AI 时代的设计领导力

Vercel 的设计师在日常工作中都在使用 Claude。成为交付流程的一部分后，他们能把工作真正落地的成功率大大提高了。这并不意味着他们要逐像素地交付，而是可能负责最后 1% 的设计打磨，或者交付一个能帮工程师起步的原型。

Vercel designers are all using Claude in their day-to-day work. They are significantly more successful in getting their work shipped by being part of the shipping process. That doesn't mean that they're shipping every single pixel, but it might be that they're doing the design polish in the final 1%. Or it might be that they're shipping a prototype that helps an engineer get started.

欢迎收听 Dive Club。我是 Rid，这里是设计师永不止步的学习社区。今天的嘉宾是 Hannah Hearth，她最近加入了 Vercel，担任产品设计主管。这期对话的重点，是聊聊我们行业正在发生的种种变化，以及这些变化对设计师意味着什么。我们会谈到 AI 工具如何改变设计的实践方式，以及它如何影响我们对职业路径的思考。所以在节目一开始，我请 Hannah 多分享了一些她如何获得 Vercel 这个职位的故事，因为我觉得这能相当有趣地描绘出设计领导力的未来图景。

Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid and this is where designers never stop learning. Today's episode is with Hannah Hearth, who recently joined as the head of product design at Vercel. And a big focus of this conversation is just talking about all of the different changes that are happening in our industry and what it all means for designers. We talk about how AI tools are changing the practice of design as well as how this influences the way that we think about our career paths. So to start, I asked Hannah to share a little bit more about how she landed the role at Vercel because I think it paints a pretty interesting picture about what this future of design leadership looks like.

我这几轮面试的开头部分，几乎和 IC（独立贡献者）面试一模一样。先是招聘经理面试，然后是作品集环节，向评审小组或一群人展示你的工作，接着进入一对一阶段。整个过程让我觉得很熟悉、很常规。但在 Vercel 的面试里，做完这些之后，他们又让我去参加一整天的现场面试。为了准备那次面试，我还得做一份带回家完成的作业，这真的非常意外。我已经 10 年没有现场面试过了，也 10 年没做过带回家的作业了。所以——

The first part of interviews that I did were almost exactly what you would see from an IC interview. You have the hiring manager interview. You do the portfolio round where you share your work to a panel or a group of people, and then you go into the one-on-one stage. All of that felt very comfortable and very typical. But for my interviews at Vercel, after I completed all of that, I then was asked to come in to do an in-person full day of interviews. And in order to prep for it, I had to do a take-home assignment, which was very surprising. I have not interviewed in person in 10 years, and I have not had to do a take-home assignment in 10 years. So—

你可能以为自己早就用不着做这些了吧？

You probably thought you graduated from those, didn't you?

是的，没错。我当时非常意外。而且我认为，过去有一个时期——也许我们现在还处于那个时期的尾声——但我觉得情况正在改变，那时带回家的作业受到了很多批评。很多人指出其中有些虚伪之处：如果你让候选人做一份和公司实际业务一致的带回家作业，那你就应该为他们的时间付费。

Yes. Yes. I was very caught off guard. And I think that there was an era—and maybe we're still in it a little bit—but I think that's changing—where take-home assignments had a lot of backlash. There are a lot of folks who pointed out some of the hypocrisy, like if you ask a candidate to do a take-home assignment that actually aligns with what your company does, then you should be paying them for their time.

嗯。

Mhm.

如果你让他们做一份和你们的工作、你们行业完全不相关的作业，那又有什么意义呢？为什么要让他们做那个？所以候选人确实被放在一个两难的境地。但作为一名设计负责人，我觉得这是展示我如何真正拆解问题、并尝试争取认同的绝佳方式。这些正是我日常工作中需要做的事情。而这一点很难在作品集展示中真正体现出来，尤其是对于设计负责人来说——你展示的是团队做了很多工作。当大家并不完全确定你个人贡献了什么时，真的很难去评估一位设计负责人候选人。显然，我准备作品集时很大一部分工作，就是把这一点尽可能讲清楚——呈现我团队完成的协作，并指出哪些地方如果没有我就不会是这个样子。这就是作品集面试的意义所在。但这份带回家的作业，我觉得让他们有机会看到我真正和他们日常协作时会是什么样子。回过头来想，这次作业也成了我的一个好机会，因为它与 Vercel 所在的行业、以及我们在 Vercel 解决的那类问题高度相关，以至于它也成了我说服自己的过程。因为在做这个项目的过程中，我重新意识到：我热爱开发者工具，也热爱解决非常技术性的问题。当我在家做那个项目时，我玩得太开心了，心里想：‘好吧，也许这对我来说真是一个绝佳的机会。’

And if you ask them to do an assignment that's completely irrelevant to your work and your industry, then what's the point? Why are you asking them to do that? And so they're sort of put in a hard position there. But as a design leader, I think it's a phenomenal way to showcase how I actually break down problems and present that to try to get buy-in. These are things that I'm going to have to do on the job. And it's impossible to really show that in a portfolio presentation, especially for a design leader, where you're showing work that a lot of your team did. And it's really hard to assess a design leader as a candidate when you aren't exactly sure what they contributed. And obviously that's a big part of my portfolio preparation—making that as clear as possible. Building up the teamwork that my team did and identifying ways where it wouldn't have been the same without me. That's the point of the portfolio interview. But then the take-home assignment, I think, was a great opportunity for them to see how I actually would work with them day to day. And in reflection, it also turned out to be a great opportunity for me because the take-home assignment was so relevant to Vercel's industry and the types of problems that we solve at Vercel that it was part of the selling process for me. Because as I did the project, I was reminded I love developer tools and I love solving problems that are really technical. And as I was doing the project at home, I was having too much fun and I was like, 'Okay, maybe this is really a great opportunity for me.'

先插播一条快讯，然后我们继续。你知道吗？我对 Granola MCP 非常兴奋。它能把你的 AI 工具直接连接到你的 Granola 会议笔记。作为一个最近大量用 vibe coding 造工具的人，这次发布的意義很大，因为会议笔记是我拥有的最有价值的内容之一。现在我可以在会议历史的基础上查找特定话题、提取待办事项、回答任何问题。这些功能今天已经全部可用，我已经在疯狂地用它构建东西了。所以，如果你想加入我，请访问 dive.com/granolamcp，也就是 granolamcp。另外，Lovable 刚刚发布了更聪明的版本。它解决复杂任务的能力提升了 71%，也就是说它可以更自主地完成更多工作。它有更智能的规划，还有提示队列，你可以在 Lovable 工作时叠加请求。而我最喜欢的是自动化测试——Lovable 现在会像真实用户一样测试你的应用。它会自己打开浏览器、遍历流程、检查边界情况，并帮你抓出 bug。最棒的是，当它发现问题时，它会当场修复。我真心认为 Lovable 是当前构建软件最简单的途径。所以，前往 dive.club/lovable 试试这个新版本吧。

Real quick message and then we can jump back into it. You know what? I'm excited about the Granola MCP. It allows you to connect your AI tools directly to your Granola meeting notes. And as somebody who's been vibe coding a lot of tools recently, this release is a pretty big deal because my meeting notes are some of the most valuable content that I have. And now I can find specific topics, pull out action items, and get any question answered based on my meeting history. This is all available today, and I'm already building with it like crazy. So, if you want to join me, head to dive.com/granolamcp. That's granolamcp. An even smarter version of Lovable just released. It is 71% better at solving complex tasks, which means it can do more work more autonomously. There's more intelligent planning. There's prompt queuing so you can stack requests while Lovable works. And my favorite part, there's automated testing, which means Lovable now tests your apps like a real user. It opens its own browser, navigates flows, investigates edge cases, and catches bugs for you. And the best part is when it finds a problem, it fixes it right on the spot. I genuinely believe Lovable is the easiest way to build software today. So, head to dive.club/lovable to try the new release.

好了，我们回到正题。你之前跟我提过，我们正在进入一种设计领导力的新时代。所以我很想好好解构一下，这对你来说意味着什么。作为一个刚刚在大公司里担任第三个非常资深的设计领导岗位的人，你看到了哪些转变？从一段工作到下一段工作之间有怎样的差异，可以反映出这种转变在更大的市场层面可能是什么样子？

Okay, now on to the episode. You mentioned something to me earlier. You talked about how we're entering this kind of new era of design leadership. So, a big thing that I would like to do is kind of just unpack what that means to you. So, what are some of the shifts that you're able to see as somebody who—you know—you're now entering kind of your third really senior design leadership role at this big company? What have been the deltas from role to role that indicate what this shift might look like at more of a market level?

我觉得在我刚开始当管理者的时候，市面上很多管理建议和新手管理者指南都在说：优秀的管理者招到非常聪明的人，然后就别挡他们的路。但以我目前的职业阶段、我们当前的市场状况，以及我们对设计领导力的期望来看，我发现事实远非如此。不是说我们要招不聪明的人然后去挡他们的路，而是我们要招聪明的人，并且我们本身就是流程中很重要的一部分。有一个角度可以思考：在我职业生涯早期，在设计领导力市场的另一个阶段，人们普遍觉得初级设计师需要更多手把手的指导——跟他们合作非常耗时——而资深员工、Principal 级设计师则可以非常独立。但实际上我并没有发现这种情况。我认为 Staff 和 Principal 级设计师需要大量的支持。

I think when I was becoming a manager, a lot of the managerial advice and guidance for new managers in books that you would read were about how great managers hire really smart people and get out of their way. At this point in my career and at this point in our market and what we expect of design leadership, I could not find that to be farther from the truth. Not that we hire dumb people and get in their way, but that we hire smart people and we are a big part of the process. One way to think about that is like earlier in my career and at a different stage of this market of design leadership, there was this sentiment that junior designers require a lot more handholding—it's a lot more time intensive to work with them—and senior staff, principal designers, you know, can be extremely independent. And I haven't really found that to be the case actually. I think that staff and principal designers need a significant amount of support.

