Shifting from Product Designer to Outcome Owner

For years I’ve been on the individual contributor side of things. My job has been to create great designs, working together with a team to pull all the pieces together.

It’s a lot of fun, and I’ve loved it.

I’m especially grateful for the folks who took a chance on me when I was shifting from web design, and who allowed me to experiment and grow into product and apps.

Now, as things tend to go, I’m shifting again.¹

As of this Monday, I’m the outcome owner for a new AI task force at Angel. And let me tell you, it’s been a lot of fun.²

At some point I’ll be able to go into the specifics, but at a high level we’ve pulled together a team of myself and three amazing engineers: Alex, Fernando, and Jason (we had a fourth who was helping out, but he had to jump back into a separate project). We’re working to build internal tools and support for Angel based on and built with AI.

We met in Provo for an onsite and all stayed in an Airbnb for two days. We discussed, worked on ideas, shared laptop screens, and pushed to build some early concepts.

Today we ran a demo together with our primary stakeholder.

The demo wasn’t perfect. It had some bugs, some architectural pieces we’ll have to shift, and a dozen new features we can’t wait to add. But the key piece—and something that’s so hard to capture at the start of a new project—is that we were able to go from idea to demo in the same week, meeting the initial requirement we set out to accomplish on Monday.

And that’s, for me, what makes this so exciting.

We’ve been discussing ideas, trying concepts, and sharing early and often. Some of our work has overlapped a bit, but the makeup of the team has centered around individuals who bring a lot of ownership to the idea and the energy to match it.

That’s a rare combination, and I’ve enjoyed seeing the contributions of each person throwing everything they’ve got into pulling the idea together.³

Looking toward next week, and the weeks beyond, we’ve got a lot of work cut out for us. We need to take the tool and scale it, add the right features, understand what’s valuable and what can be improved based on user interviews, and ensure that what we’re building is secure and private. In addition, we have to make sure the tools are valuable enough to keep going. That’s a lot. But I’m excited about the prospect.⁴

Ultimately, we’ll succeed if we can ship quickly, iterate based on feedback loops from customers, and prioritize tasks based on their impact. Those parts will be tricky, but what I’m counting on is how motivated each of us is to make this project a success—coming together as a team and making an impact.

There’s a lot to do. But first, we’re grateful for the long Labor Day weekend.

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1. Over the last (nearly) two decades I’ve moved between being an individual contributor, leading teams, and doing a mix of both at the same time. In the past I’ve been a product owner (similar to an outcome owner), run startups, been part of companies of all sizes, and changed what I’ve done every few years. It’s been incredibly valuable to constantly shift between both sides of the equation—to see what’s needed, to understand personal motivations, and to get to work with great ICs as well as leaders, while trying to learn the best of each
2. Does that mean I haven’t been doing fun, interesting work on other teams? No, definitely not. I’ve been part of some great teams, had fun building and solving hard problems, and ultimately don’t know where the future leads in what teams I’ll be part of next. But it’s a particular thrill and challenge to take all that I’ve seen from teams in the past, and try to work with a small group to apply learnings in the right way to build something new.
3. At one point I wanted to play with some ideas for the frontend design. Jason, one of our amazing engineers, helped get my laptop up and running, and using Claude Code I was able to make a ton of modifications—without getting into Figma or creating tickets. I just wrote code that improved things, and the team was able to benefit from that work directly.
4. I’m also grateful that if we ultimately need to disband, I get to go back to working with another great team as a designer. It’s ultimately a win either way.