I gave my job to the machines (and I'd do it again)
A talk by Johanna Evans, VP Product Design at Guru
Everywhere you look, someone is announcing that design is no longer needed, that the machines can do the job now. Johanna took that seriously, and then did something about it. Over the past two years she has deliberately handed large parts of her role to AI systems: writing feature specs, running early customer discovery, keeping work on-brand across an entire company. Not to disappear, but to make room.
This talk is about what happens after you give the work away. When execution is cheap and anyone can produce, a design leader's value moves to the things machines cannot do well: deciding which problems are worth solving, applying real taste to the output, and building systems that people can trust.
Johanna will walk through exactly what she gave away and how, the best practices she had to invent because none existed yet, and what that freed her to do instead, including a weekly customer discovery flywheel she calls the Friday Protocol.
If you are feeling the ground shift under design leadership, this is a practical account of how to grab it, rather than wait for it to happen to you.
