and now more than ever, your curiosity to shed your skin and jump into an undiscovered ocean teeming with new life, hazards, and opportunity. Someone will invent the next CSS, the next Responsive Design, the next sIFR, the next TypeKit, the next IE6 clearfix, and the next Masonry for the AI era. That someone might as well be you.

These periods of technological turnover are the most exciting times to be a designer. They are when we get to flap around chaotically and create the interaction patterns for the next couple of decades. Dive in while you can, because in a few years, we’ll all be back to making the same things again.

For now, the future favors the curious.

It was 1978, and I remember my dad climbing up on our roof with a garden hose. Every couple of hours, he would wet the house down, top-to-bottom, and everything surrounding it. I don’t remember everybody doing this, but my Dad is a Meteorologist, and back then he worked at the SCAQMD, the regional agency charged with studying, regulating, and improving air quality in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. Because of his specific remit and where we lived, he had a deep understanding of the Santa Ana winds and their effect on the Palisades.

When my dad explained what he was doing, he would point northeast to the hills behind us and tell us that if the winds didn’t die down, the fire miles in the distance would come towards our tiny little house and there would be trouble. As a small child, I don’t actually remember being scared about any of this. Every year there was a fire, the smoke was always so far away and so barely visible that it just seemed like anything else in life at the time. And besides, dads are superheroes to their children, so of course there was no danger.

We ended up living in the Palisades until I was 15, when we moved up to Seattle, but in that time, these sorts of fires happened almost every year to some degree. The 1978 one was a big one though, and my dad had a flight scheduled to New York the following morning. He woke up every hour during the night to check the wind readings, and loaded up our Impala wagon for a prompt evacuation. That is how precarious things were, even 47 years ago. By sheer luck that night, the winds subsided, and the Palisades were spared. A few more hours of wind and 1978 would have been 2025. Same damage. Completely flattened.

I guess Pacific Palisades has always been a wealthy area, but wealth back then seemed less of a step-function than it is now. The “alphabet streets” where we lived seemed like the most modest of the neighborhoods; the place where teachers, government workers, and clerks lived. My parents bought our 1200 square-foot rambler for $38,000, and pretty much no one in the neighborhood had views of anything. The neighborhood was so named because the streets went from Albright, to Bashford, to Carey, to Drummond, to Embury, to Fiske, to Galloway, to Hartzell, to Iliff, to Kagawa. Felt really great not having to even look that up just now, but I will admit that I was Today Years Old before realizing there is no J. I wonder why. Each street was basically the same, although I distinctly remember Galloway having more tree trunks pushing the sidewalks up, making it a better route for jumping your Mongoose bike or Powell-Peralta board.

As a kid growing up in the ’80s, the Palisades had everything you could possibly want. It was a “free-range” neighborhood, where we could ride our bikes as far away as the Santa Monica pier without worry. Palisades Park was home to AYSO soccer, tennis, basketball, “Par Course” stations, and most importantly to me, little league baseball. I was part of the “orange” franchise which started you off as a Ranger, then a Twin, and finally an Oriole. Our patron saint was Mel Haggai, who up until now, I didn’t know had flown 30 missions over Germany as a gunner when he was growing up (!!!). Mel got me to switch from first base to catcher, where I could have more impact on games. We didn’t have a single left-handed catcher’s mitt in the entire league, so he bought me one with his own money. I also remember perennial umpire John Meyers, who took me, my friend Adam Segel, and a few others to Disneyland, only to have to deal with us getting thrown out of the park for jumping off of a few of the rides and causing havoc.

I remember several restaurants like Jacopos, Barerras, and Gladstones, but the center of the food universe in the Palisades from 1972 to 2007 was Mort’s Deli. I have never seen more of an institution in any town than Mort’s was to Pacific Palisades. What I wouldn’t give right now for a plate of latkes and a bottle of Dr. Brown’s.

Just a few more quick memories before moving back to the fires:

• Our immediate neighbors on Iliff: Rick & Chickee Jensen, Sue & Gene Stratton, Norman & Mimi Rainwater, Cathy Crantz and her family, John & Robin Tripp and their family.
• Classmates who would go on to become very well known: Leonardo DiCaprio, Oliver Hudson, Redfoo, Jason Segel, and Will.I.Am, amongst others.
• The shocking murder of Teak Dyer.
• My shortlist of favorite teachers: Mrs. Wong, Mrs. Petrick, Mr. Freedman from Pali Elementary and Mr. Baker from Paul Revere.
• The Malibu Feed Bin, where a giant ostrich chased me when I was 4 years old and scared the living shit out of me.

I imagine there are people around the world picturing everyone caught up in this recent disaster as multi-millionaires with 5 homes who will Pay Any Amount to Not Pay Their Taxes. The Palisades, however, also contained everything from people who moved there when it was more modest, to food service workers in mobile homes, which have now also burned down.

The displaced residents of the Palisades (and other burning areas of LA like Altadena) perhaps don’t look like what you think of when you hear the term “climate refugee” but that is what they now are. That is also what many more of us are likely to become as weather events get more extreme. We can pat ourselves on the back for not living in a fire zone or in other precarious places like Florida, but quite literally at any moment, we could experience a 9.0 earthquake in the Cascadia subduction zone that will be the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. If something like this hits Seattle in the next few decades, count me as completely unsurprised, and hopefully not dead. Some areas may be a bit safer than others, but we are all increasingly susceptible to something unexpected hitting. Even if you’ve convinced yourself the weather can’t hurt you, there are always meteors.

Predictably, thousands of people on social networks have suddenly become experts in large-scale fire prevention. Some people are convinced the Palisades was lost because of too little water pressure, too few firefighters, an offline reservoir, insufficient controlled burns, a mayor who happened to be on a trip, a losing mayoral candidate who allegedly would have prevented the whole thing, a firefighting budget that was supposedly cut but really was not, and yes, even DEI programs.

My meteorologist dad is now 90 years old, and still in perfect intellectual health. I went to visit him and my mom this weekend, and we talked a little bit about the fires and this formative piece of our lives that had been completely destroyed a few days earlier.

The thing I wanted to know most was the same thing everyone else probably does: could anything have prevented this, and if so, what? After all, we’ve known about this precise danger for at least 47 years and probably a lot longer. And when I say “precise danger”, I mean the entirety of Pacific Palisades getting burnt to the ground by a Santa Ana fueled fire.

I asked a lot of questions.

