Quotes from recent talks

"What if everyone was accepted? We could rise almost anyone to proficiency if the curriculum and pedagogy are strong enough."

"If there’s no plan or no handoff after the vision, then the vision feels like an artifact that has no legs."

"The value of what we do is only really valuable if it’s recognized by others."

"Interoperability is frustrating by design, but FHIR is unlocking that data slowly."

"What does a hysterectomy cost? $2,000, $13,000, or $40,000? It depends who you ask and who pays."

"Our brains are like Ferrari with several petabytes of memory, but most of our thoughts are negative."

"Climate change is bad. Probably worse than we all think."

"The constraint is not the enemy; it’s an important part of the problem we’re solving."

"Lived experts are the most innovative voice in the design process, bringing unique and practical solutions."

"And again, it’s free. So what are you waiting for?"

"You can now stream our entire collection of over 70 books in EPUB format with your Gold subscription."

"AI should be a force multiplier handling repetitive tasks, not a replacement for human judgment."

"Connecting the repository to Slack and building an AI bot to answer questions fascinates users and drives usage."

"Total cost of ownership includes integration, customization, support, and ongoing operational effort that can be easily overlooked."

"The key to combating survey fatigue is short surveys triggered at the right context, making respondents feel listened to and valued."

"No matter what your contract says, once your data is in the cloud connected to an LLM, you have to accept the risk it could be exposed."

"We are not just doing research to find stuff out; we need to show a return on investment on everything."

"Connecting the dots and making strategic sense of data is still a uniquely human strength in research."

"Our research power is our ability to influence change across organizations, not just gather insights."

"Every story has multiple perspectives; there’s a story before me and a story after me."

"The first rule of book update club is you never talk about book update club."

"Epistemic network analysis reveals meaningful connections between codes, suggesting but not proving why ideas cluster."

"The human-in-the-loop element is absolutely crucial to each research."

"It often feels like research becomes beholden to exact quotes rather than the richer story that context provides, what I call the tyranny of transcripts."

"Our job as researchers is not making reports or interviewing users; it’s providing actionable, correct insights."

"Ten interviews is enough to get most of the way to meaningful insights."

"AI is not about replacing in-depth interviews but expanding access to rich data and insights."

"If you ask accessibility questions, it’s so important to actually respect the answers."

"Scale without guardrails becomes chaos. Coaching not caretaking protects learning and accountability."

"We put heavy trust in our stakeholders and co-created the curriculum with them."

"Our field was not born five years ago; we've been through these growth pains before."

"The skills we hold are exactly the skills that this moment requires."

"You are the expert in understanding the lived experiences of your users. It’s ongoing work helping those around you develop a shared understanding."

"The larger the dataset you work with, the more costly it is to run a single operation on AI models."

"Having one-on-calls with people is one of my favorite parts of conducting research, and it felt like this was being taken away from me just for the sake of saving business resources."

"Giving people time and space to think individually and pressure test with AI before group discussion prevents dominance by power."

"Showing citations in AI responses helps people develop trust and understand where answers come from."

"Multi-stage rockets are like the double diamond; you jettison valuable context at every stage and lose signal."

"Information is power in organizations, so deploying AI agents means reconsidering who gets access to what data."

"The future is researchers painting the larger picture while PMs and designers focus on deep, tactical user insights."

"Stop Wasting Research is really about thinking about research at scale and providing a big menu of different directions to try."

"I was so desensitized to the stress and urgency that it just became my baseline for living life."

"Strasberg believed you can’t honestly portray fear or grief without accessing analogous feelings from your own experience."

"Naming your layers is really, really important; it helps the AI understand exactly what to manipulate."

"Your agency is the thing that can’t be taken away from you. It’s your means to navigate this moment and keep your sanity."

"Designers often say 'has it been approved by legal and compliance? Great, let's not worry about privacy anymore.'"

"There was an expectation for you to behave like a man, but when you do, you're criticized for being aggressive."

"Not all monetization is equal; pay-to-express models are less threatening to social dynamics than pay-for-power schemes."

