▶ "Code is getting cheaper. Which means taste is getting more expensive."
That one idea from Andrew Hogan reframes everything people think they know about competing in AI right now. Andrew, Head of Insights at Figma, joins Georgie to make the case that features are no longer a moat — and that the companies quietly investing in how their product feels are the ones building something that's actually hard to copy.
In this episode they get into why 56% of non-designers are already doing design work, why the job title "designer" isn't going anywhere, and why anyone who's still treating design as a finish-line coat of paint is going to get lapped. They also unpack what agent management platforms actually need to get right, why design matters even more when kids are the users, and what GeoCities taught us about creative ownership that most product teams have completely forgotten.
Plus: the prompting-together technique that turns prototyping into a team sport, why "no tech at all" is unnecessarily painful for parents, Andrew's verdict on Australian coffee, and why the golden era of the side project might be the most important shift nobody's naming loudly enough.
Transcript Synced · select any line to jump ▾ 0:00 Georgie Healy: Leading Insights, one of the most influential design companies in the world. What's happening that people might not be aware of in the design space? 0:07 Speaker B: You thought that you needed a special degree to participate in design, and we've found that 56% of non-designers in the design process, that's product managers, marketers, developers, all sorts of roles, are doing design work. The truth is that a lot of us can do more design. You're more capable of design than maybe we thought that we were, and it's all more approachable now. And this is one of the things that I don't know if people people are as aware of, they're kind of like, "Oh, I thought I shouldn't touch it or I shouldn't do it." And the reality is you should. 0:37 Georgie Healy: But one of the stories is that, you know, we're just not gonna hire juniors anymore because we want people to already be experienced. Is that just headlines being clickbaity? What are you noticing in the data? 0:48 Speaker B: In the data, interest in hiring junior designers was about half the rate of hiring senior designers. And so it is a real thing in the data. 0:56 Georgie Healy: Does the job title designer exists in 2030. Yes. All I'm getting in the news headlines is about Claude Design. This just came out over the weekend. Any reflections on this? Hello and welcome to In the Blink of AI. I'm Georgie Healy, and this week we have Andrew Hogan from Figma. He's SF-based, but actually this was his first visit to Australia when he joined us. And yes, we talked about coffee orders. Yes, we talked about Taronga Zoo in Sydney, but also we talked about what it is like leading insights at one of the biggest design companies in the world. Design is being done not by just designers these days, it's being done by product managers, engineers, by people across organization, marketers. We're in the era of the side hustle. Mm-hmm. I started this podcast as a side hustle. He's got a parenting app as a side hustle. I encourage anyone listening right now to start a side hustle, and we'll talk about why. We talked about so many things on the show. I can't wait for you to listen. Thank you so much, uh, to Andrew for coming on, and, uh, I can't wait to hear what you think. 2:12 Speaker B: You're listening to a Day One FM show. 2:18 Speaker C: Founders scale faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes. Hire anyone anywhere. Anywhere, get visas handled fast, and get back to building. Visit deal.com/dayone. That's d-e-e-l.com/dayone. 2:39 Georgie Healy: Do you have an AI hack of the week for our listeners? 2:42 Speaker B: I do. 2:43 Speaker C: Ooh. 2:43 Speaker B: I do. My go-to now is that I ask AI to interview me about something that I'm either trying to write about or that I wanna think about more. And you end up sort of articulating a lot more, and most of it's useless. 2:56 Georgie Healy: Yeah. 2:57 Speaker B: Some of it really helpful. 2:59 Georgie Healy: There's a few very exciting jobs in the Australian ecosystem at the moment. And even though I'm not looking for work, every now and then I'm like, quiz me, see if I get the job. And sometimes it's really fascinating 'cause I think I'll nail certain things and then forces me to think differently. The, the interviewing. 3:16 Speaker B: The interviewing is a really, just a really good technique. And then it removes the like, You know, is this a good answer? Is this a bad answer? Because there's really no judgment that's about to happen. You essentially just re-judge yourself or— Yeah. Yeah. So super powerful tool. 3:29 Georgie Healy: Anything you've learned about yourself in the process? Any weaknesses that have come out? 3:34 Speaker B: I usually use it about a topic. 3:36 Georgie Healy: Yeah. 3:36 Speaker B: So I don't usually use it about like looking for a job or looking for work or something like that. It's like, well, what's happening with AI in design or what's going on with the design industry? And then you give it that sort of like prompt and then it end up articulating more. 3:50 Georgie Healy: I love it. I need to build myself an AI literacy quiz and just make it harder and harder. That'd be fun. 3:56 Speaker B: That's a good idea. 3:57 Georgie Healy: Yeah, yeah. We'll talk. We'll figure that out. Mate, we're so happy to have you here in Australia. 4:02 Speaker B: Thanks very much. 4:03 Georgie Healy: Andrew, how is the coffee in Australia? This is something you said you were keen to review. Have you had one yet? 4:09 Speaker B: I've had multiple. 4:11 Georgie Healy: Fluent in Australian. What time did you get up this morning? 4:14 Speaker B: 4. 4:15 Georgie Healy: Okay, yep, you've had a few. 4:16 Speaker B: I've had a few. I had one yesterday too, 'cause I was trying to, yeah, the coffee's been fantastic. Each place I've been to has also been really good. And these are like not, I haven't actually been ticking down like the best or anything like that. It's just places that I wander into. They've all been great. 