Something shifted when AI agents started executing in hours what used to take our teams weeks. Since adopting AI-driven production, the beliefs I had about the role of a designer changed in a couple of days.
I have been building products for a long time. Across that career I kept watching the same failure in different industries. Companies hired designers to plate food someone else had cooked. Designers were constantly tasked to deliver beautiful work against briefs and assumptions that were never questioned. In most of these “agile” environments, everyone sat in their own lane. Designers were enrolled for aesthetics, product solved for activation, developers optimized their decisions to supply functionality and marketing focused only on conversion. Everyone was technically working, but nobody owned the customer journey.
Those experiences shaped one version of my beliefs. Then Omny sharpened them into something else.
At Omny Security, we build software for people whose mission is protecting critical infrastructure like power plants and oil facilities. In these environments, a wrong design decision doesn’t just cost a sprint. It costs an operator’s attention. At scale, it costs safety and potentially hundreds of lives.
When I joined, during the first six months I watched us ship very structured, rigid workflows. They were based on user research, with excellent engineering behind them. The people who were supposed to use the technology abandoned it within five days. Not because it was broken, but because we had moved in the wrong direction at full execution speed. The users who wanted the solution in one company were not the same people who wanted that workflow, with small changes, in another. Making one complex solution equally valuable for all of them was never going to be easy.
That experience, combined with a year of building with AI, broke many of the beliefs I’d held for a decade. Here’s what replaced them.
I used to think alignment was the responsible first step. Now I think clarity has to come first, because an agent executes a vague direction with the same confidence as a clear one. I used to think design leadership meant advocating for the user. Now I think ownership beats advocacy, and that consensus doesn’t scale once agents are doing the executing. And the decisions I used to treat as the important ones, like the visual hierarchy of a screen, matter less than where a capability lives in someone’s workflow. That call gets made before anyone opens Figma.
Also in March: Clarity Before Agent Action · Ownership Beats Advocacy · Where the Capability Lives
Daniel Arevalo is Product Experience Lead at Omny Security. He builds AI-native tools and writes about design, product leadership, and what it means to direct systems that execute at a speed humans never had before.