Everyone's accelerating. Nothing's getting faster.

To paraphrase the Foo Fighters, I've got a confession to make. Over the last year or so, I've probably 10x'd my output. I'm not exaggerating for LinkedIn clout, I genuinely mean it. Research synthesis, requirements documentation, strategy decks, design systems, direct integrations, prototyping, skills development... basically the full product development cycle, all moving at a pace that would've seemed absurd 18 months ago.

AI did that. Specifically, learning how to work with AI properly, not just lobbing prompts at it and hoping for the best, but building it into how I think, plan, and make decisions.

Here's the thing though. My organisation hasn't moved 10x faster. Not even close.

And if you're a design or engineering leader who's gone deep on AI, I'd bet good money you're feeling the same thing. You've levelled up. Your team might've levelled up. But the org? The org is moving at roughly the same speed it was before, just with different bottlenecks and new frustrations.

So what's going on?

In most product organisations right now, AI adoption is happening organically. Tech leads focus on engineering needs. Designers on design needs. Everyone's finding their own tools, building their own workflows, figuring it out as they go.

Which sounds great until you realise different functions are accelerating at wildly different speeds.

Design and engineering tend to be early adopters, we're tool-oriented by nature, we're curious, and the AI tooling for our disciplines is further along. But marketing? QA? Product management? Operations? Many of these teams haven't meaningfully changed how they work yet.

The maths is simple. A 10x designer feeding into a 1x QA process doesn't produce 10x output. It produces the same output with more frustration, more rework, and a growing pile of "waiting on..." in your project tracker. The chain moves at the speed of its slowest link.

Ethan Mollick at Wharton calls this bottleneck migration, when AI speeds up one part of a system, the constraint doesn't vanish, it just relocates. His line that sticks with me: "The bottleneck migrates from intelligence to institutions, and institutions move at institution speed." Andrew Ng is seeing the same thing play out in his startups... engineering has gotten so fast that the bottleneck has shifted entirely to product decisions. His old rule of thumb was one PM to every seven engineers. Some of his teams now want that ratio flipped.

But here's what I think both of them are underselling: it's not just product management that becomes the bottleneck. It's every function that hasn't accelerated. QA. Marketing. Legal. Compliance. Customer success. The constraint migrates to whoever is slowest, and in most orgs right now, nobody's tracking where it's landed.

Brian Balfour at Reforge put it best after interviewing 50+ VP and C-level product leaders: "Your AI adoption moves at the speed of the weakest part of your system. Most leaders don't even know what that part is."

Most leaders don't even know. That's the bit that should make you uncomfortable.

The industry response so far has been almost entirely function-specific. Here's how PMs can use AI. Here's how designers can use AI. Here's how engineers can use AI. Brilliant, genuinely useful content. But it's like optimising individual lanes on a motorway without looking at the junctions. Each lane is flowing beautifully. The on-ramps are a disaster.

Even the most aggressive whole-org approach I've seen, Shopify's now-famous internal memo where Tobi Lütke made AI usage a "baseline expectation" for every employee, comes with a massive caveat. Shopify is digitally native. Their CEO codes. Their culture was built for this. And even then, the most interesting finding was that the fastest growing AI tool users weren't engineers, they were support and revenue teams. The non-technical functions, once given access, ran with it. Which tells you the problem isn't capability. It's access, permission, and nobody thinking about adoption as a cross-functional design challenge.

Most organisations, the kind I've spent my career in, complex enterprise environments with legacy systems, multiple stakeholders, and competing priorities, can't just drop a CEO memo and expect transformation. The org antibodies will eat it alive.

So if top-down mandates only work in certain cultures, and bottom-up organic adoption creates speed mismatches between teams... who's supposed to fix this?

I think design leaders are uniquely positioned to own this problem. And I think the industry is currently making a massive mistake by not recognising it.

Stay with me.

Design sits at the centre of every handoff in a product organisation. We're upstream of engineering, downstream of product, adjacent to QA, feeding into marketing. No other function touches as many handoff points. When one team accelerates and another doesn't, we feel the friction first. We're the canary in the coal mine for organisational misalignment.

But it's more than just proximity. Think about what a senior design leader actually does, not the Figma stuff, the real job. We map complex systems. We identify friction in workflows. We translate between technical and non-technical people. We build consensus across functions with competing priorities. We make abstract problems tangible so people can actually act on them.

Read that list back. That's not a design job description. That's an AI transformation job description. And it's a skillset that takes years to develop. In fact, the methodology already exists for exactly this kind of problem. We just haven't pointed it at the right one yet.

Yet right now, the market is laying off experienced design leaders whilst simultaneously creating new roles like "Head of AI Transformation" that require... exactly the same skills. The irony would be funny if it weren't so wasteful.

I'll get into this more in future posts, but design leaders aren't blameless here either. Many haven't done the work to connect their existing skills to this new context. They're still positioning themselves with yesterday's narratives. Still leading with craft portfolios when the value is in strategic orchestration. Still waiting to be invited to the strategy table instead of showing up with something worth discussing.

The market won't hand you this. If you're a design leader reading this, especially if you're senior, especially if you've been out of the day-to-day craft for a while, the opportunity is enormous. But you have to claim it. Loudly. With evidence. In terms that CPTOs and CEOs actually understand.

More on that soon.

I'm writing this from inside a product org, not from the consulting sidelines. I've 10x'd my own output and watched the bottleneck migrate downstream in real time. I've also led large design teams through major organisational transformations before, so the "everything is changing and nobody knows who's driving" feeling isn't new to me. The AI bit is. The organisational dynamics aren't. And I'm increasingly convinced the two need to be solved together, not separately.

If any of this resonates, if you're nodding because you've felt the exact same friction, I'd love to hear about it. Drop a comment, send a message, whatever works. Because I think this is a conversation that needs to happen, and it's not one I've seen anyone having properly.

The tools are incredible. The individual gains are real. But until we figure out how to synchronise AI adoption across entire organisations, not just the keen functions, we're all just running faster on a treadmill.

And nobody looks good doing that.