他们需要极具现场感的设计领导者，能够帮助他们应对政治局势和组织复杂性，并且在那些设计师接到远比初级设计师模糊的项目时、帮助他们把任务拆解开来。没有设计师想成为孤岛，一位设计领导者真的能让你感觉自己是团队的一部分，让你总有可以求助的人，获得出色的反馈、宝贵的指导，以及坦诚、直接的指引——下一步该做什么，以及如何真正把工作从产出（outputs）变成成果（outcomes），并且让东西真正上线。我认为有那么几年我们人员过剩，却缺乏能力去弄清楚设计如何能在行业中发挥最大作用；而现在，重点已经从单纯产出漂亮的东西，转向真正把它们交付到生产环境、并让客户真正用上。我认为设计领导者现在理所应当地比以前更受到这方面的评判。所以我觉得这是一个令人兴奋的时代，但同时也更艰难了。

They need design leaders who are extremely present, who can help them navigate political situations and organizational complexity, and who can help when those designers are given projects that are massively more ambiguous than a junior designer and help them break it down. No designer wants to be an island, and a design leader can really help make you feel like you're part of a team and you have somebody that you can always go to to get excellent feedback, great guidance, and honest, direct guidance on what to do next and how to actually turn not just outputs out of your work, but outcomes out of your work and actually get things live. I think there were a few years there where we were overstaffed and somewhat underequipped to figure out how design could be most effective in our industry, and now the shift has gone from just producing beautiful things to actually shipping them to production and landing them with customers as well. And I think design leaders are rightfully more judged on that now than we were in the past. So I think it's an exciting time to be a design leader, but it's also harder.

这里有好几个趋势叠加在一起：一方面可能是团队规模的压缩——你刚才也提到了；另一方面是职责的增加——甚至你作为领导者也要对最终上线的东西负责。设计师被要求做更多的事，但也许设计师反而更少了。作为领导者，这种动态关系如何展开？就如何充分利用你在 Versel 的这下一张白纸，你又在思考哪些事情？

There are like a few trends that kind of combine here where you have maybe the compression of team size, which is something that you mentioned, and there's also this increased responsibility too. Even you, as the leader, are being held accountable for what actually ships. Designers are being asked to do more, but maybe there are also fewer designers. How does that dynamic play out as a leader? What are some of the things that you're thinking about in terms of even how to make the most of this next blank slate with Versel?

几年前，我们都得到了一波资金涌入。疫情初期，前几周显然对科技行业来说极具挑战，但后来我们都扩张了团队。那是一个有趣的时期，我们都在指数级增长。我们都在谈论组织 Scaling。然后清算来了——我们经历了一次修正。市场提出了『修正』这个说法，我认为这其实被误解了。人们把它看作是对一次性错误的一次性修正，但实际上我认为这是一次方向性修正，更加持久，而且会长期持续。现在有一个预期：很多公司在经历增长阶段时，会更像早期创业公司那样运作，试图用更少的资源从团队身上压榨出更多。而我认为这正是我们不断听到的 AI 主题——借助新工具成为 10 倍设计师或 10 倍工程师。这令人精疲力竭，而且真的很难在不让团队过劳的情况下做到这一点。所以我认为现在……

A few years ago, we all got an influx of funding. In the early pandemic, the first few weeks obviously were extremely challenging for tech, and then over time we all expanded our teams. It was this interesting period where we all grew exponentially. We were all talking about scaling orgs. Then the reckoning came — we corrected. They introduced this term 'correction' in the market, and I think that's actually a bit of a misunderstood term. People have been seeing it as a one-time correction for a one-time mistake, but actually I think it's a course correction that is more permanent and will be more sustained over time. There's this expectation that a lot of companies are going to be operating more in the early startup phase as they go through a growth stage, to try to get more out of their teams with less. And I think that's the theme we're hearing a lot with AI — being able to become a 10x designer or a 10x engineer with new tools. It is exhausting, and it is really hard to find a way to do that without burning teams out. So I think that's now.

你知道，在频谱的一端，我们不想把团队扩充到让员工面临被裁员风险的地步。我们希望在招聘和增长上非常谨慎，但也不能把团队压垮。所以我认为，每个设计领导者都会面临、也一直面临的挑战之一就是合适的团队规模，但现在，组织其他部门比以前更加以批判的眼光来看待这一点。我们能深入聊聊工具这块吗？我知道很多个人贡献者（IC）和领导者都很关心这个问题。也许为了设定一下背景，我想提出一个假设性的频谱：一端是完全放手的领导者——你想怎样都行，想玩这些工具很好，不想用也完全没关系；另一端则是绩效评估与 AI 使用挂钩——我们追踪一切，你必须使用工具，每周还要安排专门的时间来用。你觉得你希望站在这个频谱的哪个位置？更广泛地说，这体现了你对于采用这些新工具的理念是什么？

You know, on one end of the spectrum, we don't want to overstaff teams to the point where we put people at risk of being laid off. We want to make sure we're really careful about how we hire and how we grow, but we also can't run people into the ground. So I think one of the challenges that every design leader faces and has always faced is the right size of team, but I think now it's even more viewed with a critical eye from the rest of the org, in ways that it wasn't as much before. Can we double click on the tooling piece for a second? I know that's top of mind for a lot of people, both ICs and leaders. And maybe even to set the stage, I want to present this hypothetical spectrum. On one end, as a leader, you're completely hands-off. Do what you want. If you want to play with these tools, great. If not, it's totally fine. On the other, it's like performance reviews are tied to AI usage. We're tracking everything. You got to use tools, dedicated time during the week to use them. How do you think about where you want to fit on that spectrum? And what does that say more broadly about your philosophy towards adopting these new tools?

我认为我们如今在这个频谱上的位置很可能不会一成不变。即便有些组织会说：『我希望每个人每天都在工作中使用 AI 工具，你会被考核，我们会追踪。』——我在那种组织里待过，那真的毫不留情。有时候你得绞尽脑汁想『我今天怎么用 AI』。但说实话，我认为这在某种程度上是个必要的魔鬼，因为任何有一定规模的公司都会被 AI 颠覆。而自我颠覆的最佳方式，就是让你自己的团队去使用这些工具，去思考这些工具将如何改变人们解决我们公司未来所解决的问题的方式。而未来就跟明天一样近。它正在发生，甚至昨天就已经发生了。它发生得如此之快。所以我认为这可能非常烦人、非常挫败，但我确实觉得这是非常有效的方法，能让你很快地强制采用你可以在其中学习的新工具。你可以根据自己的性格，用完全不同的心态去对待它。你可以选择对这件事冷嘲热讽，或者愤愤不平，或者在伦理上感到矛盾——所有这些都是合理的选项。你也可以把它看作学习新东西的机会。我们以前聊过一件事：现在进入我们行业的初级设计师，比我们当年做初级设计师时学得更快，其中一部分原因就是工具的使用。所以我在日常生活中尽量把采用 AI 视为一种祝福，一个学习新事物的机会。我想，尽管你的听众非常多元，但有一个共同点：所有收听你播客的人都是想不断学习新东西的人，是渴求新知的人。这就是为什么我认为我们真的很热爱这个时代，因为它令人不舒服，而我们就爱不舒服。我们热爱学新东西。因为当你回顾自己的职业生涯时，那些在很短时间内学到大量东西的时期，正是你职业生涯中最好的时期——它既艰难、又让人痛苦，同时又精彩绝伦。

I think where we fit on that spectrum today is probably not going to be a permanent fixture. Even the orgs that say, 'I want everyone to use AI tools every single day in their work, and you're going to be judged on it, we're going to track it' — I've been in that org, and it is ruthless. You're trying to come up with ways like, 'How can I use AI today?' sometimes. But I think it is honestly a bit of a necessary evil, because every single company of a certain size is going to be disrupted by AI. And the best way for you to disrupt yourself is for your own teams to be using the tools and to be thinking how those tools will change how people solve the problem that our company solves in the future. And the future is like tomorrow. It's happening now, or yesterday even. It's happening so fast. So I think it can be very annoying and very frustrating. But I actually think it's an extremely useful way to very quickly force adoption of new tools that you can learn from. And you can take that with a very different mindset depending on who you are. You can choose to be cynical about it, or bitter about it, or ethically conflicted about it. All of those are fair options for you. You can also see it as an opportunity to learn something new. Something we've talked about before is that the junior designers entering our industry now are learning faster than we ever did when we were juniors. Part of that is tool adoption. So I'm trying to see AI adoption in my day-to-day work as a blessing, as an opportunity to learn new things. I think one of the things that I assume all of your audience shares in common, despite how diverse it is, is that everybody listening to your podcast wants to learn something new all the time — somebody who's craving new knowledge. That's why I think we really love living through this era, because it is uncomfortable, and we love being uncomfortable. We love learning new things. Because when you look back at your career, the times and eras where you were learning a significant amount in a condensed amount of time, those are the best times of your career — where it's hard and it sucks and it's awesome all at the same time.