4:34 Georgie Healy: What's your go-to order? 4:36 Speaker B: So I like a cortado. What is that? Well, no one here knows. And so I've been getting a variation of it. But it's essentially a shot or two of espresso with then some kind of milk on top. It's like a little less milk than a cappuccino. Okay. 4:52 Georgie Healy: Frothy? 4:53 Speaker B: A little bit, a little creamy, but not so frothy at the top. No one here knows what that is though. 4:59 Georgie Healy: Yeah, I've never heard of this before. I am going to bully you into getting a flat white before you go home. 5:06 Speaker B: Okay. 5:06 Georgie Healy: Because that's our signature coffee. It's a flat white. 5:10 Speaker B: Should I do it here or in Melbourne though? 5:13 Georgie Healy: How dare you? And also I'm from Brisbane, it's fine. Both. Look, you just have to do it before you go. That's our thing. And it is a little less milk than a cappuccino. It might be— 5:25 Speaker B: The order? 5:26 Georgie Healy: It could be your order. 5:27 Speaker B: Maybe. 5:29 Georgie Healy: Report back, please. 5:30 Speaker B: Thank you. 5:30 Georgie Healy: Report back. Yeah, yeah. Get in the comments after this goes live. Okay, amazing. And Before we dive into all of our questions, we caught up last week when you were still in SF, and then, you know, I don't know if it's my algorithm because I spoke to you, but all I'm getting in the news headlines is about Claude Design. This just came out over the weekend. Any thoughts, any reflections on this? 5:58 Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, first of all, it's incredible that more people are recognizing how important design is. Something that Figma and really the design community has been saying for a while. It's one of those things that sort of has just, if code is cheaper to create, if you can make more things, then design will become more critical. So there's that. But then I think there is a difference between generating interfaces, generating prototypes, that there's more to design than that. And so I'm curious to see how that will all develop. Like how do we work together as a team? How do we iterate and refine? How do we add something that's completely unique for our particular company, whether it's illustration, um, whether it's the finding the exact right sort of like motion or animation to convey a feeling. I'm curious how those things will develop. And then it's also really great that we're sort of moving beyond some of the, you know, previously there, there were these like site builders or what you see is what you get editors, other things like that have existed for a while. And now it seems like there's like more power that's kind of coming to all of these tools. Yeah. That I think is really interesting. 7:07 Georgie Healy: It is. And I'm excited just because as someone who thought that you needed to have a specific design degree, I'm just excited to, you know, see more kinds of roles emerging in this space. 7:21 Speaker B: I mean, it's something we've been researching for a while, just the more, more roles coming into design and participating, because I think more people are realizing there's a ton of power in really intentionally approaching this process. And, you know, again, this is— there's— there are more— there's more attention and interest on those roles now than there was in the past. 7:40 Georgie Healy: You're very well suited to looking at the data behind all of this. So it is increasing. Is that what it's telling us? 7:47 Speaker B: Yeah. So increasingly, people outside of the design role are doing more design work and they're increasingly identifying as like more than one sort of role in general. With the rise of more AI tools. So really excited to see how that's developing and what the research is saying about that. 8:07 Georgie Healy: Cast your mind back to when you had a GeoCities page. That wasn't as popular here, or at least in my groups. We had Tumblr and MySpace for sure. Is there— okay, first of all, set the scene. What is GeoCities and why did you find it delightful? 8:23 Speaker B: I mean, GeoCities, and then there's a set of like, other kinds of site builder things that existed when I was a teenager. And it's sort of like, what's your unique background? What font should you have? What, my favorite, what song should be playing? 8:40 Speaker C: Ugh. 8:41 Speaker B: What motion should happen? And you could choose all of those things. And it sort of hadn't existed before that. You needed to know HTML. And then in a lot of cases, you didn't need to know HTML to do all of this. You just had your site, And you could customize it or sites. And yeah, I did. I can tell you a little bit about the one that I made if you want. 9:02 Georgie Healy: Please. I need to, I think I will know everything I need to know about you on the music and font alone. So, so let's hear it. 9:09 Speaker B: So definitely Comic Sans was a big, a big part of it. Oh yeah. Oh. 9:13 Georgie Healy: No, mate. No. 9:15 Speaker B: And definitely, definitely a lot of inspiration drawn from, there was this Sight Hamster Dance, where the different hamsters would sort of like dance around. Do you know what I'm talking about? 9:24 Georgie Healy: I do know what you're talking about. Yeah. The little, yeah. 9:27 Speaker B: A lot of inspiration drawn from that. Really? 9:30 Georgie Healy: Okay, back in the good books. 9:31 Speaker B: It was just the most ridiculous collection of things that you would look at now and just go, this is terrible. 9:37 Georgie Healy: Yeah. 9:38 Speaker B: But it was really cool to have that power at the time. 9:40 Georgie Healy: Yeah, and that creative freedom and make it your own. But song choice. What are we talking? What genre? 9:46 Speaker B: Something, something really silly. 9:49 Georgie Healy: Okay. 9:50 Speaker C: Okay. 9:50 Georgie Healy: Just fun. 9:50 Speaker B: Yeah, fun. That was, that was the brand. The brand was like sort of fun and playful. 9:54 Georgie Healy: Okay, well, we were different. 9:57 Speaker B: Did you go the serious route? 