"Completion rates (conversion rates) and dropout rates are simple metrics but often not tracked or shared."

"Legal careers value experience and credibility more as you age, unlike tech where ageism is prevalent."

"Real innovation is not being first; it's about doing it right and sustainably."

"The role of the service designer shifts from design savior to facilitator, spacemaker, and guide."

"Making the invisible visible makes things move forward and create alignments."

"Managing towards outputs means someone has decided what the solution is going to be and told you to make that thing."

"Seeing frustrations next to system data shifted conversations from blame to true standing."

"AI will soon enable us to automatically flag leading questions and coach researchers for quality."

"Don’t be afraid to not know something. Let assistive technology users teach you."

"Service design stops being just a support function; it becomes the strategic driver that transforms organizational performance."

"The challenge is co-developing a custom investment model that alters decision making based on portfolio logic rather than project-based thinking."

"When we see the problem space from multiple lenses, we can understand stakeholders’ outcomes and emotional needs."

"Service design was originally formulated as the alternative to product thinking, but digital products are actually mostly service experiences."

"Small specific interventions travel further than big programs within organizations."

"Complex systems are not chaos but non-deterministic due to interdependencies and autonomy within the system."

"We must build our service vision not just for the ideal, but for how to handle things when they go wrong."

"If accessibility is buried three levels deep in a checklist, it’s going to get missed."

"Finance is not just a system; finance is a performance."

"Increasing coordinated collaboration increased our service capacity by 200%."

"Everyone, whatever your job is, is working for this service on behalf of the customer."

"Designing sustainable doesn’t mean removing everything fun from the web."

"I feel good about the work I do, but my company doesn't ship good work."

"Philosophy is hardass; it's rigid, robust, and demanding, not fluffy or subjective."

"When we first thought about this topic, we quickly realized we needed to point the finger at ourselves because we've exhibited some of these behaviors."

"High functioning teams are built on trust and not control."

"We have to show clients the hundreds of sketches and iterations behind the AI-generated outputs."

"Don’t overcomplicate workflows; the simplest thing that could possibly work is often best."

"Research waste turns into research wealth when insights are properly activated inside organizations."

"By starting to categorize risk in detail, you naturally lead to better prompts and better evals."

"Evals are like a way to define what good looks like."

"At Sage Sure, we build paved roads so people can choose to drive on them or carve their own path."

"Change doesn’t have to happen overnight; being a good long-term, seven generations thinker shapes meaningful impact."

"Operations often move around organizationally, from design to product operations and back, reflecting evolving team needs."

"I know exactly this job, all its problems and dysfunctions, and I don’t want to do that anymore."

"Design ops is like being the PM of the design organization."

"Doing accessibility from the start saves cost by avoiding expensive retrofits and rework later on."

"Building product today is getting more and more complex, and organizations desperately need professionals who speak compliance and product."

"In order to lead change, you turn change itself into the product."

"Change is a team sport; meaningful systemic change requires partnerships and advocacy from bottom to top."

"Knowledge management empowers advocacy—leverage documented knowledge to effectively engage leaders and win over skeptics."

"The style component was developed in two minutes rather than taking a few days to create and document."

"How might we scale fast without losing our culture, our clarity and stay human?"

"Books are semantically very rich and thus pull content much more effectively in our vector database than conference talks."

"Design ops helps our designers and researchers spend most of their time doing their craft while thriving in complex organizations."

"Alex has been instrumental in setting the internal standards, and many team members have adopted his approach for consistency."

"When we build accessibility into an environment, especially if we do it subtly, it becomes the new normal."

"When designers describe their problem, they often describe a pain point, but you have to enter the user’s actual task."

"Showing where you’re using research more visibly creates a virtuous cycle of adoption and impact."

"Representing a person as a circle feels more right—like we’re all equidistant at the same table."

"Discovery habits don’t stick because of training. They stick because of scaffolding."

"Start tinkering, playing around, and pushing AI’s limits because the industry shift is going to get faster."

"Feedback is a system. It's not just a pile of comments. It needs to be choreographed, timed, sequenced, and aimed to move the work."