没错。你正在学习未来所有不该做的事，但这不过是过程的一部分。对于可能一直收听节目的朋友来说，他们知道我喜欢引用 Cleo 的话，可能引用得比应有的还多。他把这称为我们行业的『大跳球』（the great jump ball）。我心想，没错，完全说得通。

Yeah. You're learning all of the exact ways that you don't want to do things moving forward, but it's kind of just part of the process. For people that maybe have listened for a while, they know that I like to quote Cleo more than I probably should. And he refers to it as the great jump ball of our industry. And I'm like, yeah, that makes total sense.

感觉一切都大有可为，年龄真的不重要。你可能已经练习了 20 年，但现实就是——你知道的，周四下午。我做了所谓的“设计工作”，虽然我都不太清楚这个类别还存在多少。但这周我每天都在做设计，花了很多时间在 Conductor 里，操控智能体，犯了一堆我以前想都没想过的奇怪代码错误。你说得对，这确实好坏参半。有时候就像“现在到底怎么回事？”但我有一种感觉——也许我只是个彻头彻尾的乐观主义者——但尝试新事物、做实验真的很有趣。如果你刚入行两年，这些新东西对你来说是新鲜的，对我们这两个已经练习了很久的人来说也同样新鲜。

Like everything's up for grabs, and it doesn't really matter how old you are. You could be practicing for 20 years, but the reality is it's, you know, Thursday afternoon. I've done quote-unquote design work, which I don't really even know what that category is much anymore. But I've been working as a designer every single day this week, and I've spent a lot of time in Conductor, wielding agents and making all of these weird code mistakes that I'd never thought about before. And you're right, it's a mixed bag. Sometimes it's like, what's happening right now? But there is this sense—maybe I'm just a raging optimist—but it's really fun to just try new things and experiment. And if you're two years into your career, it's just as new for you as it is for the two of us who have been practicing for a long time now.

我觉得我们也该承认，并不是每个人都能从中获得乐趣。对很多人来说，尝试新事物本身就很难。而且对很多人来说，现在这个人生阶段去尝试新事物——也许他们刚有了孩子，或者家里有亲人去世——他们会觉得“现在不是时候”。这没关系。我觉得把这些说出来、接受它，并知道这不一定是自己人生的常态，是件好事。未来总会有某个阶段，我会准备好跳进新工具里去试。你刚才也提到了要专门留出时间来尝试新工具，因为我们实在太忙了。每一件事都很紧急，每一件事都明天就要上线。我觉得团队必须划出专属时间。在 Webflow 时，我们有“构建者日”（Builder Days）这样的活动；在 Vercel 以及很多其他公司，也有黑客松的机会。我认为这些机会正是运营团队需要准备好提供合适工具和权限的时候，好让团队在那几天能立刻上手试新工具，因为在日常工作中我们不一定能挤出时间。

I think it's also fair to talk about the fact that it's not fun for everybody. For a lot of people, trying new things is generally hard. And for a lot of people, trying new things right now at this point in their life—maybe they just had a kid or they had a death in the family—it's like this is not the time for them. And that's okay. I think it's good to state those things and accept them and know that this is not always going to be the era I'm in in my life. And there will come an era when I'm ready to jump into the new tools and try them out. And you talked about having dedicated time to actually jump into new tools because we get so busy. Everything is an urgent request and everything is shipping tomorrow. And I think it is absolutely critical for teams to set aside dedicated times. So at Webflow, we had something called builder days. At Vercel and at many places, there are hackathon opportunities. And I think those are the opportunities where operations teams need to be ready to give their teams the right tools and the access they need, so that on those days teams are ready to hit the ground running trying new tools, because in our day-to-day work we may not always have the time to actually fit it in.

能不能再深入聊一下，这个时代的节点——以及那个所谓“设计领导力新时代”——是如何影响你对流程和结构化协作的看法的？显然现在有大量自下而上的方式，尤其是这个时代，各种界限都在模糊。但我猜还是会有一些原则，比如“嘿，这就是我们团队合作的方式”，或者“我们每周三都要开这个会”。你觉得在今天的世界里，还有哪些流程依然存在？

Can we go a little bit deeper on just how this moment in time—and again, that new era of design leadership—how is that influencing the way you think about process and structured collaboration? Obviously there's so much bottom-up, especially in today's age when kinds of lines are getting blurred. But I would imagine there's still some principles, like, hey, this is the type of way that we're going to work together as a team, or we're going to have this meeting every Wednesday. What process does still exist in today's world, I guess?

我可以给你一个具体的例子，说明这种变化如何改变我们设计中一个非常著名的流程——设计冲刺（Design Sprint）。它是 Google Ventures 的那套五天流程。

I can give you maybe a concrete example of how this shift is changing one of our processes that is very famous in the design world: the design sprint. It's this five-day Google Ventures process.

把所有红色圆点贴纸给我，用来做热力图。我爱……

Give me all the red sticky dots to heat map. I love...

圆点贴纸。关于设计冲刺，变化的一点——至少在我所处的圈子里，从我自己和同行的经验来看——是没有人会再花五个八小时在同一个房间里协作，哪怕远程也不这样了。我觉得这很合理。设计冲刺已经演变成一种新形态：可能仍然是五天，但你每天早上其实只需一个小时同步时间来做开场，提供一些背景信息、对齐目标，确保我们在解决正确的问题，或者在正确的方向上发散。其余七小时则是独立工作，往一百万个方向去做原型。我们可能还会把做原型这件事从设计冲刺的第四天提前到第一天，这纯粹是因为工具变了。我还见过只用一天跑完的设计冲刺：上午理解问题，下午发散，到当天结束就有一个原型，然后拿去给客户测试。所以我觉得，这是我们把设计思维时代的一些好东西，应用到今天这个世界的一种方式——今天我们有完全不同的工具，对交付速度的预期也不同，对工作最终产出的定义也不同。

Sticky dots. One of the things that is changing about that—at least in my world, from what I have seen not just in my own work but also in my peers' work—is that nobody is spending five eight-hour days in a room together collaborating, even remotely. I think rightfully so. The design sprint has morphed into a new evolution where it might be five days, but you're actually only doing one hour of synchronous time in the morning to kick off each day with some context, some alignment, making sure we're solving the right problem or diverging on the right ideas. But you're spending the other seven hours doing independent work, going in a million directions of prototyping. We might also be doing that prototyping on day one of the design sprint instead of day four or whatever it was, just because the tools are changing. And I've seen design sprints run in a one-day process where we spend the morning understanding and the afternoon diverging, and then by the end of the day we have a prototype and we're testing it in front of customers. So I think that's one way where we're taking some of the great things from the design thinking era and applying them to today's world, where we have a very different set of tools and a different set of expectations on how fast we can ship things and what sort of outcomes we're producing at the end of our work.

当你有这种自然压力去压缩设计流程时，也许我们会砍掉很多年习以为常的“设计表演”。在这种情况下，你如何依然保持对工艺的高标准？因为 Webflow 和现在的 Vercel 都以对细节精益求精、做出深思熟虑的作品而闻名。我有点好奇，这里似乎存在一种张力，因为现在有一种自然趋势——我也感觉到了——就是一切都必须越来越快、越来越快。

When you have this natural pressure to collapse the design process, maybe we axe a good bit of the design theater that we've been accustomed to over the years. How do you still uphold this really high bar for craft? Because both Webflow and now Vercel are kind of known for sweating the details and making something that is really well-thought-out. And I'm kind of curious—there feels like a bit of tension there, because there is this natural movement right now, and I'm feeling it too, where everything's just got to be faster and faster and faster.

我担心的不是工艺在这个过程里被削减，而是我们有没有在解决正确的问题，有没有用正确的方式去解决。我非常在意工艺，我工作的公司也在意工艺。但我觉得，在压缩时间的时候，我经常发现最不该压缩的是用来对齐“到底该解决什么问题”的时间。同时我也很幸运，在过去几家供职的公司里，每个人都在意工艺。如果设计师身边的同事都不在乎工艺，那他要坚持下来是很困难的。所以我觉得，工艺可能会在其他地方被削减——其实我觉得它不会被削减，它反而会更自然地长出来。没错，它很自然地长出来，因为 Vercel 的每一个人都对每一个像素较真，这种环境会孕育出优秀的工艺。

I worry less about craft getting cut in that process than I do about whether we're solving the right problem. Are we solving it in the right way? I care so much about craft, and the companies that I work at care about craft. But I think when you're cutting time, a lot of times I've found that the worst time to cut is the time where you're actually aligning on the right problems to solve. But I also think that I've had a great opportunity at the last few companies I've worked at, to work in a place where everybody cares about craft. It is very hard for designers who work in an environment with people who don't care about craft to actually make that through. So I do think it gets cut in other places—actually, I don't think it gets cut. It comes more naturally maybe. Yeah, it comes very naturally because every single person at Vercel gives a damn about every pixel, and that environment breeds great craft.