9:59 Georgie Healy: No, no. So I had a MySpace page and, you know, I get inspired by people that clearly had to code to figure out how to change fonts and things behind the scenes and try and copy and emulate that. But I was a bit of an emo girl. And so you'd open the MySpace page and Screamo would hit you and it'd be like, haha, sucked in. 10:20 Speaker B: You're trying to convey a certain kind of emotion. You want people to feel something. 10:23 Georgie Healy: You think you, you think you understand me, but no. Screamo. Yeah, it was fun. Yeah. And my MSN— did you use MSN? My font was always lower caps and always pink signature font. 10:37 Speaker B: I was like Times New Roman, nothing else. It was funny. These things are dissonant. I would not say they make sense together. 10:43 Georgie Healy: Neither did mine. 10:45 Speaker B: No, totally. 10:45 Georgie Healy: We can convey multitudes in design. 10:49 Speaker B: But that's part of it is you're trying to convey what you're about, what you want people to think of you. And that's part of what design is, is the act of thinking through how you want somebody to feel when they interact with the thing that you've made. And that can be, you know, artistic expression can be one way of thinking about it. But then obviously, like, every company has their own set of things they want people to feel. 11:10 Georgie Healy: Agree. And I think this is what people love to talk about because, you know, it gives you that ownership and control and then you've got the technology that can help you get there. I think it's really special. Okay. And, you know, Leading Insights, one of the most influential design companies in the world. What's happening that people might not be aware of in the design space? 11:35 Speaker B: I think this point that you raised earlier of like you thought that you needed a special, special degree to participate in design, and we've found that 56% of non-designers in the design process, that's product managers, marketers, developers, all sorts of roles are doing design work. And so it's not that being an expert, uh, you know, being an expert makes you better at these things. It makes you more successful often. Um, they can, we call it raising the ceiling of what's possible. Like we've all worked with designers that are just like, whoa, how did you, how did you do that? But the truth is that a lot of us can do more design and we are more capable of design than maybe we thought that we were. And it's all more approachable now. And this is one of the things that I don't know if people are as aware of. They're kind of like, oh, I thought I shouldn't. I shouldn't touch it or I shouldn't do it. And the reality is you should. You can convey your ideas, you can convey things to other people especially, and you can get to something that you're happier with at the end too. 12:38 Georgie Healy: Can you get better at it over time too? 12:41 Speaker B: The more you do it? Oh yeah. 12:42 Georgie Healy: Yeah? 12:42 Speaker B: Absolutely. I mean, the more you try to do it, the more you get critique, especially from trained specialist designers, the more you watch how people interact and feel with whatever you've made. Because I mean, we were talking about artistic expression earlier, A lot of this is designing, you know, how does an email get sent or potentially how do you manage your swarms of agents? Like, how do you design the workflows that go around that? So watching how people do it and what they struggle with absolutely will make you better over time. 13:13 Georgie Healy: I launched the AI Accelerator at Google, and these are the smartest AI founders in the entire ecosystem. They've already raised seed and Series A funding. But it's really interesting. Sometimes we would open up their website and we would say, "Well, I wanna go here." And they'd be like, "No, no, no, we want you to scroll down and click here." It's just reminded me of that. Like, you can be absolutely incredible in one space, but it helps to have someone use the product, use the website, and see. 13:44 Speaker B: I mean, if it's not for you, you definitely need other people to do this, and then you need to iterate to get to wherever you think it needs to be. And that goes for feeling, that goes for like information architecture, that goes for just the flow and whether they have like a good view of what they're doing. And that is often much more complex than just what fonts did you choose? What color is this? Like, what's the imagery on this? It's way more than that. And that's part of the thing that I think people are realizing is how much goes into designing something that is like excellent. 14:23 Georgie Healy: You're making me wanna open up my vibe-coded website and sit someone down for coffee and be like, where are you clicking? Genuinely. 14:31 Speaker B: Do it with 5 of them. 14:32 Georgie Healy: Yeah. 14:33 Speaker B: Do it with 5 of them, and then you look at the themes. And this is the sort of thing that I think, then you sort of like want to, what I find is that people want to keep iterating to solve the problems that have come up, and it's almost like motivational. 14:44 Georgie Healy: Yes. I'm gonna buy 5 flat whites for 5 different people after this. Genuinely, that's a great reminder. Okay, so you wrote this, I found it a really incredible quote. "Attempts at building moats through features won't work anymore." Why not? 15:01 Speaker B: I think as the cost of code declines, it'll be easier than ever for somebody to look at the thing you just made and give an approximation that feels or seems kind of like the same. And so if you think about traditional, like a feature checklist, like, oh, we can manage agents, we can send swarms of agents out to complete tasks, they can report back, they can do, often those things are replicable now. Whereas the way that people feel when they're managing the agents is much harder to replicate because that's governed by a smaller set of things, whether it's like, how does the agent report back? What tone do they use? How is the information displayed? Is it like kind of quick and you can dig in more, or is it sort of opaque and hard to look at? Those details are often much harder to replicate because often the people doing the copying don't actually understand why you would need that in the first place. 