The flight of a year
Back after 365 days of neglect
Readers,
I’m feeling some happenstance guilt. I accidentally logged into Substack today and realized my last post on Nimble UX – was exactly a year ago! A year!
Unlike my past posts, I’ll make this one short and share three topics that I’m noodling on. If anything resonates, I’d love to hear from you—drop me a note on LinkedIn.
Are frameworks making UX obsolete? We’ve produced a canon of frameworks, toolkits and standardized methods in an effort to legitimize our field and streamline processes. I used to think of these as our scaffolding, but this week for the first time, I realized our diligence might in fact be one of the reasons some are declaring the end of UX. (Not that I agree with this sentiment). For the founder or product leader who likes a plug and play approach, AI makes automating research, design and content seem easy. That illusionary convenience threatens to flatten our value. I’m working on a longer piece unpacking this tension. Stay tuned.
UX skills are a mess - and I’m deep in it. Most of my writing energy lately has gone into a book I’m co-authoring with Torrey Podmajersky and Kim Mats Mats: UX Skills for Business Strategy, due out from O’Reilly in early 2026. Skills is a gnarly topic – fluid, subjective, and context-driven. I’m finding that the mental model I gravitate towards runs counter to conventional wisdom. If this is a topic you geek out about, I’m running a card sort to ensure I reflect the collective perspective. Reach out!
Building products is scary easy. This week, I watched my brilliant Design Partner at Velocity Ave, Nisha, spin up a product. We were talking about how schools assign students to classrooms – parents have preferences, teachers have input, and local policies layer on top. It’s messy and the burden on principals is heavy. In a matter of minutes, Nisha had prototyped a tool that could algorithmically balance all a school’s requirements, entirely tuned to their needs. It was astounding and unsettling. I’m frankly nervous about the power, speed and automation this means for product development – its ethics, its waste, and its consequences. My gut response? This is going to need to be regulated.
From my brainheart to your inbox, thanks for hearing me out. I look forward to sharing more soon.
Warmest,
Maya