The first was whether that 1978 fire would have done essentially the same damage as this one if we didn’t get lucky with the winds dying down. He said it probably would have. This is important because it shows that no one thing that we did in the last 50 years caused this. Or more precisely, I should say “caused this possibility”. Perhaps it will come out later that a certain power line caused some sort of initial spark, but the important bit is that the likelihood of a catastrophic fire like this has been around for a very long time, and the possibility was only getting stronger. It was when, not if. Sparks happen.

The second thing I asked was about all of the ways fires like these can start. It turns out there are sources you probably already know about, like arson or lightning, but even a piece of glass lying in the dry brush can act as a catalyst. If you remember burning things with a magnifying glass and the power of the sun as a kid, you can picture what that might look like. Another potential source is sparks from power lines, and it’s particularly concerning to read that power lines near the flashpoints of the biggest fires don’t seem to have been de-energized during the peak winds. My dad explained that this is usually a last resort as people will not tolerate outages for days at a time for a risk they feel is so remote (more on this later), but certainly during the several hours when the winds were forecast to be hurricane strength, it seems plausible to have done something there. Like many aspects of this disaster though, it’s best we get the facts before passing final judgement. One thing my dad was particularly impressed by is that Ariel Cohen and the weather bureau got the prediction of wind conditions exactly right, to a level of accuracy you almost never see. We indeed knew everything was lining up for a catastrophically dangerous couple of days, and if you believe the governor of California (which I do in this case), we began a proactive response before the fires even started. Did energized power lines play a role, however? We’ll have to wait and see.

The next thing I asked is if he thought any of the things I mentioned above (i.e. controlled burns, more pressure in the hydrants) would have stopped this. He said probably not. We were not “50% more water or firefighters” away from preventing this. It was simply too big and spread too fast. This is the key bit: even though a lot of these fires start in the hills, far away from houses, the hurricane force winds carry the embers at hurricane speeds for miles. So even if the main fire is only advancing at a few miles per hour, the embers are spreading out like thousands of Molotov cocktails. This is why you can’t just do a controlled burn between the hills and the houses as a buffer. The Santa Anas launch the embers right across whatever your best laid plans might be.

So finally, we get to the most important part then. If we couldn’t have stopped the fire this week, was there anything we could have done to prevent this in the 47 years since the last time the Palisades almost burnt down?

The answer? Yes.

The first and most important thing that hasn’t happened in the decades since the last near-miss is establishing fire as an ever-present, existential threat in the community’s mind. You can tell this is the case by the sheer influx of money and people into the area lately. As a small example, I have some friends who moved there (on Iliff Street, in a rare twist of coincidence!) recently. If you told them there was a pretty good risk the entire town would burn down in their lifetime, they may have had second thoughts. Ditto for all of the real estate and business development that has transformed the formerly quaint village area over the last few years.

I am absolutely not implying that anyone already in the Palisades should have moved away. I don’t think I would have. You don’t just leave wonderful places you’ve put so much love into for a threat that may never affect you.

But the fact that this seemed like such a safe haven for newcomers shows the information gap that existed before last week. The insurance industry seemed to catch on recently, but to the average person in the Palisades, the risk of fire seemed more like perhaps an unlucky block getting destroyed, rather than the entire town.

To help explain the importance of threats remaining top-of-mind, my dad reminded me of his journey at the SCAQMD from the 1960s through the 1980s. He was part of a team in charge of improving the air quality of the South Coast Air Basin. This was mostly an exercise in reducing smog, and it was a long, successful journey that carries lessons for our emerging climate and fire crisis.

Growing up as a kid in the 1980s, I remember vividly the smog alerts every summer. One moment you are running around for hours, and then within a few minutes you can no longer inhale normally. You take quick baby breaths, walk inside, and cease physical exertion for the rest of the day. And when I say “can no longer inhale”, I don’t mean that it smells dirty. I mean your lungs reject the air coming in and seize up.

When you fly into LA today and see what you think is smog, rest assured it is nothing compared to what we had in the ’80s. The one advantage this public health problem had though is that it was in your face every day. Everyone in LA felt it daily and supported their government’s efforts to solve the problem. With the community behind it, the SCAQMD, California Air Resources Board, and the EPA introduced legislation that prohibited leaded gasoline, required catalytic converters, and moved forward with a variety of other actions that eventually reduced “very unhealthy” smog days from 160 (!!!) in 1981 to only 1 in 2021 and 2022 (!!!!!).

Think about that. If you lived in Los Angeles in the 1980s, just being alive was hazardous to your health for half the year. Now, it’s a single day where you might want to stay inside.

This achievement was due to the work of Federal, State, and Regional air pollution control agencies, along with the combined research efforts carried out by scientists at Caltech, the University of California, and other academic institutions, but it would have never been possible if the community of Los Angeles didn’t lock arms with their government and perform the collective action necessary to solve the problem.

Getting people to take fire seriously would have clearly been more difficult than it was for smog, but it’s the only way to have created the collective action necessary to change the conditions of the Palisades over the last 47 years to prevent the extent of damage that occurred. What sorts of things would have reduced the damage? Something like the following:

• The replacement of highly flammable large vegetation like eucalyptus trees with other alternatives.
• The xeriscaping of yards with less flammable materials than grass.
• The prohibition of wooden roofs, or at least a big insurance discount for replacing them.
• Improved building materials and methods designed defensively against fire risk.

Although the Palisades is almost completely destroyed, there are some buildings that escaped damage, and to my eyes, they look like modern projects that used more stucco, steel, and concrete than wood. More expensive? Yes. But this is probably the way we need to think about building now, especially in areas even remotely at risk of this sort of thing. Pacific Palisades is one of the nicest locations on earth, and I’m sure plans are already being drawn to rebuild it, but there is no doubt in my mind that those plans will require these methods and safeguards. There is no longer a choice to do otherwise.

If you live anywhere near the reach of the Santa Anas, there may still be time to take action before this happens again. There is a 100% chance it will happen again at some point, perhaps even within the next few days or at this time next year. Los Angeles only has a couple more months to get any rainfall at all this season, and if the Santa Anas revisit in the autumn to an even drier backdrop, who knows what further catastrophes await.

I’m not going to say any more about these particular fires because after awhile, it’s just more speculation. Even my dad would tell you this is just his opinion, albeit one rooted in a long career of climate science in and around the Palisades. What I will say though is that if we want to avoid more catastrophes like this, collective action is the only solution.

I haven’t even mentioned the idea of human-induced climate change at all in this post, because it frankly doesn’t even matter at this point. Extreme weather is here, whether we caused it or not. Even if you believe, as some people do, that the earth just does this stuff on its own, it’s beginning to kill us at an accelerating clip, and that should be something we can all band together against. Right?

Often times, it is the artists in society who provide the parables to light the path forward.