16:00 Georgie Healy: Are more features better or are less features? Is there a specific golden number? Like, how do you play with that kind of thing? 16:09 Speaker B: 7. 16:10 Georgie Healy: 7. 16:10 Speaker B: Yeah. 16:10 Georgie Healy: Okay. 16:11 Speaker C: Write it down. 16:11 Georgie Healy: Depends. 16:13 Speaker B: I think it really depends. And I think it depends on a number of things. And I think it's also incredible to watch a team figure out how many features are the right ones. Should we deprecate a feature? If we add a feature, what does that actually do to how people feel using the product? And then it's often gets incredibly complex when you get in this sort of enterprise world where you've added a feature because some customer wants it, uh, and you kind of wonder whether you really need it or not, but they were really focused on it. And that's often what makes design, um, and digital product building in general really interesting is that you have all of these constraints and specific situations that are in place. That make it so the people working on it have to work across disciplines and expertise. 17:00 Georgie Healy: I vaguely remember a marketing course I did once, and when they spoke about cars that were coming to market, in the advertisement, if they explained too many features of the car, people would just forget. Whereas if they just said 3 great things like a sunroof or whatever, people were more likely to buy it if they listed less things. 17:22 Speaker B: I could, I could see it. I mean, and it's, what's funny is also that it changes over time too. Like what the 3 things are will shift. What is it that's sort of expected versus what's actually like differentiated? Um, and this is the sort of thing that people who are attuned to design are often like really, they're, they're really on top of like, what is it in the culture, in the zeitgeist that feels right at the moment? And it often feels kind of like magic. Like, where did you come up with this? How did you see that thing when that person did this or read this line about the car? 17:57 Georgie Healy: Majority of our listeners are founders, operators. They work in tech. Any advice when it comes to building their websites or sharing a new product release? How do you find that special number 7 or whatever the number is? 18:12 Speaker B: I mean, it's hard. —iteration. I think that feels like such a— 18:16 Speaker C: Yeah. 18:16 Speaker B: All of them know this, right? But it's hard iteration through talking to people and through watching them and through just being like obsessed with what they're doing and where do we get traction and where do we not? And then often it's really helpful to have somebody in the process who is not you, who can see things and tell you things that maybe you didn't realize or recognize, whether that person is like a trained researcher, a trained designer, or something else like that. I think it's figuring out who can give you that sort of advice too. 18:46 Georgie Healy: Love that. I remember I went on this huge rant on the podcast less than 6 months ago about it's not working 'cause API keys is where it always falls down. The API key stage, it never works. It tells me to go here, I copy paste, and now it all works, Andrew. And like, that rant has really aged badly. 19:07 Speaker B: Well, I think part of it's the pace of change and then, part of it is that our expectations rise because even at that point, it's pretty magical when it works compared to previously when you didn't have the ability to do this at all. And then now a couple of months from now, you're going to— it's going to not work for some reason or another and you're going to be like, well, this is, this is terrible. Why wouldn't it work now? 19:28 Georgie Healy: This is unacceptable. 19:28 Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. So our expectations rise, which then makes that company or whoever you're putting, wherever you're putting this API key in. Yes. Makes them have to make whatever they're making better because the, the what is good has shifted. 19:42 Georgie Healy: Yeah, it's exciting, it's exhausting. 19:48 Speaker C: Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast so you stay focused on scaling. Deel takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOA, benefits, and compliance so your team can grow without borders. It's why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast. Visit deel.com/dayone. That's d-e-e-l.com/dayone. 20:18 Georgie Healy: It's amazing. It's overwhelming. It's all of the things. I am dying to talk to you about this, and very much to your point about experimenting and trying things and building things and being passionate to do so, So you've built a parenting app on the side of your full-time role. What made you do that? What made you excited to do that? 20:42 Speaker B: Well, so Parent.Tech is the, the idea is that we need to examine our sort of relationship with technology and our kids' relationship with technology and be really intentional about it. And so I'm talking to people building these things as a way of, I thought I was gonna learn mostly about technology, It turns out I actually am learning more about parenting, which is much more valuable, I'd argue. And it's been incredible for that. And then some people are sort of along for the ride, some other folks too, but it is kind of a selfish thing of just like, I need to know more to be successful here. 21:19 Georgie Healy: And in the journey, your kids are quite young, like mine are. So we're not really thinking quite yet about, okay, what university degrees are gonna be less disrupted right now. But technology in general, it's kind of like this space where it's different to when we were growing up in that age, right? 21:40 Speaker B: Yeah. 21:41 Georgie Healy: It's something to navigate. 