Alex Mench

Music. Product. Design. Currently at @kobalt. Used to write about global sounds, now I just listen. Every 3rd Friday of the month on @lwstdfm. He/him.

[Alex Mench @Alex_Mench]

A thread of playlists👇🏻✌🏻

[Alex Mench @Alex_Mench]

GoodOne001 is a little selection I put together. There will be more - some sooner, some later. Each will be accompanied by a photo i've taken. This one's designed to help. #GoodOne https://t.co/TM45yHt08p

[Alex Mench @Alex_Mench]

I genuinely think the term 'Design' is damaging/limiting to individuals. I’'ve long thought what it might mean to use the principles without the title to side-step the negative associations and preconceptions. Design Founders are often special, for good reason.

[Julie Zhuo @joulee]

I see a lot of designers who want to stay "designers," like the role is some kind of warm, fuzzy blanket focusing purely on experience and aesthetics.

But this is not how the best designers think.

In my interview with @soleio ​on what separates top 1% designers from mediocre designers, he says it brilliantly: “If you delegate impact to PMs, you cannot ask for the title of excellent.”

At the end of the day, it’s your job -- not your manager’s, not your PM’s, not your CEO’s — for your design work to change behavior positively for the user

[sebastian @scspeier]

One interesting observation in this chart is the claim that demand has flipped from designers to PMs. It frames this as if orgs suddenly want fewer designers and more PMs, but that feels rooted in legacy titles, not how the work is actually getting done. On most product teams today, designers are already owning big chunks of “PM work” — discovery, framing, prioritization, and strategy — and strong PMs are expected to bring real product taste and design sensibility too. Some orgs hire designers with strong product instincts, some hire PMs with strong design instincts, but in both cases they’re really looking for the same hybrid profile. I think it’s way easier to route that through a PM headcount and PM job listing than through Design, especially if there is still a desire to hire strong crafters at bigger orgs that might not be able to ship a product on their own. So what this graph is really measuring isn’t a clean shift from Design → PM, but more like.. the lag between how we label roles and the blended product + design work that’s already happening.

[Alex Mench @Alex_Mench]

@lennysan Although to be honest, i’m not even sure what Design means any more. I think the term is potentially quite damaging/limiting, even outside of AI. As a Product Designer, I’m beginning to wonder how to deploy the principles without the title

[Alex Mench @Alex_Mench]

@lennysan I wonder if (unfortunately) it’s about how PM’s have been labelled ‘thinkers’ & designers as ‘do’ers’. And because now the so called ‘doing’ is easy, PM’s are easier to label as valuable. But so many of the critical skills are what Design was before the PM role was clarified.

[Alex Mench @Alex_Mench]

@DwidenR24 As per your wish for a canvas for agents to design/dump back into...

https://t.co/32gKQDEdYW

[Alex Mench @Alex_Mench]

@DwidenR24 Hey man. Enjoyed a recent video of your Figma/Claude workflow. Have you covered what it looks like to start with a prompt in Claude, not a figma file?

[Alex Mench @Alex_Mench]

@DwidenR24 Thanks. And yes, absolutely. I guess my question was more about the setup, and whether or not there's anything you're specifically doing to enable it outside of what is shown in the video.

[Alex Mench @Alex_Mench]

@Ankaman616 He's cooked. Over saturation will be the end of him. Death by 1000 marketing cuts. Ballet was the straw that broke his back. Or mine.

[Alex Mench @Alex_Mench]

I reference this in a design/technology context so much. Product 'marketing', education and collaboration is 99% ensuring that what we consistently obsess over as practitioners is not just externalised, or acknowledged, but properly absorbed. Otherwise we're screwed.

[VV @visualizevalue]

Thought, said, heard, understood.

[Alex Mench @Alex_Mench]

@benblumenrose 100%. The current inclination is for designers is to use AI to be more like engineers, not be better designers. It's about immersion in the problem/opportunity space, and the need to protect it, rather than vibe-coding the first idea. Which is simply a race to the bottom.

[Alex Mench @Alex_Mench]

@AndyMitten The houses along my street all have 'park' related names as well as number, and a lot of the neighbours have them just above the door. My wife won't let me call ours Ji Sung Park.