好，那我们再深入聊一下“对齐”这块。也许我们可以请出刚才那个假想的初级设计师——他们能通过工具获得大量练习，对吧？也许手艺也在进步，也学会了很多原型制作技能。但在“到底如何在组织里把事情推动起来”这件事上，仍然有点黑箱，尤其是在时间更紧张的情况下。所以，当你回顾那些合作过、非常出色的个人贡献者（IC）时，他们做了哪些事情来有效对齐团队？或者说，有哪些行为或特质，能让听众从中获得一些很小的战术？

Okay, let's double click on the alignment piece then. And maybe we can speak to this hypothetical junior designer that we were hyping up earlier. They're able to get the reps with the tool, right? And maybe the craft is getting there, and they're learning all these prototyping skills. But there is still a bit of a black box around, okay, how do I actually make things happen in an org, especially given tighter timelines? So when you think back on some of the really, really good ICs that you've worked with, what are some of the things that they're doing to effectively align the team, or certain behaviors or traits that people listening could maybe glean some little tactic from?

嗯，你是指初级设计师吗？

Yeah. You mean junior designers specifically?

我说的是初级设计师，但其实我是在替自己问。

I said junior designers, but I'm actually really just asking for myself.

我认为优秀设计师的首要特质，无论资历深浅，是愿意频繁分享自己的作品，并吸收反馈，同时知道什么时候该拒绝反馈、什么时候不该。真正学会经常分享作品是关键。今天我们团队还聊到这个。有一位成员问了我一个建议：分享反馈的合适时机是什么？我们最终得出的答案是，其实没有所谓的合适时机。我可以告诉你，不合适的反馈时机就是你等到每周设计评审会才去拿反馈，或者等到周五和工程师的团队同步会才去拿反馈——那就太晚了。你应该在有一点点可以展示的东西时就立刻去获取反馈，不管它有多粗糙。我觉得过去人们之所以避免过早获取反馈，是因为担心利益相关者会评论像素细节，而不是整体流程。但我希望我们已经翻篇了，我觉得我们已经翻篇了。只要你分享的上下文是正确的，就应该尽可能早、尽可能频繁地获取反馈，因为得到的反馈越多，你学得就越快。

I think the number one trait of a great designer, whether they are a junior or not, is that they are willing to share their work very often and incorporate feedback, and know when feedback needs to be pushed back on and when it doesn't. Really getting good at sharing your work often is key. We were talking about this today with my team. One of our team members asked for advice on what is the right time to share feedback. The answer we ended up getting to is that there's really not a right time. I can tell you the wrong time to share feedback is if you wait for that weekly design critique meeting to get feedback, or if you wait for that team sync with your engineers on Friday — that's the wrong time. You should be getting it the minute you have something to show. It doesn't matter how half-baked it is. I think people historically have avoided getting feedback too early in the process because they're worried that stakeholders are going to comment on the pixels instead of the flow. But I hope we're past that. I feel like we're past that. And as long as you're sharing the right context, you should be getting feedback as early and as often as you can, because the more feedback you get, the more you're going to learn quickly.

设计实践的这部分也在发生巨大变化，因为现在你可以进入 F0，快速生成一个完整可用的原型，它可能只是粗略地指向要解决的问题，但你其实还在摸索。过去这个过程在我心里要线性得多：我处于流程早期，我会先声明自己还处于早期，也许我还在用灰盒，或者只是一堆静态稿和草图。现在保真度与流程阶段不再那么相关了，这给我们思考反馈和那些协作触点的方式带来了一大阻碍。

Even that part of the practice of design is changing so much, because now you can hop into F0 and spin up a fully functional prototype that may be loosely pointed at the right problem to solve, but you're still kind of figuring that out. It used to be so much more linear in my mind: I'm early in the process, I'm able to give a disclaimer that I'm early in the process, maybe I'm even using gray boxes, or it's just a bunch of static mocks or sketches. Now fidelity is no longer as correlated to where we are in the process, which throws a wrench into the way we think about feedback and those touchpoints.

没错。这让你的原型——那些你分享的东西——变得真实得多。从某些方面来说，你能得到更好的反馈。你能得到的是关于真实走完整个流程是什么感受的反馈，而不是让产品经理或工程师靠静态稿去想象。但他们的确有时会被视觉效果绊住。这没关系，真的没关系。我觉得这是我们进入原型时代后都在练习的一块肌肉。现在对我们团队来说，最难的是今天的‘交付’长什么样。你会有一堆各种类型的资产要分享给团队，意思是：这就是设计——一个在某些方面还不太顺的 AI 原型，一个缺了交互设计的 Figma 文件，一个带解说词的 Loom 视频，还有无数其它小东西叠加在一起。我觉得设计工具还没有真正解决原型制作中的协作问题。所以我期待我们行业的工具不断演进，能支持更多像在 Figma 里得到的那类反馈，但用在做原型上。我知道有 Figma Make——我们可以继续深挖这个，但先不展开。

Yeah. It makes your prototypes — the things you're sharing — so much more real. In some ways you can get better feedback. You can get feedback on what it actually feels like to flow through the process, instead of relying on a PM or an engineer to imagine it based on some static mock. But they do get tripped up on the visuals at times. That's okay. It's fine. I think it's a muscle we're all learning as we enter the prototyping era. What's really hard right now for our team is what handoff looks like today, where you have a collection of assets of all different kinds that you might be sharing with your team in order to say, this is the design: it's an AI prototype that's kind of janky in some ways, it's a Figma file that's missing the interaction design, it's a Loom video with your commentary over it, and a million little other things that all add up. I don't think design tooling has really solved the collaboration aspect of prototyping yet. So I'm looking forward to our industry's tooling evolving to allow for a lot more of the type of feedback we get in Figma, but with prototyping tools. And I know there's Figma Make — we could go down that whole rabbit hole, but we won't.

再深入一点。你觉得这会走向哪里？当你想象 Vercel 设计团队这台运转良好的机器的理想状态时，那种协作在你眼里是什么样的？

Go a little bit deeper there. Where do you think this is headed? When you think about the ideal state of this well-oiled machine that is the Vercel design team, what does that collaboration look like to you?

我知道我们团队正在用原型解决非常复杂的交互问题，这是静态稿做不到的。但这些原型工具无法让我们在不动手做工程的情况下，拥有我们想要的那种工艺水准和像素级细节——用 Claude 和 Cursor 做工程正变得越来越可行，但我们团队不一定想在每个项目上都这么做。设计师想成为问题解决者。在设计师的光谱上，有人更偏产品，有人更偏工程。但我认为设计工具可能会发生一次演进：要么我们的原型工具变得更像可视化编辑器，要么我们的设计工具原生自带更好的原型能力。

I know that our teams are prototyping really complex interactions to solve problems that static mock-ups can't. But those prototyping tools don't allow us to have the level of craft and pixel-perfect details that we want control over without actually doing the engineering ourselves — which is becoming more and more possible with Claude and Cursor, but it's not necessarily the way our team wants to do it on every single project. Designers want to be problem solvers. On the spectrum of designers, there are people who lean more product-heavy and people who lean more engineering-heavy. But there's probably an evolution of design tools where either our prototyping can become more visual editing, or our design tools natively have better prototyping.

是的。而且无论在哪个工具里，这种协作——也就是你与他人分享，在非常具体的页面和流程上获得反馈——可以让你点一下按钮就采纳反馈，然后 Cursor 和 Claude 直接把反馈落实了。

Yeah. And in whatever tool this is, collaboration — meaning you're sharing this with others, you're getting feedback on very specific screens and flows — in ways where you could click a button and incorporate feedback, and Cursor and Claude just take that feedback and do it for you.

嘿，很快和你说一下全新的 DIVE 人才网络。我亲手汇聚了我认识的一百多位最有才华的设计师和开发者，这样我就可以把他们推荐给我最喜欢的公司。如果你正在听这期节目，而且对新的机会持开放态度，这个人才网络是完全匿名、毫无压力的。它是一种很轻松的途径，让你了解外界有什么机会，而不必在社交媒体上公开发帖。如果你有兴趣加入，或者你正在寻觅下一个人才，请访问 dive.com/club/talent。

Hey, really quickly, let me tell you about the all-new DIVE Talent Network. I've hand-assembled over a hundred of the most talented designers and builders I know, so I can recommend them to my favorite companies. If you're listening to this and you're open to new opportunities, the talent network is anonymous and super low-pressure. It's just an easy way to see what's out there without having to post on social media. If you're interested in joining, or maybe you're looking for your next hire, head to dive.com/club/talent.

也许我们可以聊一聊，给听众一些背景：Vercel 的设计团队目前离‘生产上线’有多近？实际写代码的量是多少？工具栈是什么样的？显然，我敢肯定 Vercel 有大量内部自用（dogfooding）。有没有人真的在往生产环境提交代码？我知道你才入职五周，但我特别好奇：一个在我看来技术倾向更强的团队，其真实状态是怎样的？

Maybe we could talk, just to give people context, about how close the design team currently at Vercel is sitting to production — how much coding is actually happening? What is the tool stack? Obviously, I'm sure there's a heck of a lot of Vercel dogfooding. Is anybody committing to production? I know you've only been there for five weeks, but I'm really curious: what is the state of the world for a team that, at least from my perspective, seems slightly more technically inclined?