21:42 Speaker B: I've heard it described as micro, micro generations where basically there's these chunks of time where something is really true and you really need to think about it. And then it changes, the products change, the, you know, society's sort of expectations there. Yeah, I mean, you know, people with kids who are under 5 have a different set of considerations than people with kids who are like 15, 16. 22:06 Georgie Healy: Agree. You know, when you talked about design not being just for designers and you're building things outside of work, I vibe code a little bit here and there. Do you have stories about any beautiful designs you've seen from people that, you know, maybe not normally expected to be designing things, or have you seen anything in the ecosystem that really inspired you or delighted you? 22:34 Speaker B: Um, I think that every, every company has these examples now where I don't know if I, if the designs are beautiful so much as they solve like an incredible problem that a small set of people maybe have in that organization. It's so funny because people sometimes use Figma Make to design tools in order to design well, in order to design another thing. It's like a designer design tool within— yeah, exactly. And they're like really specific, like, I want a shader that works in this specific way. 23:07 Georgie Healy: What's a shader? 23:09 Speaker B: Um, so it's a way of getting like some, uh, something unique that you wouldn't sort of see somewhere else, um, within like a product or an app. It's just, it's one of those things where like the depth you can go to, to be like excellent at your craft is extreme. And that's sort of like what's different about a, you know, expert specialized designer versus those of us who kind of like dabble a little bit. 23:34 Georgie Healy: Yeah. But the headlines are a bit doomer. Here we've got like Atlassian, Canvas shrinking workforces. And it's, it has like, at least in my, communities felt a little, a little, um, like a bit of a cloud is over the startup ecosystem. I'm trying to keep it light and, and show all the things that are, that are joyful. Um, but one of the stories is that, you know, we're just not going to hire juniors anymore because we want people to already be experienced. Is that just headlines being clickbaity? What are you noticing in the data? 24:09 Speaker B: Um, so in, in the data interest in hiring junior designers was about half the rate of hiring senior designers. And so it is, it is a real thing in the data that there, there's a sort of a profile that is very much in demand. This person that can drop right in, they know how to think about AI-powered products. They know how to think about complexity. They know how to manage all of the, the different people who are involved. And then you also have the rise of completely new categories of products that have never existed before. Agent, you know, answer engine optimization, AEO, that wasn't even a thing before. You had SEO, but AEO is its own separate thing. You also have agent management platforms that are rising and popping up, agent creation. So you have this sort of like, this change in what companies are looking for. And in parallel, this rise of new things being invented and created which then have to be really thought through. It's not just the category, it's also all of the, the new products that are being created by existing, you know, companies. So our data indicates that there was rising demand for design through the back half of last year. 25:22 Georgie Healy: Mm-hmm. 25:23 Speaker B: And we see companies trying to take on more. We see them trying to tackle bigger, better expansions of new products. And so I think it's kind of It's a tumultuous time where a lot of different things are happening at once. 25:41 Georgie Healy: I really like how you specifically listed out the emerging fields too. A lot of people say, oh, well, in every industrial revolution, new jobs have arisen. I appreciate you targeting, you know, it's the agent space, it's these areas that are, but you know, if you do really wanna be competitive right now, explore those spaces, right? 26:03 Speaker B: Yeah, and there's multiple parts to that. There's, can you make the technology work? And there's, can you make people feel like this is doing what they're asking it to do? And do they feel good about what's going on? You know, if this agent's gonna spend money on your behalf, you wanna know what are they spending money on, and you wanna be able to audit that. And none of that just kind of like happens. You have to really think it through. 26:25 Georgie Healy: Yes, beautifully said. What happens when this, we talked about the children and teenagers coming through this time. What happens when these junior workers use AI too early? You know, you and I have learned the hard way. We've read the books, forced memorization, gotten into a lecture hall, like tried to remember the facts. And now, you know, they're like increasingly able to use AI. And so it's like at their fingertips. Any thoughts on automate— automating too early or anything like that? 27:02 Speaker B: I think we have to help people realize which parts of the process feel like they could be skipped, but the end result will not be as good. So one extremely, I give a lot of presentations, my best presentations, I write the presentation out. I don't ever look back at it, but the whole act of writing it out. 27:27 Georgie Healy: Handwritten? 27:27 Speaker B: Handwritten. 27:28 Georgie Healy: I'm the same. 27:29 Speaker B: And the best designers that I know, they sketch the whole thing out and they might do it at a high fidelity where everything is really thought through. They might do it at a lower fidelity. They sketch it out. Other great designers don't do that. They sort of like feel their way through it and kind of generate it. So I think part of this is us all looking at, for an in— as an individual, what is it that helps you get to like a better outcome? And what is it that leads to sort of the impact in the world you're looking for? And I think people may discover that they have a competitive advantage, not just hitting the button. 