Approaching AI as a design leader: start delivering small miracles to your customers now

This is part 2 of a 3 part series on how design leaders can approach AI in transformation their work and their teams. Part 1 focused on culture of experimentation here. It’s also useful to read my article on emerging patterns in designing for AI-first experiences.

In part one of this 3-part series, I discussed the importance of building a culture that’s focused on experimentation. The key there is building a culture that moves at the speed AI is moving and that you’ve given your team the tools to unlock their creativity.

In every domain and almost in every product, there is an opportunity to unlock “small miracles” through AI. These “miracles” may look too small to you relative to the advancements in AI and announcements from big AI players like OpenAI, Google, or Meta. To your customers, however, they’re miracles they’ve been waiting for, even if they didn’t know it.

These miracles can be as simple as making it easier to write email marketing campaigns, respond to customer feedback, or even more out of the box personalization through basic assistant-level features.

The key is to simply look at the obvious: the work you’re planning to ship anyway and thinking through a mindset of “how can AI either help us move faster, unlock a better experience, or add a layer of delight that wasn’t possible before?”

This may seem like a technology-first approach to design. It is not meant to be. Remember, you’re adding a layer on top of the work you’re already doing to deliver on customer-first experiences. Presumably, the work you have planned to ship over the coming three or six months has already had the benefit of deep customer research, impact-based prioritization, and thoughtful product consideration.

The importance of focusing on small miracles first comes from three key pieces:

1. Score some wins. Part of the cultural transformation of your team and teams around you is their ability to see a small amount of work deliver very high amount of impact .The goal is to focus teams on the power thinking AI-first brings to even the smallest of user interactions with your product.
2. Focus on customer-first delivery with a AI-first mindset. You‘re bringing an AI-first mindset with a customer-first approach. Most customers benefit most, in the short term, from your speed to market over transformative experiences that may take a while.
3. Transformative experiences may require re-thinking existing work. Almost all transformative experiences will require work that’s even if technologically possible, it remains disruptive. The key here is that you do want to be disruptive but without scoring wins or being customer-first, your disruption is likely to be slower.

The other lens to take here is to understand the dynamics in your organization. In most tech companies, small miracles are brushed off as “easy” solutions. Your role, as a design leader, is to re-orient the organization around what’s most impactful not what‘s harder or most exciting. This is the era of ”easy is good”. At least for now.

We’ll get to how we move from here to transformation, but start with the small miracles!