One of my onboarding 1:1s in the new role was with Sean Thompson, Lead Designer at Loom and a desire I've admired throughout my career. Sean is an OG designer from the early tech days. As we shared our origin stories, we had so many similar paths in our journey; falling into design in the way of loving to make things and the early mobile design era (320x480 pixel perfect Photoshop Smart Objects early days).

As someone working predominately with AI in the new role, it got me thinking about the allure of working on new frontiers. I lived through the new frontier of mobile and social/user generated content web. We're now in the age of new frontiers in AI/ML, Extended Reality (XR), and Blockchain/Decentralized Systems. For clarity of this post, I define a new frontier as the technology becoming a mainstream conversation of the emerging technology, not when the technology was first invented. AI was not invented two years ago and has a long history, but recently became more mainstream.

Org evolution during new frontiers

As new frontiers arise, there is excitement and challenges that come with it. First, companies get immersed in the emerging technology and all find a way to incorporate it in their product and branding. There are so many companies that were simply a product company and now they have an AI-powered product. The second aspect is a big challenge, which is the ability to invest and innovate in the area. If the business is established and has strong tailwinds, switching to a new frontier can present a high risk if it doesn't pan out. During new frontiers, everything seems like a sure-fire bet. However, the majority of what we think paradigm shifts may end up being NFTs or HD DVDs.

To make a de-risked bet, organizations spin up a centralized team to build expertise in the domain and help other teams. In the early days of iOS Development, nearly every company had centralized mobile team, sometimes being an individual person. For iOS, there was a much smaller concentration of people who knew Objective-C and the Apple Developer ecosystem, and expertise to ship mobile apps. Over time, these competencies matured. More people were interested in mobile, Apple evolved their developer experience, and (for better or worse) there were new frameworks to ship mobile apps.

To accelerate excellence, companies formed centralized teams to:

1. Service: Teach people how to fish with the new capability

2. Platform: Developing tools and work across a portfolio of teams

3. Distribution: Systems to ship and go to market, also helping other teams do so

The centralized mobile teams then became more embedded on feature teams and other lines of business. The center of excellence became decentralized. During my experience leading mobile teams, it took years to fully mature.

Developing new frontier skills

I hate to break it, but there is not step-by-step playbook in developing skills around new frontiers (that's why they are new frontiers). However, there are methods and focus areas to develop experience around new touch points.

First, use emerging products. It's impossible to personally design and build at the speed of innovation. Looking across and around for inspiration can help you develop pattern recognition of what works or not. This doesn't mean simply signing up and using it once. Spend time with it in your daily life to understand if it provides value. Keep a product journal to evaluate and critique the products—questions I use for prompting are:

• What are the implications of this product?

• If we built something at our company inspired by this, how might it transpire?

• How is the experience?

• Is this a solution looking for a problem or a viable product humans would adopt?

The second focus area is to prototype, prototype, prototype. Functional prototyping of a new technology creates understanding of the boundaries of how the technology can play with the existing world. With the new frontier of AI, I would integrate LLMs into my prototyping arsenal, such as ProtoPie or Replit.

Finally, explore speculative human behaviors with existing. The biggest competitor your product has are not other people building things like you, it's existing human behaviors which remains undefeated. You can design all the to-do apps you want but will likely lose to analog post-it notes or people writing a list on the fridge. During the era of exploring new frontiers, there are more solutions looking for a problem than solution solving problems. Before the product shipped, I 3D printed an Apple Watch in 2014 to start "using" it in my day-to-day. Before mocking things up in watchOS I wanted to understand scenarios when a person would want to use the watch to begin with.

Boldly go where no one has gone before

Throughout the journey of my professional craft, I've always b-lined it to emerging technology and exploring new frontiers. It's the convergence point to make sense of how a new technology can change an existing human behavior, and I don't take that responsibility lightly.

Recap:

• Organizations often centralize teams to explore and develop expertise in new frontiers

• New disciplines can emerge during this phase: Data Science, Growth, Design Engineering, etc.

• Invest in time using emerging products—create a product journal

• Prototype for functionality to discover the edges

• Let human behaviors guide you to find solutions that solve problems

Only time will tell if AI is truly a new frontier. Right now, I'm excited to explore the journey.

Hyperlinks + notes

A collection of references for this post, updates, and weekly reads.

• It only takes one person to open the right door by Carly Valancy

• Reframing your skills for a career pivot by Carly Ayres

• What do prototypes prototype? → An all-time favorite paper on prototyping