Jan 31, 2026
Recently, I watched a speaker session by Jenny Wen titled "Why Designers Can No Longer Trust the Design Process". It put words to something I’ve felt for a long time, even if I hadn’t articulated it clearly before.
I’ve never been a big believer in rigid design processes.
As designers, we’re constantly told to “trust the process,” as if following a prescribed sequence automatically guarantees great outcomes. But the world we’re designing for has changed. The tools have changed. The context has changed. Speed has changed. So why are we still treating the same old playbook like gospel?
Today, a Product Manager using AI can quickly vibe-code a working prototype faster than a designer can craft a perfectly written problem statement. That’s not disrespectful to design. It’s simply the reality of how tools now compress time and execution. To thrive in this environment, we need to move past the IKEA manual approach to design. We also need to stop relying on cookie-cutter templates. The moment a pattern becomes repeatable, AI has already learned it.
If you look closely at most meaningful breakthroughs, they rarely happened because someone followed the process flawlessly. They happened because someone chose to break away. They skipped steps. They bent rules. They questioned assumptions. They used tools in ways they were never originally intended to be used.
As Edwin Catmull writes in Creativity, Inc., a good process can prevent failure, but it can also prevent originality.
If AI can execute half the process faster than we ever could, then maybe the real value was never the process itself. Maybe it was always about judgment, taste, and direction.
And those are things no checklist can replace.
