TALK

Ambiguity is our superpower. Let’s not waste it.

When the world gets uncomfortable, most teams try to understand the shifts from where they’re sitting: Engineers ask how AI changes what they can ship. Designers ask how it changes their workflow. Leaders ask how much faster the team can move. 

Each angle is reasonable—an attempt to shrink the question down to something manageable. But when we narrow the frame too soon, we miss the chance to ask more powerful questions—questions like, how is AI changing how our customers interact with our product? How is it shaping who our customers even are? What market are we actually in?

Those are the questions Megan and her team at Justworks started asking. And it led them to meet customers they’d never have considered before—like the Gen Z founder who’s netting $25k a month, has never had a traditional bank account, got his first credit card last month, and gets all of his business advice from ChatGPT.

In this talk, Megan will argue that you don’t get to that person by asking how AI changes your design workflow. You get there by letting go of fast, confident takes about AI—both the ones that call it trash and the ones straight out of the hype machine. She’ll share how her team learned to widen the frame and stay in ambiguity a bit longer—and why she now believes the old split between tactical and strategic work was never real. It was just a story we told about who gets to sit at which table.

You’ll learn: 

• Why the instinct to interpret change through the lens you know best is so common, and what it means when everyone does it at once

• How to widen the frame past tooling and workflow questions toward the customer, product, and market questions beyond them

• What you have to give up to work this way: the safety of the team of no, the momentum of the hype machine, and the tidy line between “tactical” and “strategic”

• Why this is available to anyone who engages with customers and can sit with a hard question, not just people with “research” in their title