Akshay Verma

Forget vibe coding. Enter vibe leadership.

The therapist from Severance

Your Outie has a seat at the table

Why do all of your posts hurt so much, so deep 😭

Ran out of milk, so added condensed milk instead to my French toast batter. Highly recommended!

Who’s working on a multimodal foundation model for health data? Curious to see some examples!

💯 I try that with everyone. With those who do appreciate what we have to offer, it’s like magic! They become allies for life!

As a consulting firm, we have to resort to disqualifying most companies in the sales process. The companies that we’d actually enjoy working with, I can count them on two hands 🥲

True, that’s what happens most of the time 😔

My hypothesis is that it’s because they haven’t really seen up close how good designer teams function. It’s one of those things where you need to be in such an environment that it opens your eyes. But, their job is to create such an environment. Thus, the chicken and egg problem.

I agree with the problem. And it’s been the most frustrating thing about being a designer for me, personally.

What I’m trying is understand is why do most CEO’s not value design? I see that all the time too. But, in about 20% of the cases, they change their stance when they see what it can do.

It’s a chicken and egg situation. Leaders don’t know what good design is, so they don’t hire for it. Most young designers have never experienced a culture of good design because it doesn’t exist at most orgs.

I think a lot of nuance gets lost on social media. But at least here in India, it’s unfortunately true. There are so many times when all a designer has to do is educate the client/leadership and collaborate better, and then they really support and value their work.

I’m curating a list of designers specialising in product discovery (the “innovation” stuff). Please recommend people I should add.

bsky.app/profile/did:...

And like you said, owning the end-to-end user journey — really shaping and orchestrating each intervention in it, rather than stacking together a bunch of features and calling it a product.

I’m all in for AI levelling the playing field. Designers don’t need to gate-keep UI design.

The problem is designers have been focusing on usability, where they should’ve been helping figure out usefulness. That’s where we can still add tremendous value. AI hasn’t learned product discovery yet.

Reply here and then continue over a cup of coffee? 🙂

Designers need to stop being babies, stop playing by themselves with their toys, and get to work. There’s a lot to learn. There’s a lot to teach.

And PMs haven’t stolen your job. You’ve just not been doing it.

(15, fin)

This is what design brings to a business, not replacing anybody, but also playing an irreplaceable role.

Where design is today is our own fault. We have failed to deliver on the promise of design. We have instead chosen to just make pretty things. That’s very important too, but not enough.

(14/n)

It’s hard to fight probability. The faster, iterative approach that tests divergent ideas is vastly more effective.

In this process, designers will hit many walls, ask new questions, understand deeper causes, unlock new unmet needs, and eventually, arrive at something people REALLY want.

(13/n)

Business does this through launching a few features every quarterly.

Design does this through prototyping and testing 10s of very different concepts in the same amount of time — divergence.

(12/n)

And most smartphone makers were building for exactly that. No data or market research would’ve shown what would spark customer love.

You only find that by making something, putting it into the hands of users, and then listening to them.

(11/n)

These are the kind of needs that we aren’t even aware of. We gain awareness of them when we experience a great product for the first time. We didn’t know how badly we wanted an iPhone before we first saw it. Everyone knew they wanted email, a web browser and music on a phone.

(10/n)

If you really want to win, it isn’t optional. At least in my experience, this is where design really plays an irreplaceable role.

Building and testing is the only way to really uncover unmet needs.

(9/n)

Risk and reward go together. That hasn’t changed.

What’s missing is divergence. Data, analysis and intuition won’t show you what you’re missing — what other solutions could’ve been — missed opportunities.

The funny thing is when you read that, it probably sounds very “optional.”

(8/n)

But, if deciding always comes before building, then you better be really sure of what you’re invested your resources into building. You better make something safe. Take fewer risks. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Follow the patterns.

(7/n)

Yet, why do most products stagnate or fail?

Isn’t the assembly line of software creation well established? You made well informed decisions driven by data, analyses and intuition, right?

A lot of times that’s enough. It’s true.

(6/n)

Is there room left for problem solving through prototyping, testing, researching? If there are known solutions to most problems — patterns that work — do you need to use design for discovery/strategy?

Designers can just be tasked with making things, right?

(5/n)

People have always been solving problems with their own intuition, and with spreadsheets. What has been added in the past 2 decades is “optimising” through data. This is where PMs come in.

All of these things have a legitimate place in a business. But they are fighting for territory.

(4/n)

There are already people who specialise in strategy, and there are people/AI that specialise in craft. Why do you need a designer who does both, but isn’t the absolute expert in either?

Even in the glory days of design, few companies understood this. That hasn’t changed.

(3/n)

Software isn’t new anymore. Most aspects of building it don’t need reinvention anymore. Probabilistically, ingenuity is becoming rarer. All you have to do is use the right patterns. That’s exactly AI’s premise.

(2/n)