Vercel 的设计师在日常工作中都在使用 Claude 和 Cursor。他们通过参与到上线流程中，在让自己的作品真正落地这件事情上成功率高得多。这并不意味着他们交付每一个像素，但可能是他们负责最后 1% 的设计打磨，也可能他们交付一个原型，帮助工程师起步。有时候设计师与设计工程师搭档做项目，因为设计工程师在场，他们就不太需要做那些工作。还有些时候，设计师所在的团队没有设计工程师——没有那种对前端工程极其熟练的人——这时设计师可能会选择自己承担更多前端工作，以便看到自己的作品以自己设想的方式活过来。我觉得，当你拥有这样的技能时，能有这种选择权是很美好的。

Vercel designers are all using Claude and Cursor in their day-to-day work. They are significantly more successful in getting their work shipped by being part of the shipping process. That doesn't mean they're shipping every single pixel, but it might be that they're doing the design polish in the final 1%. Or it might be that they're shipping a prototype that helps an engineer get started. There are times when a designer is partnered with a design engineer on a project, where they don't really need to do that work because the design engineer is there. And then there are times when a designer is on a team that doesn't have a design engineer — doesn't have someone who's super adept in frontend engineering — and that designer might choose to do more of that frontend work, just so they can see their work come to life exactly the way they envisioned it. I think it's beautiful to be able to have that option when you have the skills to have that option.

即使你不想一直使用这些技能，或者未来几个月不想深入投入，拥有这些技能仍然非常有价值。我自己才刚加入 Vercel 大约五六个星期，就提交了一个 PR。

Even if you don't want to use them all the time or you don't want to lean into that for the next few months, having the skills is really valuable. I myself have only been at Vercel for like five or six weeks, and I shipped a PR.

你发了什么？你发了什么？

What did you ship? What'd you ship?

其实就是一个 bug 修复。有个 URL 坏了，我改了一个很小的改动。说实话我当时很震惊。我是在设计工程团队的帮助下才把本地开发环境跑起来的。如果你是个设计师，想试着多写点代码，甚至用 Cursor，最难的其实就是搭好本地开发环境。但一旦我搭好了，提交了 PR，我就想：“哇，合并按钮居然不是灰的。我点一下看看会发生什么。”然后它就直接上线了。特别好玩，特别刺激。

Literally a bug fix. It was like a URL was broken, and I fixed a tiny little change. I was honestly shocked. I had some help from the design engineering team just getting my local dev environment set up. That's the hardest part if you're a designer and you're trying to get into a little bit more coding, even with Cursor. The hardest part is just getting your local dev set up. But once I did and committed my PR, I was like, "Wow, the merge button is not disabled. Let's see what happens when I click it." And it just went live. It was so fun. It was thrilling.

10 到 20 年前的科技行业，你必须会写代码才能做设计。那时候每个设计师都是前端开发者。我们甚至不叫彼此设计师。你就是某种前端开发者。

10 to 20 years ago in the tech industry, you had to code to design. Every designer was a front-end developer. We didn't even call each other designers. You were just a front-end developer of some kind.

我觉得我们以一种糟糕的方式偏离了这一点。我很高兴我们正在回归到材料和工具本身，并且对真正产出到世界上的东西产生更直接的影响。这并不意味着我们每个项目都必须这样做，或者应该这样做，但我认为这正在让设计变得更有影响力，并且带来实际的成果。

And I sort of think we got away from that in a bad way. And I love that we're coming back to the material and the tools and having a more direct impact on what actually makes it out into the world. It doesn't mean we need to do that on every project or that we should, but I think it's making a meaningful change in how design is seen as influential and having really tangible outcomes.

我们聊了很多不同的力量和变化中的事情。所以也许我们可以稍微谈一下人才招聘这块，因为我想，你大概在过去几个不同的岗位中参与了不少招聘谈话和面试。那么，当你退一步看，你优先看重的特质或你在寻找的东西，最大的差异在哪里？根据我们正在讨论的这些不同因素，过去甚至一两年里，情况发生了怎样的变化？

We've talked a lot about different forces and things that are changing. So maybe we could touch on the talent recruiting hiring piece for a second, because I'm assuming, you know, you've been in your share of hiring conversations, interviews over these last few different roles. So maybe when you kind of zoom out, where do the biggest deltas exist in terms of the traits that you're prioritizing or what you're looking for? How has that changed over the last even maybe year or two based off of some of these different factors that we're talking about?

相比两三年前，现在你要在作品集里、在招聘经理面试中展示你最近尝试了新东西，使用了新工具或新流程，这一点要重要得多。在目前这个阶段，展示这些几乎是基本要求，因为有大量的人要么一直犹豫不决，要么尝试了但不太成功。所以我觉得过去 10 年的机会——如果曾经有过的话，现在就是展示你个人项目的最佳时机。曾有一段时间，这被视为不太合适或不太相关，而现在它比以往任何时候都更有意义。不是要展示“哎，工作之外我所有时间都在想技术。”而是说，在你当前做的项目之外，你尝试了新东西，提出了一个想法，并且展示了从想法到解决方案的完整过程。这整个时间可以压得很短。不一定非要在工作之外，工作之内也可以。

Today, much more so than 2 or 3 years ago, showcasing in your portfolio in your hiring manager interview that you tried something new lately and you used a new tool or a new process. It's like table stakes at this point that you are showing that, because there is a huge swath of people who have been either hesitant to do so or have done so and haven't been as successful. And so I think the opportunity of the last 10 years — like this is the time, if there's ever been one, to showcase your side project in your portfolio. There have been times where that has been seen as not really appropriate or not really relevant, and now it feels more relevant than ever. Not to showcase like, "Oh, outside of work, I spend all my time thinking about tech." But that outside of the project that you're working on right now, you have tried something new and you've come up with an idea and you've shown, like, from idea to solution. You can make that time really small. It doesn't have to be outside of work; it can be inside work.

我很喜欢这一点。我要以看过很多人才网络作品集的人的身份再强调一下。我看到那种“实验”标签在增加，或者像“游乐场”文件夹，点进去就是一堆乱七八糟的东西。这就像一颗金星。当你能够非常明确地指着说“嘿，我在尝试新东西。可能不是所有都很好，但我在尝试”的时候，这确实能说明很多问题。另外，如果你正在听，并且想“我就是没时间”，我觉得你说得非常好。这确实很难，对每个人来说都不容易。不过话说回来，一小时也能做很多事。比如周六花一小时，你就能做出一个值得放到网站上、能展示很多东西的玩意儿。

I love that point. I'm even just gonna underline it as somebody who looks at a lot of portfolios through the talent network. I am seeing an uptick in the little, you know, experiments tab or maybe it's like the playground folder, and you click it and it's just a bunch of random stuff. It's like a gold star. It really does display a lot when you're able to very clearly point like, "Hey, I'm trying new things. It might not all be amazing, but I'm trying stuff." And also, if you're listening and you're like, "Well, I just don't have time." I think you gave a really good point. It's hard. It's not as easy for everybody. That being said, man, you can get really far in one hour. Like, in one hour on a Saturday, you can actually make a thing that is worthy of putting on your website and demonstrates a lot.

对。我觉得当有人说没时间的时候，不管是尝试新工具、学新东西，还是去健身房，或者无论什么，总有一些大家常说的没时间做的事。不是你没时间，而是你选择把生活填满了别的事情。这完全可以。但如果这件事对你很重要，你就会为它腾出时间。如果现在对你来说不重要，也没关系。但那可能意味着你会错过一些找上门的机会，那些机会在寻找愿意腾出时间、并且现在就把这件事放在优先位置的人。我觉得这就是很多人感到压力大的原因：每个人都在做出成绩。就像你说的，回到你之前提到的作品集，你知道，就是一个标签，里面放着他们的实验之类的东西。甚至作品集本身就可以是这样。我不觉得每个作品集都必须成为地球上最有创意的东西，但它是你的沙盒，是你玩耍和展示自己有多好玩的地方。不是每个人都擅长自我品牌，但你知道，我觉得现在——

Yeah. I think anytime somebody says they don't have time, whether it's to try out a new tool or to learn something new or to go to the gym or, you know, whatever it is, there's always some popular thing that people say they don't have time for. And it's not that you don't have time; it's that you have chosen to fill your life with other things. And that is absolutely okay. But if this was important to you, you make time for it. And it's okay if this is not important to you right now. But that might mean that you miss opportunities that come your way, who are looking for people who make that time, who have prioritized it right now. I think that's where a lot of people are feeling so much pressure: everybody is making waves. And like you said, back to something you said earlier about in the portfolio, you know, just like a tab where they're trying out experiments or something. It can even just be the portfolio itself. I don't think every portfolio needs to be the most innovative thing on earth, but it is like your sandbox. It's the place where you can play and show how playful you are. And not everybody's good at self-branding, but you know, I feel like right now,

呃，是不是现在流行“尴尬风”？所以，让你的作品集稍微尴尬一点，挺有趣的。

Uh, isn't it like cringe is in, right? So, like, make your portfolio a little cringe. It's fun.

爬一爬“尴尬山”吧。

Climb cringe mountain.

对。我说这话是作为最大的双标党。我的作品集是白底黑字或者黑底白字，而且里面只有一份博客列表。但那是，你知道的，我又不是去申请那些职位的人。

Yeah. And I say this as like the biggest hypocrite. My portfolio is white with black text or black with white text, and all I have is a list of blogs. But that's, you know, I'm not applying for the same type of role that these folks might be.

对，我也很喜欢这一点。我觉得多年来我们行业一直被洗脑，好像作品集就应该是这样：你有一排卡片，每张卡片带你到一个案例研究，并且是 100% 的流程。我很高兴我们渡过了那个每个案例研究都像“这是我怎么写便利贴的，然后这是我怎么……”的阶段。我真的不需要知道那些。

Yeah, I love that too. I think we've just been so brainwashed for years as an industry, where it's like this is what the portfolio looks like, and you have the grid of cards, and each one of them takes you to a case study, and it's like a 100% process. I am so glad we are past this era where every case study was like, "And here's how I wrote a sticky note, and here's how I..." I don't really need to know that.