28:07 Speaker C: Mm. 28:08 Speaker B: You know, and then even the act of refining how you hit the button is in itself part of this process. You know, prompts do matter. And part of what's hard is that everything has— is changing rapidly. You don't actually know which parts are really valuable yet. And the situation is dependent. I think that's part of why we have to make sure that people have the tools to be able to fine-tune all of this. And I think you're asking a valid question of should we have them go through it to know how it should work? You know, people always complain academia is like a little slower to change. They're teaching the wrong things. Part of it is just learning how to think and work so you get to something good at the end. Yeah. And I don't know if we know what that is yet, but I also think you can kind of look at the stuff that's, that's like made its way through writing stuff down by hand to memorize it, you know, sketching things out. Those things have been durable because they're valuable. 29:07 Georgie Healy: I'm obsessed with what you just said. You know, so many of us have had degrees or done degrees that we ultimately haven't used, but the art of studying, the art of forcing yourself to be like, "I need to get this piece of paper, and I will do it, and I'll figure it out." I also love what you said, you know, some people can just raw dog right onto the computer everything they need to do. I can't. I need a pen and paper, at least in the early stages, or it doesn't get into my brain. 29:40 Speaker B: And well, and there's value in exploring a multitude of options and a multitude of mediums and actually even transferring occurring across mediums sometimes is useful. Like you sort of see, what do I really need to carry through from this sketch into this code or into this, you know, uh, uh, you know, representations of code on a canvas or there's, there's value in the translation sometimes, especially if it's occurring with other people. One of the coolest things I've seen recently is people, um, prompting together, prompting at like doing vibe coding together next to each other. 30:12 Georgie Healy: Wait, what? 30:13 Speaker B: Yeah. So like you go into Figma Make and you, these are the examples I'm hearing about. 30:18 Speaker C: Yeah. 30:18 Speaker B: You go into Figma Make and you prompt, hey, this is what I'm thinking about making and this is what I'm doing. And you're next to somebody who's a PM or somebody who's in a different field and they're thinking, oh, well, I actually thought it should be more like this. And they're prompting next to each other too. And so this act of prototyping and prompting is a communication act between people. You know, when we talk, there's a certain way of discussing. And then when you talk to a computer, you talk to it differently too. So these are things we don't even know exactly how they'll all play out. We just know that they're emerging and that they are interesting and worth trying. 30:55 Georgie Healy: Oh, that is incredible. I've never heard of that. And just the different way you prompt. And like, I'm thinking blue, what color blue in my head could be different to yours. And then the outcome could be completely different using the same model with similar but different prompts and seeing— 31:12 Speaker B: And you can talk about it together. The prototype is a communication tool, is, and I think, an underdiscussed part of this moment right now. 31:21 Georgie Healy: And I love how you said it matters because the way you communicate, especially in design, matters too. You know, it's one thing for me to be like, well, I want it all on the whiteboard. And you're like, well, I kind of need it visualized in a different way. And being able to at least try the different ways so that you've got the skill set to communicate in other ways if you have to. 31:43 Speaker C: Absolutely. 31:44 Georgie Healy: Yeah. Now, like many revolutions before this AI time, you know, we're gonna have so much free time, Andrew. Like, we're gonna, um, be at the beach this whole time you're here in Australia. You're just gonna be at the beach because you've got all your agents just doing all your work for you. True or false? 32:01 Speaker B: Um, well, definitely not me personally. 32:05 Georgie Healy: You haven't figured it out quite yet. 32:07 Speaker B: Well, no, I, I'm not going to be I'm chatting with you. I'm hearing what you're asking about. 32:12 Georgie Healy: Maybe better you see your children. 32:13 Speaker B: There's a human, there's a human, I don't know, I'm learning a lot. The, I think the reality is that people will take on more and the quality bar of what is good will increase. And that's true for products that are being released. That's true of like the work products that we do. You know, if you previously you had time to do one analysis, now you have time to do 30. Or more. 32:37 Georgie Healy: Are you working harder now? 32:40 Speaker B: Probably. I don't know. I would say that our data, like when we ask people about the tasks that they're taking on, they're taking on more tasks. 32:50 Georgie Healy: I'm hearing this today. 32:52 Speaker B: Yeah. And I was a little coy on the answer because I think I probably am working harder. Right. You can, you know, you have— if you have a sort of a chief of staff system set up, you kind of have potentially eliminated the space in between going from one task to another or, you know, finding the context. And some of that's really great. You stay in flow. Some of that is that you actually need to now build in extra time to sort of recharge. And like, I think we're seeing some of that too in some of the other studies that are outside the ones we are running too. 33:21 Speaker C: Yeah. 33:21 Speaker B: It's just hard to make decision after decision after decision after decision. 33:25 Georgie Healy: Agree. And, and you know, in my group chats, people in tech, On the weekends, we are using AI tools that we've never used before, and that requires, you know, putting time aside. And if you've got a full-time job, how do you find that time aside? And after the kids finally go to bed and then you're like, "Okay, I guess I could do it now." It, like, from where I'm sitting, it is more time doing more work. 33:51 Speaker B: I think in many cases, people enjoy it too, which is kind of the tricky part of this, right? 