If you’re familiar with the graphic novel and HBO Series “Watchmen“, you may remember that one of the plotlines revolves around an ex-superhero named Ozymandias conjuring up a plot to save billions of people from nuclear war by uniting the world’s superpowers against a common enemy. He engineers a giant squid and launches it from space into the center of Manhattan, where it explodes, killing many. The strategy works as intended, and the world bands together upon realizing the threat is ostensibly coming for everyone.

That is exactly where we are right now.

Earth is raining calamities down upon us that should unite us as a species. Will we do what we did during the pandemic and turn against each other again? Or can we use this even bigger, spiraling threat to put our disagreements aside and perform the collective action necessary to maintain human life on earth?

The planet will be just fine without us. It is we who are endangered.

Every element moves more gracefully, every response loads much faster, and every detail is more considered. Copilot may be the tip of the spear when it comes to how we are thinking about our products over the next decade, but we’ve also begun to modernize Edge, Bing, and our news offerings. We are just getting started.

Here is a preview of a feature we are working on for Edge that allows you to co-browse the internet with your AI companion. It’s the most powerful addition to the web browser since video:

We aren’t just adding to Edge, but we are also — just as importantly — subtracting from it. Although Edge has grown browser share consistently for several years now, we’ve also grown our feature set a little too aggressively. Every so often, you have to step back from the bonsai tree, look at it from all sides, and prune. The Edge of tomorrow will be both simpler and more powerful than it is today.

Same deal over on Bing. We are pruning away old growth to make room for better-looking, more powerful search results:

There is a lot more going on in Microsoft AI as well, including a bunch of new things we are cooking up for MSN:

If you’re interested in joining the Microsoft AI team, we have a number of positions open right now that I’ve listed at the bottom of this post. If we already know each other, please reach out directly.

I mentioned in my last post a year ago how there were a lot of processes we needed to improve in the coming months. I detailed an unbroken chain of 8 steps for great products to emerge:

1. An idea that can improve lives if executed well.
2. Foundational research to light the path before design and coding begin.
3. Rich design explorations and prototyping to make the experience palpable.
4. Buy-in to build it at a level of quality that makes the team proud.
5. Impeccable UX engineering and UX writing to make sure every detail is dialed.
6. Well-conceived server-side engineering to make it scalable and maintainable.
7. Creative marketing to prime people for the experience.
8. … and finally, maybe more important that anything else on this list, the will to keep refining relentlessly after the experience is launched. This part is so often neglected as companies rush to build more things.

Although we are still in the first inning of this journey, I’m happy with the progress we’ve made across the board… in particular, steps 4 and 8. There is a different energy when everyone who is working on the product knows the standard is not “good”, not “better than our competitors”, but “the best version imaginable”. We are not there yet with any of our products, but there is no confusion where the bar is.

Reorienting our cross-functional teams to prioritize user experience has been a gratifying (and ongoing!) challenge. The vast majority of companies are not set up this way for a variety of reasons, some good, and some bad. In some industries, surviving might mostly about cost minimization, and not user experience. In other industries, “good enough” might be all people expect or need. But in just about all companies, there is some form of diminishing returns when it comes to how much time is spent getting every detail just right. The question is: where does a company draw the line?

One sign your company draws the line too low is if people insist that every detail, no matter how esthetic, be rigorously tested in order to prove it is instantly metrics-positive. This is a sign of a culture that rejects the value of taste and long-term vision.

Does that mean you should test nothing? Of course not. You should test everything, at the very least, to prevent accidentally messing something up. I still remember more than 20 years ago, during my first week at ESPN, causing our entire front page to disappear because I forgot a semicolon in a Javascript file. Testing for safety and information, though, is different than testing as religion. Furthermore, there are some things — particularly in the world of large language model training — that should absolutely follow a cycle of train/test/release/repeat.

Culturally speaking, this rebalancing of our values has created a spark for great work to emerge. Many of the same people who have been working on Bing, Edge, MSN, and Copilot for years simply have a new set of product-building principles now, in addition to some great new teammates and refreshingly smaller, evenly staffed cross-functional teams. It’s been wonderful seeing everyone exercise muscles that show up more often in startups and creative agencies than in 49-year old tech companies. The ingredients have been here all along, but the recipe is changing.

Speaking of ingredients, we are looking for more Designers and User Researchers to join the team at Microsoft AI.

These positions are United States only, Redmond-preferred, but we’ll also consider the Bay Area and other locations:

• Principal UX Researcher
• Design Director – News & Interests
• Principal Designer – News & Interests
• Senior Designer – News & Interests
• Principal Designer – Consumer Advertising
• Principal Designer – Growth
• Senior Designer – Growth
• Principal Designer – Rewards
• Principal Designer – Design Systems

These positions are specifically in our lovely Mountain View office:

• Creative Producer
• Motion Creative Director
• Brand Writer
• Principal Product Design Lead

Note that we are looking mainly for experienced, hands-on individual contributors to join our team. If inventing the design patterns for the next phase of the consumer internet sounds right up your alley, we’d love to talk to you.

We are living in the golden age of ice cream.

In the 1970s, we had a few basic flavors to choose from: vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, chocolate chip, mint chocolate chip, and rocky road. There were a few shops like Baskin Robbins that marketed some scary stuff like Rum Raisin, but if you were just getting ice cream at the supermarket or some other ordinary location, those were your choices.

There also wasn’t as much science to ice cream back then. The term mouthfeel was still relatively obscure. It all seemed perfectly good back then because… ICE CREAM!!! … but compared to what we have today, it was, as the kids say, “supes basic”. In the 1980s, along came the frozen yogurt craze which pointed to how much untouched frontier was ahead of us. Shoutout to Humphrey Yogart, by the way — the world’s best named frozen dessert shop. Shoutout also to Aaron Cohen’s Gracie’s, which not only has excellent ice cream, but the world’s only bathroom dedicated to Dolly Parton.

Anyway, we’ve learned so much about fat content, texture, and flavor combinations since then that we have practically invented a new food group.

A few years ago, during a trip to the underrated gelato mecca that is Croatia, I had a variety which tasted different than anything I’d ever tried. It was a “fig yogurt gelato” from a little shop in Cavtat. I usually stay away from frozen yogurt because it’s generally not as good as ice cream, but this was intriguing. A great flavor (fig), combined with a beautiful tartness (yogurt), along with best texture for frozen desserts (gelato). It was outstanding, and I have not been able to find anything like it ever since…

Until yesterday!

Behold, Hellenika Cultured Gelato:

I don’t think I will ever purchase another brand of ice cream at the store ever again. It is the most perfect ice cream I have ever tasted. The creamiest mouthfeel, wonderful flavor combinations, and that little bit of tang which reminds you this is no ordinary substance.