[Alex Mench @Alex_Mench]

If we're all just becoming writers (shaping and refining prompts), could it be that the people who studied English Literature and Journalism are the real winners?

Or is it simply that the ability to create a good design brief is relevant again?

[Alex Mench @Alex_Mench]

Yes, yes and yes.

[First Round @firstround]

Figma is not the source of truth, according to Ryan Lucas, Rippling’s VP of Design.

Echoing industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, Lucas says a designer’s job isn’t done until the product sells. Lucas thinks about good design as “useful, usable, desirable — and used,” with many people forgetting about the last one.

“Figma is not the source of truth. It’s a bunch of rectangles in a vector drawing program. The source of truth is the thing that customers experience. I would much rather everybody orient to the thing that we are putting in front of customers than orient to some of the tools and techniques we use upstream.”

Listen to more of Lucas’s insights below on this episode of Executive Function.

[Alex Mench @Alex_Mench]

@AndyMitten @TheAthleticFC Good lad

[Alex Mench @Alex_Mench]

@lennysan @cursor_ai @clairevo Have you had anyone experiencing this error message:

Error handling deep link: URLs are not allowed in prompts

[Ryo Lu @ryolu_]

software is still about thinking

software has always been about taking ambiguous human needs and crystallizing them into precise, interlocking systems. the craft is in the breakdown: which abstractions to create, where boundaries should live, how pieces communicate.

coding with ai today creates a new trap: the illusion of speed without structure. you can generate code fast, but without clear system architecture – the real boundaries, the actual invariants, the core abstractions – you end up with a pile that works until it doesn't. it's slop because there's no coherent mental model underneath.

ai doesn't replace systems thinking – it amplifies the cost of not doing it. if you don't know what you want structurally, ai fills gaps with whatever pattern it's seen most. you get generic solutions to specific problems. coupled code where you needed clean boundaries. three different ways of doing the same thing because you never specified the one way.

as Cursor handles longer tasks, the gap between "vaguely right direction" and "precisely understood system" compounds exponentially. when agents execute 100 steps instead of 10, your role becomes more important, not less.

the skill shifts from "writing every line" to "holding the system in your head and communicating its essence":

- define boundaries – what are the core abstractions? what should this component know? where does state live?
- specify invariants – what must always be true? what are the constants and defaults that make the system work?
- guide decomposition – how should this break down? what's the natural structure? what's stable vs likely to change?
- maintain coherence – as ai generates more code, you ensure it fits the mental model, follows patterns, respects boundaries.

this is what great architects and designers do: they don't write every line, but they hold the system design and guide toward coherence. agents are just very fast, very literal team members.

the danger is skipping the thinking because ai makes it feel optional. people prompt their way into codebases they don't understand. can't debug because they never designed it. can't extend because there's no structure, just accumulated features.

people who think deeply about systems can now move 100x faster. you spend time on the hard problem – understanding what you're building and why – and ai handles mechanical translation. you're not bogged down in syntax, so you stay in the architectural layer longer.

the future isn't "ai replaces programmers" or "everyone can code now." it's "people who think clearly about systems build incredibly fast, and people who don't generate slop at scale."

the skill becomes: holding complexity, breaking it down cleanly, communicating structure precisely. less syntax, more systems. less implementation, more architecture. less writing code, more designing coherence.

humans are great at seeing patterns, understanding tradeoffs, making judgment calls about how things should fit together.

ai can't save you from unclear thinking – it just makes unclear thinking run faster.

[Alex Mench @Alex_Mench]

@Ankaman616 @AdamCrafton_ @TheAthleticFC Surely. Surely. Gary Oldman as Fergie. For so many reasons.

[Alex Mench @Alex_Mench]

Live (well, prerecorded) on @LWSTDFM for the next 2 with my big brother @adammench standing in for @AndyTheakstone. https://t.co/FrO1v0ypku

[Alex Mench @Alex_Mench]

@AndyMitten Your ability to remain pragmatic even in the most volatile of moments never ceases to amaze me. I can only dream of these levels of level-headedness.

[Alex Mench @Alex_Mench]

@HarryStebbings Encountered this last week with (a) sports podcaster(s). Found myself fading out on the second, and ignoring the third. The content will inevitably be too similar, or too incremental, to be worth it.