33:56 Speaker C: It is. 33:56 Speaker B: You say work and then you say enjoy in the same, Agree. Yeah. I would also say, I feel like this is the golden era of side projects where people are working on things that they love to work on or want to build, and they can do that and they're finding enjoyment in it. And it's not work in the traditional sense, except that now we are all learning a bunch of new tools and new workflows. And the side project is really an excellent way of like exploring that because you don't need permission. Just start doing. 34:28 Georgie Healy: The golden era of the side project is my favorite term, sentence, thing I've ever heard. You need to trademark that. You need to like— 34:38 Speaker B: I'm a fan. I mean, I feel it. People I work with, people I talk to. I mean, we talked about parent tech earlier. Like these are— the side project has never been easier to get into and to learn from too. 34:51 Georgie Healy: I've got a couple myself. I'm obsessed with it. Obsessed. Substack, podcast, events, and all AI-enabled for industries and technologies that normally wouldn't be, which is incredible. 35:04 Speaker B: But it just, it unlocks a lot of things for you. You're probably also now grabbing some new skills that you didn't have before, and then you're realizing how good the people are at the other, like at those skills, because that's the career that they've built, the expertise they've built. It's not like they didn't become important. They actually now feel more valuable 'cause you're like, "Oh, I can't make the audio quite do what I thought it do." Agree. 35:27 Georgie Healy: And to the listeners, I'm sure they feel this way as well. I feel like the areas I'm personally passionate about are very creative, podcasting, Substack, it's all handwritten. The colors and the schemes is very me, lime green. Like it's, you know, me, but it might not be for everyone. But then I'm using AI in terms of the data analytics feeding those in. What trends can I expect with this news? You know, it's— I'm using AI in creative and non-creative ways. It's fun. 35:58 Speaker B: It's an incredible material to play with. And you're probably stepping into tools that you haven't played with before, which then means those tools have to design for people who do not know anything about that field either. And that is also sort of an expansion of the need to think about how these things are designed and to differentiate on design. 36:16 Georgie Healy: Okay, so you've also said though, for the people that are feeling overwhelmed, like you and I are high-fiving, we're loving our side projects, but some people are feeling overwhelmed. What happens if they miss something? Like what if they missed the news over the weekend? There's always new news. Is that unacceptable? 36:36 Speaker B: I mean, there was news the weekend before and the weekend before that and the weekend before that. 36:40 Georgie Healy: You can't miss it. Are you allowed to? 36:42 Speaker B: Well, I think you are allowed to. I think my take on this is that most of the value that we create is not in following each announcement. Most of the things that bring us joy are not in knowing each thing that's happening at the hour that's happening. The things that you are meant to know about will sort of come back to you, especially if you're in the field, you're talking to people, you're in the group chat, that kind of thing. And I think there's also a lot of value in touching grass and then playing with your kids and then going to the park and not looking for every little announcement that's happening. I think it's okay to miss some things, especially like the first time around. I don't know if this is a controversial take, maybe it is, but most of the incredible things that we make don't just come from knowing about technology. They know from knowing about how it fits into the larger, you know, world. And that means interacting with that larger world and spending the time to do that. 37:38 Georgie Healy: I find I can't be creative and have new ideas if I'm just reading other people's ideas. 37:44 Speaker B: It takes so much energy. 37:46 Speaker C: Yeah. 37:46 Speaker B: And you, it takes so much energy to be creative and think of new things. And in order to do it, you also need a deep well to draw on from places that are not in the places where other people are, from new spaces and sort of connecting them together. That's, I mean, creative acts come from connecting unlike ideas often. I love that. 38:04 Georgie Healy: I think everyone's heart rate just went down a few notches. To finish the interview, we've got a spicy rapid fire. Okay. I always say rapid fire. It doesn't have to be that rapid if you've got a long— 38:15 Speaker B: You're not going to hold me to it. 38:16 Georgie Healy: I will not hold you to it. If you've got a great answer, I'll do my best. Yeah, we'll try. We'll try. Yeah. See, see how we go. Job boundaries are getting a bit more blurred by the day. Does the job title designer exist in 2030? 38:32 Speaker B: Yes, because many people love that identity, love calling themselves a designer. They love how it— what it conveys to the people around them and the indication of what they're going to go for. Absolutely. It still exists. 38:45 Georgie Healy: Geocities, Tumblr, MySpace. What's the 2026 equivalent for self-expression online? 38:52 Speaker B: I think this is so dependent on your, like, micro community. Like that, you know, I don't have a spicy answer because I think it's splintered in so many different places. 39:03 Georgie Healy: Yeah, it's a good point. I think mine's Substack, but that's, you know, in the last 6 months. 39:08 Speaker B: And that's also the world that you are in. Like, it's good that from a taste perspective, it's perfect for your world. 