Hey Reader

This week is about helping you design smarter in 2026, using AI more intentionally, understanding the market more clearly and having better conversations with your users and stakeholders.

In today's email:

• Designing with AI (without going full dev): Vibe coding with Anton Sten, a introduction to Lovable, plus Detail.design for sharpening all the little UI details that make a product feel right.
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• Understanding the bigger picture of your career: Why are designers struggling in this economy (and what to do about it), plus 10 lessons from leading Discovery Design at Canva and what's worth carrying into 2026.
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• Running better interview: A practical Maven course on interviewing, learn how to ask better questions, synthesizing insights, and getting stakeholders to act on what you learn.

🎯 The Design Bundle a limited time bundle of 6 resources from working product designers to help you make confident decisions, influence stakeholders, and move your career forward.

Design gems of the week

• ​Vibe Coding for Designers - Anton Sten: Anton Sten shares how he built and maintains his website using AI, what's working, what's clunky, and how vibe coding lets designers who don't want to go full dev.
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• ​Why Designers Struggle in this Economy and What to do About It: This talk from Ryan Scott goes beyond why "the market is bad" and actually connects the big economic shifts to what designers are feeling today - from hiring freezes, team structures, and shifting expectations. A great watch if you want the bigger picture and how to respond strategically.
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• ​User Interview Skills for Designers & PMs - Maven: A practical course for anyone expected to talk to users, but never received the proper training. It covers recruiting, asking better questions, synthesize insights, and convincing stakeholders to act on what you learned. Use code: FEMKE15 for 15% off this course
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• ​Detail.design - Where craft lives: A curated lirbrary of tiny interface decisions that make products feel polished an intentional. Each detail includes why it works, where you've seen it, and how to recreate it - perfect for levelling up your craft.
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• ​Building with Ai for everyone. An introduction to Lovable: A grounded introduction to building with Lovable and prompt-powered building. No hype, just what they are and what they're not, a hands one demo and how to realistically use them in your workflow.
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• ​10 Lessons 2025 Taught me About Design Leadership: Reflections from leading Discovery Design at Canva - what actually mattered, what didn't, and what lessons worth carrying into 2026.

Design better AI products — even if you’ve never worked on one before.

AI is making its way into more product experiences, but most designers haven’t been taught how to design for it. How do you build trust when outputs are probabilistic? What does “good UX” even mean when the system might be wrong?
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This workshop breaks it down.
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Led by Florian Boelter, Staff Product Designer at Juro, we’ll go hands-on with real UX patterns and decision-making tools you can use when designing AI-powered features — from uncertainty and fallback states to human-in-the-loop workflows.
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We’ll work through a practical, hands-on exercise where we critique and redesign an AI product experience together. Whether you’re preparing for your first AI project or want to build a strong case study for your portfolio, this is where to start.

​RSVP to the workshop​

Why senior designers still second-guess themselves

You're in a design critique.

Someone from product questions your navigation decision.

You have reasons—good ones.

You spent hours testing alternatives, considering edge cases, mapping user flows.

But the moment they ask "have you thought about..." your mind races. Did you miss something obvious? Should you have explored that option? Maybe your reasoning isn't as solid as you thought.

The worst part? You know your work is solid. But knowing it and feeling confident defending it are two entirely different skills.

The experience paradox

You'd think once you're five or ten years into your design career, you'd stop questioning yourself. Surely you've seen enough patterns, made enough decisions and shipped enough products to feel unshakeable in your choices by this point.

However, more experience leads to higher-stakes decisions and expectations.

Your work affects more users, costs more to build and has more visibility when it fails. The impostor syndrome doesn't disappear—it just gets more sophisticated.

And design as a discipline itself doesn't help. Unlike engineering where code either works or doesn't, design lives in the subjective space. There's always another option you didn't explore. Always someone who would have approached it differently. Always room for doubt.

Then you're in a room with a VP who asks thoughtful questions about business impact. Your eng lead wants to understand the technical tradeoffs. Your PM is advocating for scope reduction.

These are smart people asking legitimate questions—which somehow makes it harder. You can't dismiss their concerns. You need answers that work at their level of thinking, and suddenly your carefully considered design rationale feels inadequate for the conversation you're actually in.

What confident designers actually do differently

Here's what I've learned from watching designers who consistently make confident decisions: they're not free from doubt.

They just have better tools for working through it.

Confident designers have frameworks for evaluating options systematically. Not just "this feels right" but "here's how I scored these three approaches against our core objectives."

They can articulate their reasoning in language that makes sense to non-designers. They know what "good enough" looks like instead of disappearing into perfectionism.

They've also seen enough examples of how other designers solve similar problems that they can recognize patterns. They know which hills to die on and which compromises are strategic. They understand that doubt is information—sometimes it's pointing to a real problem, sometimes it's just fear.

Most importantly, they have ways to test their thinking before they're in the hot seat defending it. Templates for pressure-testing decisions. Checklists that catch blind spots. Questions that surface whether they're solving the right problem.

The systems behind the confidence

I've been thinking about this a lot while putting together the Design Bundle with five other practicing designers. These are designers who consistently get stakeholder buy-in, ship work they're proud of, and are unshakeable in design reviews.

Turns out none of them are just winging it. They all have systems.

• Tommy Geoco's design decision frameworks help you move from "I think this works" to "here's exactly why this is the right choice for these specific goals."
• Anfisa's courses includes templates to evaluate complex decisions under pressure.
• My own course Product Strategy for Designers walks through how to build conviction in your design choices and communicate them in ways that stick.

These aren't theory. They're the actual frameworks you can use daily when the pressure's on and the stakes are high.

What changes when you have the tools

Confidence isn't about knowing everything or never feeling doubt.

It's about having reliable ways to work through uncertainty. It's knowing that even if someone challenges your decision, you can walk them through your thinking.

It's being able to say "yes, I considered that option, and here's why I didn't go that direction" instead of spiralling into second-guessing.

​The bundle is live through January 16th if you want to see what these designers have built.

Six complete resources for $299—everything from decision frameworks to stakeholder communication templates to career advancement strategies.

But whether you grab it or not, know this: that voice of doubt in your head?

It's not a sign you're not ready for the work you're doing.

It just means you need better tools for the thinking you're already doing well.

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