Hellenika is a small creamery run by three Greek/Australian siblings with a single location in Pike Place Market in Seattle. Until recently, it was not available in stores, but you can now pick up pints in Metropolitan Market.

If you live in Seattle, you need to try this immediately.

If you don’t, you should try to get someone to mule you some in dry ice. Hopefully one day it will ship on Goldbelly.

Don’t get me wrong. I like a good low-grade Blue Bunny mini-cone as much as the next person, but I feel like we’ve passed through some sort of intergalactic hyperspace with this gelato. The future is now. Get this to your freezer any way you can.

The good old days when America was “great” aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics or improvised explosive devices. Or when you were 15 and athletes and musicians still played hard and hadn’t sold out.

I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine around 2016 about this, and he artfully explained this theory to me at the time. It was an aha moment for me, as I tend to view each new decade as “the best one” because of how the world has advanced over my lifetime. Your view on this appears to depend quite a bit on the degree to which the news you read enriches or poisons your psyche, but also the happiness and agency you feel over your own life as you’ve grown from a child into an adult. For some, this arrow points up, for others, it points down, but I bet the biggest increase in the last decade or so is those for whom the arrow points up but feels like it points down. Outrage and fear-fueled information platforms are partially to blame, but so is the very American culture of determining your own happiness by comparing yourself to your neighbors or peers.

I had the good fortune to attend the excellent Pearl Jam concert at Climate Pledge Arena last week, and it reminded me of something I already knew: I liked music in the 1990s more because I had the excitable mind of a teenager, and being 30 feet away from them brought me back to the very best of those times… but you couldn’t pay me enough to go back in time to any decade.

There is no time like the present!

“Here’s where the science gets really ugly. The more addicts rely on these stimuli, the less pleasure they receive. At a certain point, this cycle creates anhedonia — the complete absence of enjoyment in an experience supposedly pursued for pleasure.”

A spot-on analysis of where we are as a society with our addiction to short-form entertainment and distractions. I really only see one way out of this (for me, at least) that is simple and resolute: ditching the smartphone. I have tried this for periods of time and it’s been perfectly fine in my personal life, but once you need to carry a smartphone for work, complete elimination becomes tricky. I’ve moved back to my iPhone Mini, which helps a bit, but the thing that would really do the trick would be a phone that only did messaging, phone calls, calendar, Teams/Slack, and maybe Maps. I honestly don’t even need a camera, though I’d understand that addition.

I usually write a lot about the companies I work at but have held off until now because we haven’t been hiring. Well now we are! We’re specifically looking for Designers and UX Engineers to work on our design system for Copilot. Some of these positions are on my team and based where we have offices (Puget Sound, the Bay Area, Atlanta, New York, Vancouver, Barcelona, Hyderabad, Beijing, and Suzhou) and some are on adjacent teams and can accommodate fully remote work. If you are a Designer or UX Engineer with a passion for design systems and AI, we’d love to chat.

So what has year one been like? The good and the “needs improvement”.

One of the reasons I decided to join Microsoft was I missed the joy of in-person product-making. I know not everyone feels the same way so I’m not trying to make any broad statements about local vs. remote work, but for me, it has been even more refreshing than I expected. I usually come in 3-4 days a week, while others on the team are anywhere from 0 to 5.

It’s funny, sometimes I will wake up on a Monday and think to myself “ahhhh, this is going to be a chill work-from-home day” and by the end of the day, I realize I’ve been staring into a screen on video calls for almost the entire day and how much that slowly saps my energy. Meanwhile, in-person days are filled with walks, whiteboarding, and energizing sessions with some of my favorite teammates I’ve ever had. I realize not everyone feels this way about being in the office from time-to-time, but I do. Even our fierce, interdepartmental karaoke battle helped bring a bunch of teams together who had never met before.

The other great thing about lucking out and joining when I did is that we are embarking on one of the rare paradigm shifts that occurs in technology maybe once a decade. The 1980s were about personal computers. The 1990s were about the internet. The 2000s were about smartphones. The 2010s were about the cloud. And the 2020s will be about AI. The really powerful thing about all of these developments is that they don’t replace each other, but rather they build on each other. AI is the result of everything that came before it. If you got into design to help shape the culture of the world around you, these are the moments you treasure.

These turning points are also wonderful because they give you a chance to reawaken to your Beginner’s Mind. I have learned more in my first year here than at almost any other time in my career. Not only does the pace of technological change in AI force you to build skills as you go, but there are so many amazing engineers, designers, researchers, writers, marketers and other creative people to learn from, that it happens almost automatically.

When I was interviewing here, not even my prospective new boss told me about any of what was behind the curtain. Only during my first week did I find out all we are working on to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. That is Microsoft’s mission statement, if you hadn’t heard it before. It’s an uncommonly good filter with which we can all ask ourselves every day “does this project actually do that?” It’s quite freeing as it gives you license to question projects at every stage of development.

Another thing I’ve loved about my first year here is that I joined a group that has figured out how to ship very quickly. That also has its downsides, as we have plenty of craft problems to solve, but it’s great working for one of the largest and most established companies in tech and being able to ship within weeks of designing something.

One more thing that’s blown me away is the Inclusive Tech Lab, where we work on new technologies to make our products inclusive to people all of abilities and walks of life. No one experiences technology the same way, and teammates like Dave Dame and Bryce Johnson do a ton of great work to make sure that’s top of mind for everyone.

Finally, one of the unsung benefits of working for a native Seattle company again is that Seahawks stuff is all over the place. Presentations, charity auctions, everyday office attire… you name it. It’s nice to not be the only one with good taste in football teams.

I am no corporate shill, however, so I must also be honest about some of the things that need improvement over here.

At the top of my list is that Microsoft has not yet fully embraced the role design plays at most other tech companies. We were engineering-driven in 1975 and we are squarely engineering-driven in 2023. The world, meanwhile, has changed in that time. It is no longer sufficient for complex things to work. They must also shed their complexity. People expect the products and services they spend their time and money on to delight. To overdeliver. To give them superpowers. Those sorts of qualities only materialize when you have supergroups building products.

In music, a supergroup is when a singer, a guitarist, a bassist, a drummer, a keyboardist (and so on) who are all at the top of their game come together to create an album. In tech, a supergroup is a researcher, a couple of designers, a product manager, and a Volkswagen Bus or two full of engineers. Up until a decade or so ago, a lot of tech companies followed the model of packing projects with as many smart engineers as they could find and only sprinkled in things like design and research as necessary. I still see some of this thinking in pockets over here. I’m trying to influence things, but it’s a delicate dance, especially when the company has had such enormous success by doing so many other things very well.