39:15 Georgie Healy: Yeah. Okay. You have to choose, Andrew. You have to. Should designers learn to code? Or should engineers have to learn how to design? 39:26 Speaker B: Have to choose one? 39:28 Georgie Healy: You have to. And then you can give a sentence afterwards. 39:32 Speaker B: I think designers should learn to code, but I think the reality is both will get better at both sides. And I think that will happen through sort of osmosis and the tools helping to make them stronger at both sort of perspectives, both sides. 39:52 Georgie Healy: Yeah, helps to have both, right? 39:53 Speaker B: Yeah. I don't know why I had to choose. Why did you make me do that? 39:55 Georgie Healy: Yeah, I'm really mean. I'm gonna do it once more. 39:57 Speaker B: Oh no. 39:58 Georgie Healy: Yeah, I know, I know. Just torturing the end of the interview so you don't like me at the end. Taste versus speed. 40:06 Speaker C: Taste. 40:06 Georgie Healy: You have to pick one. Oh, that was easier. Okay, we're friends again. 40:09 Speaker B: I just fundamentally think that knowing how something fits into the larger context How does the chair fit into the room? How does the room fit into the building? How does the software fit into the sort of like workflow of that person? How does the wedding invite fit into the wedding, you know, a group like that is taste is knowing that how those things connect at that moment. And I think I would always pick taste. 40:35 Georgie Healy: Now I have to ask, for your wedding, did you get quite involved in the design process of anything? Did you have a perspective? 40:43 Speaker B: I had a perspective about how it should feel. 40:47 Georgie Healy: Okay. 40:47 Speaker B: And we also had to change that perspective. We got married in 2020 and we had to change everything we were doing about it. And we went for what we wanted to feel, which was really close to a small group of friends. So that worked out really well. 41:03 Georgie Healy: I can't believe I'm saying this publicly. I kind of loved having children into COVID because I didn't want so many people around in a time where I wasn't sure how I'd feel. So COVID was kind of good that I was like, oh, can't have visitors, sorry. 41:17 Speaker B: I mean, but this, it's unique to your situation. It was unique to mine. And I think that's one of the things that it's great. There's so many opportunities for us now to make more things that fit what we want them to be. And I think it's, I don't know, this is just a great era with so many different tools and approaches that we can all use. I agree. 41:41 Georgie Healy: What's one thing about kids and technology that the industry might be getting a little bit wrong right now? 41:48 Speaker B: I think the idea of going like no tech at all is, I think it's unnecessarily painful for parents. I think you have to find the right way to intentionally add technology so it actually like works for what you're trying to do. And that goes for screens, that goes for iPads, that goes for the apps that we use. And then I think that some companies are doing an incredible job designing for that, and some of them maybe not so much. 42:17 Georgie Healy: Does design matter in tech more for kids, do you think? 42:20 Speaker B: I think so. Absolutely. 42:23 Georgie Healy: Yeah. My gut feel is also the same. Last question. If you're a designer or product leader in Australia watching this, what's one thing you should be doing differently over the next 6 months? 42:37 Speaker B: I think you should be thinking really hard about design. It's possible, you know, I said the speed versus taste question that, you know, these people, the people are saying, no, no, speed is the only thing that matters. And I think I would say they should take a look at how that speed is furthering their sort of like goals. And are they, you know, are they losing people to some part of the process that's confusing to use? People not adopting a feature that's really important. And I think taking a sort of intentional look at how is this designed, I think will serve them really well, even if they're on the sort of like speed is the biggest thing. 43:17 Georgie Healy: I've never built anything that I've been proud of when I felt rushed, I will say. 43:23 Speaker B: Well, and the argument partially is potentially that, well, you should just do it 30 more times and you should just iterate and iterate and iterate. Which is— that's definitely a strategy that can work, but the question is, which direction are you iterating towards? 43:36 Georgie Healy: Gosh, this has been such a pleasure. Andrew, thank you so much for joining in the Blink of AI. Where can people find Parent.Tech? Where can people find you if they want to connect? And where are you going to visit in Australia before you go back to SF? 43:52 Speaker B: Parent.Tech is the parenting. I Love LinkedIn. I'm a fan of LinkedIn. I know many folks have thoughts on that. And then yesterday I caught a ferry to Taronga Zoo. I loved it. It was great. 44:06 Georgie Healy: Isn't it fantastic? 44:07 Speaker B: It was really great. Saw a red panda. And I'm hopeful to find some other things like that where it was a real spontaneous activity. I was walking and realized I could catch a ferry to a zoo. Which is maybe the greatest combination on a business trip. 44:25 Georgie Healy: I would've recommended that if you hadn't done it. Maybe hit up one of the eastern suburb beaches. Bondi to Coogee Walk is a popular one. 44:32 Speaker B: Thank you. 44:33 Georgie Healy: We'll hook you up, won't we? Yeah. Thank you, Anshu. This is a pleasure. Thank you. 44:37 Speaker B: Thanks, Georgie. 44:40 Georgie Healy: Thank you for listening to In the Blink of AI. You can check out the show notes for anything discussed in this week's episode. Episode, and we will be back next week. This podcast was produced by Day One with music by Dan Hansen and visual artwork by Sophie Tyrell. If you loved the episode, please tell your mates, and I love AI news. Please share your thoughts and suggestions to [email protected] . 
In The Blink Of AI with Georgie Healy
Presented by Deel & Stripe 
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