Ajantha Suriyanarayanan

At first blush it would seem that product strategy and life design don’t have a lot of similarities. This week, my to-do list says otherwise. On one half of my screen: architecting a workshop on reimagining the future of UXR in the age of AI for October's Dscout Co-Lab conference with Catherine Howard Lovazzano. On the other: mapping the participant journey for our upcoming DesigningYourLife for Women retreat in Rome with Melissa Birchler and Barbara Balletta. The audiences couldn’t look more different. But the design challenge feels very similar: getting capable people to pause, reframe the problem, and stop running on default. The failure modes look like opposites, but they lead to similar outcomes: motion without real movement. In tech, the pressure to ship has always been high, and the AI frenzy has sent it into overdrive. As Beth Lingard pointed out in her excellent Substack post, "The AI Problems Nobody Has Solved Yet," teams are rushing to embed AI across every surface before anyone has stepped back to understand the whole human experience—let alone whether they’re solving a worthwhile problem. In life design, I find many of our participants are conditioned to over-analyze. They wait for complete certainty, trying to map out a 10-year master plan in their heads before taking a single step - and ultimately, they get stuck. One group builds before they’ve framed the question; the other tries to solve the whole puzzle before testing a piece. My mission in both rooms is to interrupt that momentum. To create a container safe enough to slow down and frame a problem worth solving, push past the obvious first answers, and turn a genuine insight into an experiment small enough to test next week, for less than $20. After two decades using design thinking to help tech organizations figure out what’s actually worth building next, bringing this toolkit to women navigating midlife is turning out to be the most meaningful chapter of my career so far. Different rooms, different stakes. But underneath, the same messy, generative work of figuring out what comes next.

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IDEO x reMarkable’s Creative Edge workbook breaks creativity down into six very human moves: Define → Empathize → Ideate → Prototype → Test → Storytell. What stands out most is the discipline it reinforces: slowing decisions down, observing clearly and without judgment, and creating space to move beyond reactive, emotionally driven responses (this is key!) before locking in solutions. A practical way to translate everyday observations into durable impact, especially as AI takes on the obvious and human judgment becomes the real differentiator. https://lnkd.in/gnWa7UcJ #DesignThinking #Creativity #HumanCenteredDesign #DecisionMaking #Leadership

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