Hey Reader,

Something keeps coming up in mentoring calls lately: designers who are doing genuinely strategic work but feel like they're waiting for someone to give them permission to move faster. This issue is partly about that, and partly about the tools and thinking catching up with what's actually possible.
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In today's email:

• Agency, not agents: The most important word in AI right now isn't "agent" — it's agency. Two pieces in this issue point to the same friction: the constraint isn't the tooling, it's who has access and who gets to make decisions.
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• AI workflows in the wild: A behind-the-scenes look at how the lead designer on Claude Code actually uses AI at Anthropic — parallel agents, custom skills, automated PR reviews — plus a free upcoming session for designers who want to get ahead of the agentic shift.
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• Tools worth bookmarking: A curated design tool directory organized by archetype, and a book that explains how the software you design for actually works under the hood.

Join Julia Ysabela Fernandez (Meta) and Linn Vizard (Made Manifest) for a practical session on creating more engaging, collaborative rooms even when they’re virtual or high-stakes. You’ll learn simple facilitation techniques to spark participation, build trust, and help people contribute more meaningfully. ​ 🎟️ Get your ticket​

Design gems of the week

• ​Your AI strategy has a trust problem, not a tooling problem​​​
  (Elena Verna): Most teams already have the tools. What's slowing them down is gated information and approval chains that signal "we don't trust you." The unlock is agency: access and autonomy to make decisions routing everything up the chain. Worth reading if you've ever felt like the bureaucracy is the constraint, not your skills.
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• ​How Claude Code’s lead designer builds with AI (Dive Club Live): Live with Meaghan Choi, lead designer on Claude Code at Anthropic walks through her actual workflow: parallel Claude agents, a custom /prototype skill for quick option generation, Loop mode for hands-free iteration, and a scheduled routine that monitors for front-end changes shipped without a designer involved.
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• ​designtools.fyi: A well-curated directory of design tools you can browse designer archetype. Great for finding alternatives and getting re-oriented when the tooling landscape changes every few months.
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• ​Making Software: An in-progress book that explains how the software you use every day actually works (touchscreens, Gaussian blur, Bezier curves, rasterization) with lots of diagrams. Good for the kind of designer who wants to know what's under the hood.
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• ​Designers Ready for Agentic AI Workflows: A Quick Intro: A free 30-minute live session that covers what agentic workflows actually mean for designers, why your Figma file structure matters more now that agents read your files directly, and a simple Claude agent team live.

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Open design roles worth a look

• ​Staff Product Designer, Events​ - Perk
• ​Staff Product Designer, Group Practices - Headway
• ​Staff Product Designer, Ads - Fetch
• ​Head of Product Design - n8n
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The invisible gap in your influence

Across designers who've completed the Strategic Influence Audit, Communication Architecture scores the lowest of any pillar on average — lower than Organizational Navigation, lower than Visibility & Recognition. And it shows up just as consistently in senior designers as it does in earlier-career ones. It's not an experience level problem.

It tends to stay invisible because nothing's obviously broken. The work is getting done. You're contributing. Things feel mostly fine. You just can't figure out why your influence isn't matching your output.

Communication Architecture isn't about being a good communicator in the conversational sense. It's about how you structure and sequence the way your work gets seen — which artifacts you create and when, how you frame decisions for different audiences, whether the story of your work lands with a PM the same way it lands with a VP. Most designers have built this ad hoc, if they've built it at all.

The pattern I see most often is designers doing genuinely strategic work, but narrating it tactically:

• Presenting the solution when the problem framing should come first
• Sharing explorations in design reviews when what's needed is a recommendation
• Documenting process when stakeholders need a clear articulation of the tradeoff
• Writing updates that describe activity rather than progress or impact

The work is strong. The architecture around it isn't.

The good news is this is one of the more fixable gaps — once you can see it. It doesn't require a new role or a title change. It starts with a shift in how you think about your audience before you communicate, not after.

A few places to begin:

Know who you're talking to before you open the doc.
A design review for your immediate team and an async update for a VP are different artifacts, even if they're covering the same work. Most designers default to one format for everything.

Lead with the decision, not the journey.
Stakeholders don't need to follow your process to trust your judgment — they need to understand what you decided and why. Save the explorations for people who asked for them.

Make your strategic thinking visible.
The tradeoffs you weighed, the constraints you worked within, the options you ruled out — that's the work that builds influence. If it's only in your head, it doesn't exist for anyone else.

Getting this right won't happen from a single review tweak. It's a practice — and once you start looking for where your communication architecture is working and where it isn't, you'll start seeing it everywhere.

The Strategic Influence Audit is a free tool for designers who want to understand where their influence is strongest — and where it's quietly leaking. Take it here →​

Have a topic you'd like me to write about? Reply to this email and let me know! I read every reply.