Many designers receive top-down demands to build AI-powered tools that lack context or feasibility. Those demands create a false choice between obeying and failing or refusing and risking employment. A third approach is to adopt strategic curiosity: probe motivations, underlying data, success metrics, timelines, and constraints. Strategic questions reveal missing knowledge, stakeholder assumptions, and hidden directives from senior leadership. Designers can translate findings into feasibility assessments, estimates, risk analyses, prototypes, and suggested experiments. This approach aligns expectations, surfaces necessary resources, and converts vague mandates into actionable, measurable, and defensible project plans.
Many designers are hearing statements like these from their bosses, and it's not a suggestion. It can be challenging to know how to respond to leaders who present you with unreasonable demands based on following trends (or untested concepts). You're faced with what feels like an impossible choice: either follow orders and build something you know will fail, or risk your job by saying "No."
However, there's a third option, one that many design leaders follow to get their bosses to reconsider: being strategically curious about the motivation and logic. Doing this allows you not just to understand how to make it happen: it allows you to provide critical estimates your businesses need. While these decisions might seem to come out of nowhere, they often don't.
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