这就是我们在设计冲刺第三天做的事。

This is what we did on day three of the design sprint.

对，对，没错。

Yes. Yeah. Exactly.

对。

Yeah.

我记得有个人说过——呃，Matt，我们最近还邀请他上过一期节目——他谈到了他想要自己的个人网站成为一种体验。我觉得那真的很酷，因为它不再只是你的信息和案例研究的目录了。而且我觉得很长时间以来，我们都把它当成案例研究的目录，评价也完全与案例研究和流程挂钩。而现在变成了：不，不，有人正在加载你的网站。你想给他们什么体验？文案是什么？感觉是什么？东西怎么动？颜色是什么？字体是什么？所有这些都在我看你 18 个月前做的那个特定项目的问题陈述之前，就已经形成了最初的信号。

I think somebody said something — uh, Matt, we had him on for an episode recently — and he talked about how he wanted his personal website to be an experience. I thought that was really cool, because it's not just a catalog of your information and your case studies anymore. And I think for so long we just thought of it as like a catalog for case studies, and evaluation is entirely tied to the case studies and the process. Where now it's like, no, no, somebody's loading your website. What's the experience that you want to give them? What's the copy? What's the feel? How do things move? What are the colors? What are the typography? All of that is creating the initial signal way before I look at your problem statements for this one specific project that you worked on 18 months ago.

我认为这对那些觉得自己被手上的案例研究牢牢限制住的设计师特别重要。比如在医疗行业工作的设计师，或者第一份工作也是唯一一份工作是在政府机关的设计师，又或者是想证明自己能跳出之前职业角色的转行者，比如从护士转行的人。这些人最能从“花时间学点新东西，然后用一种好玩又有创意的方式展示在作品集里”中获益。因为这样一来，我看你的案例时就能看到：这个人在约束很多的环境里怎么工作，以及当他自己主导、这些约束不存在时又怎么工作。如果你没有某个副业项目或作品集来体现这些，我是看不到的。

I think this is especially important for designers who feel really restricted by the case studies they have. It could be a designer who works in healthcare, or a designer whose first and only job they've been able to land is in government, or a career switcher trying to show they can do something outside their previous role, like a nurse. These are the folks who would benefit most from taking the time to learn something new and showing it in a really fun, playful way in their portfolio. That way I can look at your case studies and see how this person operates in an environment with a lot of constraints, and how this person operates when they run the show and those constraints aren't there. You can't see that if you don't have a side project or a portfolio where you're putting in that work.

我想请你来回答一个目前躺在我邮箱里的问题，我一直没找到好的答案，是关于作品集的。提问者基本是在说：“嘿，我们处在一个由手艺主导的世界，但那并不是我真正的优势。话虽如此，我在产品方面非常擅长，而且在那些岗位上做出了影响。但是节目里很多建议都是非常看重手艺、看重作品输出。我担心如果我用视觉作品打头阵，反而会被刷掉，但我确实觉得自己是很强的候选人。”你对这个人有什么建议吗？我可以把你的话转告给提问的人。

I'm going to lean on you to answer a question that's currently in my email inbox, and I don't have a great answer for it. It's related to portfolios. The person is basically asking: 'Hey, we're in this craft-dominated world, but that's not really what I bring to the table. That said, I'm really good at product, and I've been able to make an impact in these roles. How should I think about my portfolio when a lot of the advice on the show is very craft-forward and work-forward? They're concerned that leading with visuals would actually get them weeded out, but they do believe they're a very strong candidate.' Do you have any advice for that person that I can pass along?

嗯，我有两个选项，可能有点犀利。第一，你必须接受如今的设计已经不光是 UX 了，还包括视觉设计、工艺和交互设计细节。所以如果你想在这个行业做设计师，你得想办法掌握这些技能，而且要乐于学习新东西。市面上有课程可以学。我曾听人说工艺是学不来的，说那是一门艺术，你必须有艺术天赋。我完全不信。你绝对能学会。那就花时间去学。学完以后，把这个副业项目放进你的作品集，或者融入到作品集里。另一个选项，是和自己进行一次很有反思性的对话：你到底想不想当设计师？因为我觉得现在行业里关于“角色融合”的讨论很多，很多产品经理会做设计，工程师也会一点设计，设计师也会一点工程和产品。每个人都会一点。那么，现在是不是你真正转向产品的好时机？产品领导者赚得更多，所以这不是降级。如果你是一个优秀的设计思考者，你完全可以成为一个非常高效的产品领导者。如果那确实是你愿意花时间去做的事，那就考虑加入一个非常注重设计的团队，担任产品经理。我觉得对这样的人来说，那会是一个非常有趣的职业转变。

Yeah, I have two options, and they're kind of spicy, maybe. One is you have to accept that design today is more than UX. It's visual design, craft, and interaction design details. So if you want to be a designer in this industry, you need to figure out how to get those skills, and you need to be excited about learning something new. There are courses where you can learn these things. I've heard someone say craft is something you can't learn, that it's an art and you have to be a very artistic person. I don't buy that at all. You can definitely learn it. So put in the time to learn it. When you do that, add that side project to your portfolio, or incorporate it into your portfolio. The other option is to have a very reflective conversation with yourself about whether you actually want to be a designer. Because I think now, with the blended-roles conversation in our industry, there are a lot of PMs who can do design, engineers who can do a little design, and designers who can do a little engineering and a little product. Everybody can do a little bit of everything. So is this a great time for you to actually pivot into product? Product leaders make more, so this is not a downgrade. You could be a really effective product leader if you're a great design thinker. And if that's actually where you like to spend your time, then consider joining a really design-forward team as a product manager. I think that could be a really fun career switch for somebody like that.

好，那我们继续沿着这个话题往下聊。也许我们可以和那个假设中的初级设计师聊聊——其实又是在说我自己。如果你的想法是：好吧，一切都在飞快变化，我希望未来四五年还能以专业设计师的身份养家糊口——那么你看到了哪些不同的路径，或者人们可以用什么方式为自己投资，来面对一个感觉上瞬息万变的世界？

Okay, let's keep pulling on that thread. Maybe we can talk to that hypothetical junior designer, who is really just me again. If you're thinking, okay, everything's changing so quickly, I want to continue to pay the bills as a professional designer one, two, three, four years from now—what are the different paths you see, or ways people can invest in future-proofing themselves for a world that feels like it's moving really, really quickly?

显然，当下最重要的能力之一就是适应和学习新东西。你要展现出你能做到这一点，同时也要明白：在学习这些新东西的时候，不要只执着于某一样，因为一切都会变。下个星期、下个月、明年都会变，所有工具都在演进。但还有一些“永恒技能”，无论你最终选择什么角色都很有用。无论是留在设计领域、成为一名出色的设计师，还是随着角色融合转向其他方向，比如讲故事——也就是让他人认同“这是我们应该解决的正确问题，原因如下”。我认为很多在早期创业公司的设计师能很快获得这类技能，比如产品思维，因为他们离客户很近、离工作很近。在这种环境中工作能让你很快掌握这些能力。而在大公司的设计师，则可以在“争取认同”中锻炼这些技能——我该如何向领导讲述这个故事，说服他们这是我们应该做的事？讲故事是一项能让你职业生涯走得很远的技能，尤其是当你从初级升到高级、再到 Staff 级等岗位时，你不一定是在做更少的执行工作，但执行已经不再占据你大部分精力了。你的精力花在说服和劝导别人相信“这是正确的向前路径”上。他们给了你一个任务，你却指出这根本不是该解决的问题——你要真真切切地处理这类处境。

Obviously, right now, one of the biggest skills is being able to adapt and learn something new. So showing you can do that, and knowing that as you learn these things, don't get hooked on one thing, because this is going to change. It's going to change next week, next month, next year. All the tools are moving. But there are also some forever skills that serve you well no matter which role you end up in. Whether that means staying in design and becoming a fantastic designer, or moving into something else as your role blends, skills like storytelling—like getting buy-in that this is the right problem we should be solving, and here's why. I think a lot of designers at early-stage startups pick up these skills, like product thinking, because they're so close to the customer and the work. Working in that kind of environment helps you develop those skills really quickly. A designer at a larger company can get those skills in buy-in—how do I tell this story to leadership to convince them this is the right thing we should be working on? Storytelling is a skill that takes people a long way in their careers, because as you move from junior to senior to staff and so on, you're not necessarily doing less execution work—but execution is not where you spend the majority of your brain cells. Your brain cells are spent convincing and persuading people this is the right path forward. They've given you a task to do, and you've said this isn't even the right task to solve—really navigating those situations.

在你这些年共事过的一些最好的独立贡献者（IC）身上，有没有哪些例子或做法，塑造了你对“设计师如何有效讲故事”的理解？

Are there examples or practices you've seen in some of the best ICs you've worked with over the years that have shaped what you think of as effective storytelling as a designer?

好，举个例子。我共事过的一位设计师特别擅长讲故事，因为他非常清楚如何说出产品和技术高层领导都没在谈的“房间里的大象”。那头大象可能就是你公司的生死存亡问题。比如，AI 正在颠覆这家公司，而我们只是在迭代，并没有创新——然后他能针对这个提出想法和解决方案。这是沟通方面最重要的一条建议，无论是向上管理还是说服项目干系人。关键不是只抱怨，而是要带着想法来，并且在合适的时间，和合适的团队、合适的人一起把这些想法打磨过。

Okay, so for example, one designer I worked with was really effective at storytelling because he knew exactly how to name the elephant in the room that senior product and engineering leadership weren't talking about. That elephant in the room could be the existential crisis for your company. It could be how AI is disrupting this company, and we're just iterating, not innovating—and having an idea and a solution for that. That's one of the biggest tips in terms of communicating, whether it's managing up or convincing stakeholders about a project. It's not just complaining; it's coming with ideas and having workshopped them with the right team, the right folks, at the right time.