I think there are plenty of people here who still feel like being engineering-led is unequivocally good, but to those people I would say that in a modern tech company, design is engineering. It’s no better or worse, but it does have very different leverage in the building of a product.

On the plus side, Microsoft has never had as much design and research talent as it has right now, and we are increasingly looked to by the executive leadership team as lighters of the path. When we go into high-stakes meetings, we always go in with pixels and prototypes, which are uniquely good at cutting through bullshit and ambiguity. As a wise person once said, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.

There are a ton of amazing designers and researchers who have been here for 10 and even 20+ years whose hard work has led to this moment of evolution for the company, and every day I am in awe of their perseverance.

Next on my list is how often we get in our own way with “procedural goo”. I’ve worked in plenty of large companies including Twitter, Disney, and MSNBC, and have never seen the level of approvals, paperwork, and rules that get in the way of speed and autonomy here. Just transferring someone from within my own org to a slightly different role within my own org took a dizzying amount of effort. At most companies, this would have been about 10 minutes of work: one minute from me and nine from someone in HR trying to navigate to the right screen in Workday.

Then we have acronyms. My GOD do we have acronyms. I actually liked acronyms before I got here! I usually think they are cute. After seeing a new one almost every single day since getting here, I have resolved to never use them either inside or outside of work. I even say “Cyan Magenta Yellow Black” out loud if I have to!

Finally, the last thing on my list — and this is where you come in — is dedication to craft. It is so tempting to try and “science” your way into viable products these days. Build the beginnings of a customer base through rudimentary product-market fit, and then fastidiously optimize your funnel, your game mechanics, your viral loops, your push notifications, and so on and so forth. These gains are not always easy to come by, but they are rooted in ruthless experimentation and allegiance to short-term data. Our north star is at least pretty pure — Daily Active Users — and that metric is usually a good indicator that you’ve made something people like, but doctrinaire allegiance to almost any singular metric can quickly make people forget why we are in this profession to begin with: to improve lives. Or to put it squarely in Microsoft parlance again: to help every person and organization on the planet achieve more.

If you ever find yourself asking the question “how can we increase Daily Active Users?” instead of “how can we make our product better for people?”, you’ve already lost. Metrics are trailing indicators of qualitative improvements or degradations you’ve made for your customers… they are not the point of the work.

Recently, we’ve made some excellent strides in prioritizing qualitative product improvements even when they fly in the face of metrics we care about, and it’s really gratifying to see. It reminds everyone that a product is the collision of thousands of details, and the crafting of these details requires taste.

Designers are often looked to as “owners of craft and taste”, but craft is very much a team sport. It’s not just how things look and feel but also how they work. I very much like how Nick Jones (channeling Patrick Collison) at Stripe put it in this video:

“What we put out there should quite plausibly be the best version of that thing on the internet“.

To do this takes an unbroken chain of excellence:

1. An idea that can improve lives if executed well.
2. Foundational research to light the path before design and coding begin.
3. Rich design explorations and prototyping to make the experience palpable.
4. Buy-in to build it at a level of quality that makes the team proud.
5. Impeccable UX engineering and UX writing to make sure every detail is dialed.
6. Well-conceived server-side engineering to make it scalable and maintainable.
7. Creative marketing to prime people for the experience.
8. … and finally, maybe more important that anything else on this list, the will to keep refining relentlessly after the experience is launched. This part is so often neglected as companies rush to build more things.

Some people would look at this list and think “yep, makes sense”. Others would look at it and think “sounds slow and not very agile”. The trick to balancing this level of quality with speed of development is realizing that it’s often more efficient to experiment in step 3 than it is in step 6. This is why so many modern tech companies realize that hiring more designers and researchers doesn’t waste time and money… it saves time and money. With less than a week of one designer’s time, we can produce a wide variety of prototypes to test with real people. Just recently, we created an entire GPT-powered research application without even bothering a single engineer.

Design is engineering.

Finally, a brief note about prototyping. I would argue that the most impactful innovation in the craft of product development over the last 20 years has been the rise of rapid design prototyping. Prototypes that demonstrate an experience are useful not just in usability testing, but also in selling ideas up and across the organization. Engineers hate working on things that haven’t been thought through or “appropriately politicked” yet, and if you can bring them a working prototype that has already been vetted with users and various stakeholders across the company, they will love you for it and work hand-in-hand with you to get every detail right.

Design prototypes are the currency of a high-craft, high-speed product development organization, and they are increasingly the currency of our team.

Alright, back to the hiring. I plan to hire against the entire growing list of products our team is responsible for: Copilot, Windows, Edge, Bing, Start, Skype, SwiftKey, and so much more… but for now, this is a concerted hiring effort centered around Designers and UX Engineers to help build out the emerging design system for Copilot and our suite of AI-powered products.

If this is you, please have a look at the following roles we’ve just posted:

• Designer II
• Senior Designer
• Principal Designer
• UX Engineer II
• Senior UX Engineer
• Principal UX Engineer

We’d love to work with you on the future of design systems at Microsoft!

I recently got back from a trip to Korea where this stuff was all over the place. I had heard about people rubbing snail slime on their faces before but never really gave it much thought since I have quite literally never found any sort of face cream/lotion/serum that seemed any better than anything else. They are usually either too greasy or they evaporate too quickly. I’ve had pretty splotchy, combination skin my whole life, and oddly the only thing that has ever helped me is the sun. Come fall and winter, when sun is harder to come by in Seattle, things usually deteriorate pretty rapidly.

On a whim, I decided to buy three snail-based products: this cleanser, this serum, and this cream. Total cost: $45. (These are not affiliate links.)

It’s been almost two months now, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I haven’t had a single dry patch, blemish, or even a hint of redness since the very first application. Just a dollop of serum in the morning, a regular face wash with the cleanser at night, and a spot of cream right after. Whole thing takes a only a minute.

Other than the results, the best thing about this stuff is the way it feels. It’s just a super thin layer that stays on all day and you don’t even notice it.

Anyway, skin care is way off of my normal beat, but I figure if you’re looking for something new yourself or want to give an amazing gift this holiday season, you owe it to yourself to try this stuff! It really does work.

In confident pursuit of that feeling, I’m thrilled to be joining Microsoft to run Design & Research for their Web Experiences organization.

I was Microsoft-adjacent 10 years ago at MSNBC.com in Building 25, but this will be my first time as a blue badge, so to speak. I’m also thrilled to be joining Liz Danzico and John Maeda, who have also started at Microsoft in the last several months. I’ve known them both for a long time and have wanted to work with them forever.

