“I think it can be helpful for refinement. … I do not want it telling me what to do when I don't know what to do yet.”
Power of Ten with Andy Polaine · User Experience · October 2026
Small, a staff product designer, on where AI fits in her work. It helps with refinement and chores like generating fake user data, she says, but using it while still framing a complex problem sends you into interface details too soon.
Transcript
…I might be able to like integrate more of like what the product vision doc is saying into my deck? I have like a target audience of the VP, like, does this feel VP ready or not? That's cool and fun. And I really like that. But I'm still probably going to also go talk to a person, you know? Yeah,
I hope so. I hope so. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Yeah. Like I'm still going to go talk to the director of product design and be like, do you think that our VP is going to like this deck the way that it is? So yeah, I think it can be like helpful for refinement. I don't, I don't think I never, I do not want it telling me what to do when I don't know what to do yet.
Excellent. There are lots of great tips in your book that I mentioned before. If there was one that you think, oh, I wish I had known that earlier in my career, what one would it be?
Gosh. Yeah. I think it would probably be having more agency and proactiveness, like not just thinking that things are, you know, happening to me and that I had no choice. I think that reframe for me and that shift in mindset has powered so much. You know, from just being able to recognize like…
That is incredibly good advice. We're coming up to time. There is, this doesn't have to be around staff design, I think. It could be anything else. The show is named after this film by Rand Charles Eames called Powers of 10 about the relative size of things in the universe. So I always ask each…