我觉得“房间里的大象”这个说法很有意思，因为要能看到并准确说出那头大象，几乎需要一定的产品思维基础。如果你只是在很低的细节层面上运作，你甚至没有那个高度去看到和解决大象问题。这让我想到一个东西——我甚至不确定这是一个问题，更像是一个假设。我很好奇你的看法：好了，我们已经聊了很多关于角色融合的话题。

I think the elephant-in-the-room thing is actually interesting, because there's almost a baseline level of product thinking required to even see and accurately articulate the elephant. If you're only operating at a low level of detail, you don't even have the altitude to see and address it. Which is pulling me toward something—I don't even know if it's a question, more just a hypothesis. I'm curious to get your take: okay, we've talked a lot about roles blurring.

设计师多少都得涉足不同领域。感觉存在两个极端，你会被拉向其中一端：好吧，你热爱手艺，很好，这是你的 IDE，这是你的本地环境；你要开始写代码，开始负责前端；每个人都会往设计工程师的方向发展。而另一种，就是你之前提到的。说到底，产品负责人和产品型设计师之间的区别到底是什么？走产品路线，就能获得更高级别的影响力。这真的是一个二选一的抉择吗？

Designers kind of have to dabble in different areas. And it feels like there are these two poles where you're being pulled toward one pole over here, which is all right: you love craft, great, here's your IDE, here's your local environment; you're going to start coding, you're going to start owning the front end; everybody's going to be a design engineer in that direction. And then there's the kind of thing you were talking about earlier. Like, what is the difference between a product leader and a product-oriented designer at the end of the day? Go down the product route, and that's how you have more top-level impact. Is it a true dichotomy?

是的，我觉得在偏向产品与偏向工程的设计师光谱上，尤其是初级和中级设计师，你会看到他们选了一条路，然后全力押注。他们偶尔会因为别人告诉他们去做而沾一下另一条路，但并不会真的两边同时推进。让 Staff 和 Principal 设计师与众不同的，正是他们同时朝两个方向发力。他们会更具体地理解设计的投资回报率，并能以从前做不到的方式与产品领导层沟通。而且他们会用一个两年前根本做不出来的炫酷 AI 原型来证明这一点。我认为这需要两种非常不同的技能，而我们最资深的设计师两者兼备。一个是动手的技术能力，也就是拥抱新技术；另一个是知道什么时候该退一步、见树又见林，能指出那些房间里的大象。

Yeah, I think on the spectrum of designers who lean towards product and designers who lean towards engineering, especially junior and mid-level folks, you sort of see them pick one lane and lean really heavily on it. They might dabble in the other lane because they're told to once in a while, but they don't—they definitely aren't going both directions. The thing that makes staff and principal designers different is that they are leaning in both directions at the same time. They are trying to understand the ROI of design much more concretely and be able to communicate to product leadership in a way that they never could before. And they are illustrating that with a sick AI prototype that they couldn't have made two years ago. I think that takes two very different skill sets that our most senior designers have. One is the hands-on technical skills, you know, adopting new technologies, and the other is knowing when to step back and see the forest for the trees, to be able to point out those elephants in the room.

你刚才让我想到了另一条微路径，我猜它更靠近工程。最近在节目里，大家对设计系统的热情明显回升。我干这行已经够久了，见过所有人都说‘设计系统已死’，现在人们又说设计系统其实挺酷的，而且对 AI 来说很重要。作为那个可能又会代入的听众——他们只是想弄清楚：我的独特之处是什么？我能在作品集里放什么？我该往哪个方向钻？我该在哪个点上发力，才能在接下来的就业市场里有吸引力？设计系统这条路有搞头吗？我想知道你对它在职业发展上的相关性怎么看。

You just made me think of another micro path, I guess, that is closer to engineering. There's been this uptick in excitement about design systems recently on the show. I've been doing this long enough that I saw everyone say 'design systems are dead,' and now people are like, design systems are actually kind of cool and a big deal for AI. As somebody who is again like this hypothetical listener—they're just trying to figure out, what makes me unique? What can I put on a portfolio? What can I lean into? Where can I spike to make myself compelling in this upcoming job market? Is there something there with design systems? I'm wondering if you have a take on its relevancy from a career standpoint.

噢，设计系统这事很棘手。有些候选人应聘某个产品领域的产品设计岗，如果他们带着几乎全是设计系统内容的作品集来面试，那肯定没戏。他们必须展示产品思维，而设计系统恰恰很少涉及产品思维。我敢说在理想世界里，这些设计师也会思考产品、深入了解产品，因为他们是为产品设计系统。但现实中这并不常见。我确实认为设计系统的话题热度大幅上升，因为当你依赖 AI 工具快速搭建 UI 时，如果你用设计系统训练过那套工具，输出质量显然会好得多。有一阵子，设计系统得反复强调：它们不只是贴纸稿，也不只是组件列表。它是关于什么时候该用哪个组件、要避免哪些反模式的文档。而现在这些文档比以往更重要，因为你实际上是在用这些文档训练大语言模型（LLM）——这些文档你可能根本没写好——而我们正在承受其后果。我觉得设计系统之前因为拖慢速度、降低探索性而挨了不少批评。现在因为这些工具，最优秀、最完善的设计系统反而可能让你的团队效率显著提升，并能以前所未有的方式用设计系统做实验和探索。

Ooh, design systems is so tricky. You have candidates who are applying for a product design role in a particular product area, and if they come into a portfolio round with almost solely design system work, it's never going to work. They have to be able to showcase product thinking skills, and there is very little product thinking when it comes to design systems. I'm sure in an ideal world those designers are also thinking about the product and know the product deeply because they're designing a system for it. But in reality, that doesn't happen very often. I do think there's a big uptick in design systems chatter because when you're relying on AI tools to build UI really quickly, it's obviously significantly better output if you've trained that system on your design system. For a while, design systems had to beat the drum that they are not just a sticker sheet, not just a component list. It is documentation about when to use one component or another and the anti-patterns you want to avoid. And that documentation is now more important than ever because you're actually training the LLM on documentation you may not have written well—and we're facing the consequences of that. I think design systems got a lot of flak for slowing things down or making things less exploratory. Now, because of these tools, the best and most robust design systems might actually make your team significantly more efficient and able to experiment and explore in a way they couldn't before.

好，在放你走之前，我想把视角拉远一点。我们聊了很多，但我想确保没有遗漏。你之前私下跟我提过，你最近和一群设计负责人吃了顿饭。我想知道你能不能让我们稍微旁听一下那顿晚餐，聊聊那次对话里出现的、我们这期还没谈到的其他趋势。这些趋势可能指向当前行业状况、未来方向，或者那些科技公司和设计团队领导者最关心的事。

Okay, I want to zoom all the way out before I let you go. We've covered a lot of ground, but I want to make sure we've got everything. Something you mentioned to me off the record is that you were at a dinner recently with a group of design leaders. I'm wondering if you can let us be a little fly on the wall in that dinner and talk about any of the other trends that surfaced in that conversation that we haven't talked about in this episode—trends that point at the state of the world, where things are headed, or what's top of mind for the people leading these tech companies and design orgs.

其中一个趋势就是设计负责人大规模回归 IC（独立贡献者）工作。有一阵子，我们听说会这么做的人只有一线经理——他们试了试管理岗，然后又退回做 IC，因为他们并不想当经理。但晚餐上有多位做到设计 VP 的人又回到了 Principal IC 岗。因为在这个行业历史上，现在比以往任何时候都更适合当设计师；而在这个领域，如果你没有亲身使用工具的经验，就很难做好设计负责人。说实话，我认为这甚至不可能。如果你不停下来做点 IC 工作，就不该继续做日常管理。我还觉得，有些全面转向 IC 工作的负责人，是因为他们所在的组织不让他们偶尔接个项目。至于我现在的角色，我还没有足够的设计师配给每个团队。Vercel 的产品设计团队只有七八个人，所以我们真的很小。

One of them is this major trend of design leaders going back to IC work. For a while, the only people we heard of doing that were first-level managers who tried it out and then went back because they didn't want to be managers. But there were multiple people at the dinner who had made it to VP of design and moved back into a principal IC role. That's because now more than ever in the history of our industry, this is such an exciting time to be a designer—and it's very hard to be a design leader in this space if you don't have hands-on experience with the tools. Honestly, I don't think it's possible. You shouldn't be continuing your day-to-day work if you're not stopping to do some IC work. And I think some of the leaders who switched to full-time IC work did so because they were in an org where it wasn't possible for them to take a project here and there. And in my role right now, I don't have enough designers for every team yet. There are only about seven or eight people on the product design team at Vercel. So we're really small.

比我想的还要小。

It's even smaller than I thought.

我知道。确实很小。每个人都这么说。团队里每个人入职时都说，没想到团队这么小。

I know. It's so small. Everybody says that. Everyone on the team says that when they joined, they were shocked at how small the team is.

我以为你会说 30 人左右。

I thought you'd say like 30.