There are several things which drew me to this opportunity, but at the top of the list is the people. Not just Liz and John, but the thousands of teammates in Seattle, Vancouver, Hyderabad, Barcelona, Beijing, and many other cities. There are certainly some great solo efforts in tech, but almost all of the best work I’ve been around has been the result of getting the right people jammin’ with each other. In my first several days here, I’ve already met so many of those people, and I can’t wait to continue the momentum Albert Shum created by carrying the torch for one of the best Design & Research teams in the Pacific Northwest.

The second thing I’m super excited about is the scale of the work. I’ve worked on the largest sports site in the world and one of the largest social networks in the world, but the properties in this group reach well over a billion people. Between the (refreshingly fast!) Edge browser, MSN, Bing, and several other products, Microsoft has quietly built up one of the top five properties in the world in terms of traffic and reach. They’ve also done it with humility, knowing how far they are from being perfect. I also love that so many of these products can and will be so much more as we begin to use some of the technology that’s emerging within Microsoft. In my first two weeks, I’m already overflowing with ideas.

Finally, the other thing I’m most excited about is getting back into the office in a flexible hybrid environment. I’ve worked in-person for most of my career and remotely for the last four years, and where I’ve landed is that everyone’s preferences are different, and it’s just tradeoffs all the way down. Where you land depends on a mix of your personality, your life outside of work, and what type of job you have. For me personally, I very much like being around people and feel like I do better work when I am… but I also like getting back my commute time a couple of days a week and making daily jogging more convenient. Also, Henry (pictured above) enjoys the extra lap time. Microsoft’s hybrid policy is a nice balance, and it sounds like exactly the right setup for someone like me.

Speaking of the exactly right, this also feels — for me at least — like exactly the right time to join Microsoft. The company has been through several distinct eras over the decades, but this feels like the era of re-commitment to the planet. To customers delightful experiences, to employees a great environment, and to the natural world, a smaller and eventually negative carbon footprint.

It’s a new year, and I couldn’t be any more here for it!

I’ve been using Pinafore (along with a user stylesheet I created… feel free to grab it for yourself) to use Mastodon on the web, and a combination of Ivory and Metatext on my iPhone. Ivory looks a bit nicer but Metatext has a Notifications tab that acts more you’re used to it working on Twitter.

If you want to move all of your activity over wholesale, go to town. If, however, you want to keep publishing Tweets on Twitter and have them automatically publish to your Mastodon account as well, this short guide is for you. The entire process should take around five minutes. It’s mostly just clicking around on a couple of websites.

Important: If you do this, the goal should not be just replicate your Tweets and never visit or engage on Mastodon. The goal should be to help you build your Mastodon presence and save you from having to manually double-post. Ideally you quickly get to the point where Mastodon becomes your primary crib.

Step 1: Open a Mastodon account

If you’ve already done this, great. If you haven’t, head to any server you want — like mastodon.social, for instance — and set up your account. You can always switch your server (along with any followers you accrue) later, so don’t stress about the server you choose.

Step 2: Open an IFTTT account

IFTTT (“If This Then That”) is a freemium service that lets you automate things on the internet. You can use the free account for now. The only difference for our purposes is that the free account will only poll your Twitter account for new Tweets once an hour. This is only a problem if you Tweet a lot per hour because they will all get posted to Mastodon in batches, once an hour. If this becomes a problem, you can always upgrade to the paid version for two bucks a month. For now, head over to IFTTT.com and set up a free account for yourself.

Step 3: Get your Mastodon posting URL

Head over to your Mastodon account on the web and choose “Preferences” in the lower right corner. Then choose “Development” at the bottom of the left navigation. Then choose “New Application” in the upper right. Under “Application Name”, type in whatever you want… something like IFTTT. Under “Application website”, type in https://ifttt.com. Leave the “Redirect URI” field alone, and make sure *only* the write:statuses box is checked. Hit the Submit button at the bottom of the screen, and then click the name of your application (e.g. IFTTT) on the resulting screen. Now open a new tab in your browser, leaving this page available for later.

Step 4 (Final step!): Connect your IFTTT account to your Twitter and your Mastodon accounts

Head back over to IFTTT.com and hit the “Create” button in the upper right. Click the big “If This” button, search for “Twitter”, and then click it. Scroll down and choose “New Tweet by a specific user”. Choose your own Twitter account and IFTTT will perform the necessary authorization. Then, type the username to monitor (in this case, your own), and hit “Create Trigger”. Now click “Then That” and search for “Webhook”. There should be a tile on the resulting page that says “Make a web request”. Click that. You’re almost done. For the fields, enter the following:

URL:
https://mastodon.social/api/v1/statuses (replace “mastodon.social” if you chose a different server above)

Method:
POST

Content Type:
application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Additional Headers:
Authorization: Bearer AccessToken (replace the word “AccessToken” with the access token from the one on the Mastodon page you left open above)

Body:
status={{Text}} (Everything inside those brackets is the content of the Tweet… you could prepend some custom text right after the equals sign if you wanted)

Now hit the big “Create Action” button, then the “Continue” button, then the “Finish” button, and BOOM, you’re done!

The next time you Tweet, within an hour, it should appear on Mastodon. If you upgrade your IFTTT account, it should lag by only a few minutes.

I encourage you to move your primary posting and reading activity over to Mastodon, but this is a good baby step if you’re not quite ready for that yet. It’s also a great way to set up news bots. We need more of those. You can follow the Axios newsbot I created here, or you can follow me on Mastodon here.

One of our generation’s greatest and most influential designers hasn’t slowed down as much as he has simply shifted focus. A great example of splitting your life into chapters and knowing when it’s time to explore the next one.

As someone who competed against Figma for a couple of years, I want to talk briefly about what makes them so hard to catch, and why I think Adobe ultimately decided they would never beat them:

Performance.

Even though I have spent over 20 years in the design industry working directly on consumer products, I never fully appreciated the importance of performance until working in the design tools industry.

Most digital consumer products are used in short bursts over a long period of time. Think about the Amazon app on your phone. You open it maybe once a week, peck around for what you need, hit Buy Now, and you’re on your way. If there is a two-second lag between purchasing and getting your confirmation screen, you don’t even think twice about it. Even in the case of an outright error, you just shake your head, hit reload, and things are usually fixed.

With professional production tools though — whether design, engineering, or otherwise — full-time craftspeople spend almost every hour of every work-week inside of your software. Every time something goes even remotely astray, it is noticed. Putting aside catastrophic stuff like data loss, even things like cursor lag, screen flicker, progress bars, and scroll/zoom performance are tiny paper cuts that form into pools of blood by the end of each day.

