Lunchtime conversation: Ways of working in an AI world

A table by Nicole Burrow, VP of Product Design at Spotify

AI made the mechanical parts of design dramatically faster. Leadership can mistake that speed for designers becoming more available on demand. But the valuable part, judgment, taste, the ability to sit with a hard problem long enough to understand it, still takes exactly as long as it always did.

At this table we'll talk about what that means in practice: how design teams are adapting their ways of working, how we protect time for the slow, high-judgment work that AI can't rush, and how we have honest conversations with product and engineering partners about where design's time should actually go. Bring your own examples of what's working and what isn't.

Nicole Burrow

VP of Product Design at Spotify

Nicole is the Vice President of Product Design at Spotify, where she leads teams shaping the cross-platform consumer experience and product evolution. Operating at the intersection of brand identity, technology, and human behaviour, she focuses on scaling intuitive design systems that make complex features seamless for millions of global users.

Before Spotify, Nicole was a UX Director at agency Huge, working across the US, Europe, and Asia for some of the world's most recognised brands. 

Over the past decade at Spotify she has grown from leading a single mobile app team to overseeing a 100+ person design organisation spanning product design and user research, and recently presented the company's Time Well Spent vision at Investor Day 2026. She is particularly focused on how design organisations maintain creative ambition at the scale of 800 million monthly users — and on what stays irreplaceably human as AI reshapes design workflows. AI excels at recombining known patterns, she argues, but the hardest work has always been imagining something genuinely new — a judgment call that requires deep domain understanding and sustained attention to a problem space. She is based in Stockholm.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicoleburrow/

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