对，其实不是，但这意味着我也有时间做一些 IC 工作。我不是要永远这样，也不想一直当那种既带人又自己上场的球员兼教练（player-coach）。但如果我要做，现在正是时候，因为我能尝试新东西，也能真正与一线的人共情——你知道，他们每天都在不断学习。

Yeah. No, but it means that I also have the time to do some of the IC work. It's not that I'm going to do that forever, or that I want to be a player-coach permanently. But if I am going to do it, now is the time, because I get to try out new things and really feel empathy for the folks in the trenches, you know, learning constantly every day.

这是我们晚餐时谈到的话题之一——这种转变。曾经是我的经理的 Roberta Carrera，曾在 Heroku 担任设计副总裁，后来去了 HashiCorp，现在她刚加入 Docker。但在加入 Docker 之前，她有几年在做独立贡献者工作。一个曾领导上百人团队的设计副总裁，回去加入一个五人创业公司做 IC 工作，这非常罕见。所以，我觉得这是一个非常有趣的趋势。说到入职，我知道这个词听起来不性感，但现在加入一家公司，节奏感比以前快太多了。以前确实有这种观念：“花三个月，给自己做一个 30-60-90 天计划。”

So that was one of the topics that came up at our dinner — this shift. One of the people who used to be my manager, Roberta Carrera, was the VP of Design at Heroku and then HashiCorp, and now she just joined Docker. But right before she joined Docker, she spent a few years doing individual contributor work. It’s very uncommon for somebody who was a VP and led teams of a hundred or more to go back to working at a five-person startup and doing IC work. So yeah, I think that’s a really fun trend right now. I think onboarding — I know that’s not a sexy word — but when you join a company now, it feels like the pace is so much faster than it used to be. There was definitely this sentiment before: “Take three months, make yourself a 30-60-90 day plan.”

30-60-90 天。

30-60-90 days.

对，确实有一本书叫《30-60-90 天计划》，书很好，但那种时间尺度已经不再适用了。我在 Vercel 的第一周，专注于尽可能多地和同事一对一交流。第二周，我组织了一场回顾会，这样我能看到团队当着我面一起讨论他们在私下里跟我说的问题——哪些有效、哪些无效。到了第三周，我已经在调整人手了。我会说：“很明显这不适合你在这支团队里，我们会把你调到另一个团队。”我们调了两位同事。第三周开设新岗位，第四周就在改整个设计团队的工作方式，而不只是产品设计。所以那是一个 30 天计划。这种节奏很快，而传统建议是头 30 天要做一个倾听之旅。天哪，如果我真的连续 30 天只是倾听，大家会说：“你怎么还在这儿？”因为……

Yeah, there’s literally a book called The 30-60-90 Day Plan, and it’s great, but it doesn’t work on that timescale anymore. My first week at Vercel, I focused on meeting one-on-one with as many people as I could. My second week, I hosted a retro so I could see the group actually talk together about what they were telling me in one-on-ones — what’s working and what’s not. And by week three, I was moving people. I said, “Clearly this isn’t working for you on this team; we’ll move you to another team.” There were two folks we moved around. In week three, I was opening new roles, and week four, making changes to how the whole design team works, not just product design. So that’s a 30-day plan. It’s a rapid-fire pace, where the traditional advice was to do a listening tour for the first 30 days. My god, if I did a listening tour for 30 days, people would say, “How do you still work here?” Because...

得了吧。

Get out of here.

对，你得真正做点事。而且我觉得这种感受不只是 Vercel 才有，那里的节奏众所周知比地球上任何地方都快。这是整个行业的趋势。我们和几位晚餐时聊过的人讨论过：作为设计领导者，你必须非常快地拿出成果。而要拿出成果，你就必须以比以往更快的速度建立信任和关系。这确实是一场冲刺。

Yeah. You need to actually do something. And I think that sentiment isn’t just at Vercel, where the pace is famously faster than anywhere on Earth. It’s an industry trend. As we talked about with some folks at dinner, as a design leader, you need to show outcomes so fast. And to show outcomes, you have to build trust and build relationships much faster than you ever did before. It’s a sprint, for sure.

我知道我们之前聊了很多关于设计领导者的前瞻性话题，以及一些正在改变的事情。但在我放你走之前，最后一个问题，稍微有点回顾性。我很好奇，如果你回顾过去的角色，有没有哪些明确的经历塑造了今天的你——作为设计领导者——而且你一定会把它带到现在在 Vercel 的实践方式中？

I know a lot of our conversation has been more forward-looking as a design leader — about things that are changing. But maybe before I let you go, one last question that’s slightly more reflective. I’m curious: if you look back on past roles, are there clear experiences that shaped the design leader you are today, that you’re definitely taking with you into how you approach your practice at Vercel?

我会把在 Webflow 的工作经历描述为对我作为领导者的形成期。虽然那不是我第一个领导岗位，但它塑造了如今我作为设计领导者的方式。因为我学到的是，5 到 10 年前给经理人的早期建议是：招到对的人，然后别挡他们的路。但在 Webflow，每一个和我共事的高级设计师、资深设计师都非常感激我一直挡在他们路上。他们很感激，因为他们终于有了一个能和他们一起扎进项目细节的经理——而且是拉上全公司的设计师一起，做跨支柱、跨产品的协作，这是他们日常工作中无法进行的。之前真的没有人把这些珠子串起来。我认为设计师能产生的最大影响之一就是这种横向工作——比如我们会问：我们公司里 AI 聊天气泡应该长什么样？因为某个人在这里这么做，另一个团队在那里完全不同的做法，还有一个工具条团队又是一种完全不同的做法。真正去思考这些主题领域，在我这个高度上，我能看到全公司的各个项目，我就可以把那些设计师聚在一起，真正创造出一个他们各自独立无法做出的统一设计策略。这就是我作为设计领导者能做出的最大贡献。而在我之前的公司 Webflow，是一个很适合做这件事的地方，因为那里非常渴望这种协作。而且我认为，在每个增长阶段的初创公司你都会看到这样一个主题：公司不再小，产品不再小，你需要解决这种臃肿问题，但你还没有庞大到拥有一个极其强大的设计系统。这对跨产品、跨支柱协作来说是最最难的一个阶段。

I would describe my experience at Webflow as very formative as a leader. Even though it wasn’t my first leadership role, it shaped how I am a design leader today. Because I learned that the early career advice you got as a manager five to ten years ago was: hire the right people and get out of their way. But at Webflow, every staff and senior staff designer I worked with was so grateful that I was in their way all the time. They were grateful that they had a manager who finally got into the weeds with them on a project — and got into the weeds by bringing designers across the company together to work on cross-pillar, cross-product collaboration in a way their day-to-day work couldn’t. There really wasn’t somebody to string those beads. I think one of the biggest impacts a design leader can make is that horizontal work — where we ask, what does AI chat surfaces look like at our company? Because so-and-so is doing it over here in this way, this team is doing it a totally different way, and we have another team doing it differently again. Really thinking through thematic topic areas, at the altitude where I see initiatives across the company, I can bring those designers together to create a cohesive design strategy that none of them could create independently. That’s the biggest impact I can make as a design leader. And at my previous company, Webflow, it was a great place to do that because there was so much hunger for it. And it’s also a theme you’ll see at every growth-stage startup: the company is no longer small, the product is no longer small, you have this bloat you have to solve for, but you’re not yet a behemoth with an insanely robust design system. That’s the really, really hard stage for cross-product, cross-pillar collaboration.

嗯，Hannah，谢谢你来参加，让我们得以一窥你所看到的一切，以及这个世界上正在发生的事情——如今作为一名设计师是什么样的感受，还有向前看。现在有太多事情在发生，太多可以聊的话题。我很感激你作为我们的共鸣板，今天和我们分享了这些。

Well, Hannah, thank you for coming on, and for being a window into what you’re seeing and what’s happening in the state of the world — what it’s like being a designer today, and looking forward. There’s just so much going on and so much to talk about. I appreciate you being a sounding board and sharing with us today.

非常感谢你花时间。我很羡慕你的工作。你能和很多有意思的人交谈，进行很棒的对话，我也很欣赏你为这个行业做的事情。

Thank you so much for taking the time. I’m very jealous of your job. You get to talk to lots of interesting people and have great conversations, and I appreciate what you do for the industry.

在你离开之前，我想花一分钟给你介绍一下我最喜欢的产品，因为我经常被问到我用什么工具。Framer 是我建网站的工具。Genway 是我做研究的方式。Granola 是我在评审时记笔记的工具。Jitter 是我给设计做动画的工具。Lovable 是我用代码实现想法的方式。Mobin 是我寻找设计灵感的方式。Paper 是我像创意人一样设计的方式。Raycast 是我每一步都会用到的快捷方式。这些公司都是我精心挑选的，这样我才能全职做这些节目。所以，支持这个节目最重要的方式就是去看看它们。你可以在 dive.com/club/p/partners 找到完整列表。

Before I let you go, I want to take just one minute to run you through my favorite products because I’m constantly asked what’s in my stack. Framer is how I build websites. Genway is how I do research. Granola is how I take notes during crit. Jitter is how I animate my designs. Lovable is how I build my ideas in code. Mobin is how I find design inspiration. Paper is how I design like a creative. And Raycast is my shortcut every step of the way. Now, I’ve hand-selected these companies so that I can do these episodes full-time. So, by far the number one way to support the show is to check them out. You can find the full list at dive.com/club/p/partners.