Figma did a lot of things right over the ten (yes, ten!) years they’ve worked on the product, but one thing they did that no one else has been able to replicate is meet and in some cases exceed native app performance inside of a web browser.

Nothing Figma has accomplished in the marketplace would be possible without this, and it is the thing that competitors have struggled the hardest to replicate. When you build software using native code, you get a lot of stuff for free. Need a scrolling list? Apple, Microsoft, and Google have multiple pre-built components you can use. Need to draw one semi-transparent shape on top of another? The system already knows how to render that. Need to optimize it all for speed? Most of that work has already been done.

Inside of a browser though, the work is rarely done for you. Even in instances where someone has already built a component, it’s often too slow or glitchy to use in a professional development environment. So what did Figma do about this? Over the course of several years, they:

• Built their own components and architecture painstakingly from scratch and never settled for “good enough”
• Worked with organizations like WebKit and Chromium to improve web browsers themselves (the benefits of which go beyond Figma)
• Detailed out in the open what they were doing and how

It was this last one that really made me see how wide the moat was for the first time. Normally companies keep their secret sauce secret. After all, why would you want to give your competitors any information that might help them compete? But a company who routinely publishes information that is useful to competitors? That is some confident shit right there. It reminded me of a tweet I can’t find from several years ago:

“The design tool war is already over, but no one knows it yet.”

Fast forward a few years and everyone who has tried to match Figma’s all-around performance has fallen short. Private companies like Sketch and InVision. Public companies like Adobe. It’s not for lack of effort by hundreds of incredibly smart people. It’s just really frickin’ hard. Combine that with the fact that Figma is a moving target who is now building entirely new capabilities, and you can see why Adobe decided this wasn’t just a move they wanted to make… it was a move they had to make.

… which brings us back to a lot of the reaction we are seeing on Design Twitter today.

I don’t think people mind the abstract concept of Figma being acquired by another company nearly as much as they mind the very real threat of Figma losing what makes it so special in the first place: focusing maniacally on performance, thinking differently, and optimizing for user experience above all else. The backlash is an expression of how a lot of people feel Adobe has done in those categories over the last decade.

If I’m Adobe, I am printing out as many Tweets from today as I can, making a book out of them, and then doing this:

After that, I’m letting Figma lay the tracks for the next decade of this industry and rallying the thousands of talented people at my own company to rethink how the entire organization builds software. Within the next several years, it’s going to be possible to go from idea in the morning, to prototype in the afternoon, to working code in the evening… and the company who can do that most thoughtfully is going to be one of the most important companies in the world.

Below is my dollar-store wisdom, in case you also want to enjoy fast food in moderation.

First, some golden rules:

Rule #1

No soda. This is an easy one. A medium Coke is 210 calories, 56 grams of carbs, and no protein. It’s also about $2 for something that costs about a nickel to make.

Instead, go with free tap water or an unsweetened iced tea. Zero calories and nothing artificial. Another nice hack that works at some places is going to the soda fountain and filling your water cup with club soda. There are usually two small tabs and one of them says “water”. The other one is the “off-menu” free club soda.

Rule #2

No fries… or if you must, get a small every now and then. I understand people like fries. I like fries too. But even a small order of fries is another 220 calories, 29 grams of carbs, and only 3 grams of protein.

Rule #3

Study menus for what’s overpriced and what’s underpriced. For instance, at Mickey Dee’s, a McChicken, a hamburger, and a 6-piece McNuggets are all $2 apiece or less. Meanwhile, a Double Bacon Quarter Pounder with Cheese is $7.

These places all encourage you to buy the Value Meals, but since you aren’t getting the soda or the fries, individual prices matter.

Now onto the meat of the matter: what should you order at each of the major national fast food places?

Restaurant-specific recommendations

The general pattern you are aiming for is “one or two protein-filled items and a water or tea”. Let’s see what each place can offer you in that regard.

McDonald’s

People like to rip on McD’s because it’s the canonical fast food restaurant, but it’s usually quite solid in terms of food predictability. One strange thing about the place though: pretty much all new items they ever add to their menu suck. Crispy Fried Chicken sando? Not great. Arch Deluxe? Not great. Buttermilk Fried Whatever? Not great. To succeed at McDonald’s you need to stick with the classics… the stuff that’s been on their menu for decades.

My three favorite orders here are:

• Two hamburgers with ketchup and mustard only. 500 calories and 24 grams of protein. About $4. That’s right. Regular old J. Wellington Wimpy style hamburgers. Always tasty and tidy enough to eat while you’re driving. You can leave the pickles and onions on if you want, but I feel they drag the quality down.
• One hamburger with ketchup and mustard only and a 6-piece McNuggets. 500 calories and 26 grams of protein. About $4. Same idea as the first order but more variety of flavor for you.
• One McChicken sando. 400 calories and 14 grams of protein. About $2. This is probably the best value on the entire McD’s menu. You could consider cutting the mayo to lower the calories but you need some sort of sauce on there. Dry sandwiches are for raccoons and pigeons.

Burger King

I have friends who swear that Burger King is the only fast food place they won’t go to, for well-documented reasons, but I think it’s generally fine. I don’t seek it out, but if it’s there, I will consider partaking, if for no other reason than a change of pace.

Some BK ideas:

• Whopper Jr. All Whoppers are giant, messy, and filled with calories, but the Jr. is manageable. Weighing in at only 336 calories, with 15 grams of protein, and about $4.30, it’s a solid choice.
• Rodeo Burger. I’ll be honest, in researching this article I had never even heard of the Rodeo Burger so I went down to my local BK to give it a shot. Holy shit… this might be my new favorite fast food item. A nice, tidy burger with BBQ sauce and onion rings in it, and it’s only 336 calories? With 13 grams of protein and only $1.29, I am comfortable saying this is the best deal in fast food right now.
• Spicy Chicken Jr. Alright, we are already running out of things to order at Burger King, so I’ll just include the only other acceptable item in here. It’s not the best chicken sandwich in the world, but at 386 calories, it’s a whopping 74% less calorific than the 1498 calorie “Spicy Ck’King Deluxe” sando. Holy crap. Also, 11.5 grams of protein and it’s only a dollar!!!

I wanted to include the Impossible Whopper in here, but like all other “regular” sized burgers at BK, it’s pretty huge and loaded with calories. Also, it tastes exactly like a Whopper, so you can use your own judgement as to whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Impossible Meat is so tasty on its own that you are better off making your own burger out of Impossible Sausage at home.

