Kim Bryant

Are IC enterprise designers unintentionally sabotaging their portfolios in this AI-obsessed market? If you’re a Product Designer updating your case studies… you’ll probably want to read this... I’m actively hiring two Sr-to-Lead Product Designers, and after reviewing a lot of portfolios recently, a pattern keeps repeating: 👉 Too many portfolios are leading with AI chatbot projects. Not sprinkled in… leading with them. Often multiple ones in the same portfolio as Case Study #1 and #2. Here’s the problem👇 AI chatbots are important, but they’re not the center of gravity for most enterprise / SaaS product teams. In the last six-nine months, many of these patterns are already shipped and commoditized. And now with agentic flows, the UI work becomes more about reviewing, validating, and confirming work AI has already completed behind the scenes. Which means… “Old school” multi-step, end-to-end product flows are still valid – with a twist. Because every IC job post right now is calling for “high craft” or “consumer-grade design” – it’s no longer acceptable for flows to simply “get the job done.” Hiring panels want to see refinement and polish in the final output.  Otherwise you’ll get the feedback we give far too often: “The design thinking is great… but the visual design is just… [sigh/meh]… not quite there.” Visual craft always matters. Everywhere. At every company. Whether D2C or B2B or Enterprise. So if you’re refreshing your portfolio, here’s my ask as someone hiring in this tough market: Don’t over-index on AI chatbots just because they’re hot right now. Show me your complex, nuanced, multi-stage flows—the kind that prove you can handle the real product work most teams need. Just make sure they’re polished (ie. That “high craft” buzzword again), intentional, and tight. Because that’s what will actually differentiate you in 2025 and into 2026. And now the proverbial 🔌: If you’re a high-performing Sr. or Lead looking to innovate in the HR and Comp tech space, holler at me in my DMs or Comments. Thanks! 🙏

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For nearly a year, I’ve been thinking about a question that feels increasingly important to modern product development. As AI-assisted workflows continue to evolve, including recent examples like Figma’s partnerships with Claude and Codex, the question keeps surfacing: How do teams keep design systems, product intent, and production UI code aligned? We’re moving into a world where ideas can become prototypes almost instantly, code can move more fluidly into design workflows, and AI can assist more directly across the product development process. But speed is only part of the story. In real organizations, the harder challenge is maintaining alignment across teams, branded design systems, and production UI code in a way organizations can actually trust. Over time, this often shows up as design-development drift, where design systems and production implementations slowly fall out of sync as products evolve. That’s the space I’ve been exploring through recent patent-pending work focused on human-in-the-loop synchronization between design systems and UI code. The goal is not to replace designers or developers. It is to make AI-assisted workflows more trustworthy by helping preserve design system integrity, reduce design-development drift, and keep human judgment at the center as products evolve. My view is simple. The teams that benefit most from AI will not just be the ones that generate faster. They will be the ones that build better systems for alignment, governance, and execution. More to share soon. #AI #DesignSystems #ProductDesign #DesignOps #Frontend #Figma #DevTools

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