Time for another fast food video review. This time we try an under-the-radar item from Burger King that has actually been around for quite awhile: The Rodeo Burger! pic.twitter.com/KDxmfHVmGf

— Mike Davidson (@mikeindustries) February 19, 2022

Jack In The Box

Jack gets a bad wrap, and I’m not entirely sure why. They almost went out of business after an E. coli scare in the mid ’90s, but since then, I feel like they have been consistently one of the best and most innovative fast food joints around. They also have some of the very best commercials of all time:

Probably my favorite thing about Jack in the Box is that they’ve been piling new stuff onto to their menu for the last 30 years and never take anything off of it. Want a classic Jumbo Jack? No problem. French toast sticks? We got you. Teriyaki bowl? Giddyup. You could literally order all three of those things during a single trip to the drive thru.

Unfortunately however, most of things on the menu are better suited for your already-in-shape summer body. Take for instance, the Grande Sausage Breakfast Burrito, which weighs in at a whopping 1040 calories. I’m not a believer in breakfast burritos as a thing that should even exist in this world, but it’s just important to pay attention to these giant menus because trouble is around every corner.

Some ideas for your next trip to Jack in the Box:

• One of the healthiest things at Jack is something I have been ordering since its introduction in 1988: the Chicken Fajita Pita. Every time I order one, I am half expecting the person behind the counter to look at me funny and say “we haven’t had those for decades, pal!” but nope, they seem to always have one at the ready. With 27 grams of protein and only 330 calories, this is guilt-free fast food at its finest. $4.79 isn’t dirt cheap, but just think of it as a small price to pay for (perhaps) adding extra days or weeks to your life.
• The Junior Jumbo Jack is an oddly named burger that should perhaps just be called “The Jack” at this point, but it’s a good option if you need your burger fix but don’t want to feel gross afterwards. It’s still 420 calories and only 14 grams of protein, so not nearly as good of a proposition as, say, Burger King’s Rodeo Burger, but it probably won’t kill you. It’s also only $1.39 so how are you going to complain too much?
• The last item I’m going to recommend at Jack in the Box may shock you: the Two Tacos deal. Oh boy, where to even start with these things. They aren’t so much tacos as they are Flappy Meat Pockets. They look nothing like they do in the amazing commercials, but once they are in your stomach, you can’t really tell the difference. Two of these bad boys are only 99 cents, and contain a total of 340 calories and 12 grams of protein. If you’re low on dough, you could keep yourself alive on these things for months before your body slapped you upside your face and asked you what it did to deserve this. Seriously though, they’re not bad. You just need to believe.

Wendy’s

I don’t know why Wendy’s isn’t more popular. A solid menu with good ingredients and IMHO the best fries in the business. Some good orders from Wendy’s:

• Dave’s Single, no cheese, no onion. Listed at 590 calories and 29 grams of protein, but without the cheese it’s probably more like 500 and 24. About $5.
• Grilled Chicken Sandwich. 350 calories, 33 grams of protein and $5.50. A good thing to order if you want to sneak in a small order of Wendy’s excellent fries.
• Spicy Chicken Sandwich. 500 calories, 28 grams of protein, and $5.50. Pound for pound, not nearly as healthy as the grilled chicken, but a big taste upgrade. Deffo skip the fries if you order this one though.

Wendy’s also has some other interesting items like chili, baked potatoes, and Frostys, but this is not what we go to fast food restaurants for. Canned chili is just as good, if not better, and you can find a lot better ice cream than what you get in a Frosty. Don’t waste your calories on this stuff.

Chipotle

Out of all restaurants in this list, I feel healthiest when eating at Chipotle. I think if it was a sit down restaurant that served you your food on a ceramic plate, no one would even accuse it of being “fast casual”, let alone “fast food”. It’s just really tasty Tex-Mex, made quickly (through the magic of sous vide!), and offered affordably.

My go-to orders at Chipotle:

• You may be on team burrito, but I am team taco all the way. Better portion control, crispier produce, easier to stuff in your mouth. A reasonably dressed, crisp taco is only 170 calories, with 11 grams of protein, for $2.75. Barbacoa is by far their tastiest meat, but the vegan chorizo and sofritas vegetarian options are great as well. I usually get three, but through the magic of taco-specific portion control, you can dial it up or down.
• If you’re trying to go even healthier, Chipotle now has a wide variety of bowls to choose from that are all pretty good. Choose vegan chorizo for your protein, stay away from things like sour cream or rice, and go to town. You can get yourself a protein-packed, veggie-rich lunch for under $10.

Chick-fil-A

There are a lot of moral dilemmas one must wrestle with when choosing to eat meat — especially meat from fast food places — but Chick-fil-A offers up another dilemma entirely: is it ok to eat at restaurants whose leaders look down on people based on their sexual orientation?

If you look closely enough, you will probably find that a lot of the companies you give money to are reprehensible in one awful way or another, but given what we know about Chick-fil-A, I have tried to eliminate my patronage there.

I did, however, find one neat trick recently that will keep me from ever having the urge to go there again. Chick-fil-A sauce in a bottle. It’s only $5 at your local grocery store, and at least for me, it’s about a two-year supply. Do they make a couple of bucks off me? Sure. But it pales in comparison to making regular visits to that place. F’ that place, and f’ it twice on Sundays.

KFC

I can’t in good conscience recommend going to KFC if you are trying to shave off a few pounds, but I did go there the other day to try the “Beyond” Chicken Nuggets, so I thought I’d post the video:

Alright, as requested, video review time! I will also say that after I ate these first two ones, there were some less fresh ones in the box, and as some people mentioned, there is a substantial quality difference. pic.twitter.com/nJg08nT00i

— Mike Davidson (@mikeindustries) January 29, 2022

To sum it all up…

The goal of this post is not to tell you what the very tastiest items are at each restaurant. If you don’t care about calories or feeling gross — as I didn’t until I hit my mid-forties — go to town and eat whatever you want. But if you’ve successfully migrated to a healthy diet 6 days a week and just want to get your grease game on once in awhile, I hope this article has been helpful to you. As bad as some of this food might be for you, eating a single portion of it three or four times a month probably won’t affect you too much.

I also look forward to food engineering really coming into its own over the next decade. We spent the ’80s and ’90s making food demonstrably worse for you and worse for the planet, but with recent innovations in food science, we can now do amazing things like make real cheese without cows. The 2010s ushered in the golden age of ice cream (among other things), but my bet is the 2020s and ’30s will be the golden age of high-quality, lab-assisted healthy food. If you want to find out more about it, watch David Chang’s The Next Thing You Eat on Hulu.