aleksicivan

Product & Experience Leader

[aleksicivan @aleksicivan_]

You are not anonymous. You are just not named.
I sat in the room where the dataset was the product.
I wrote about what I understood there, what's underneath "I agree," and what changes when you realise the system is working exactly as designed.

#Privacy

https://t.co/UU4vDJBS6M

[aleksicivan @aleksicivan_]

"Design is becoming strategy"
"Design is becoming systems"
"Design is shifting from interfaces to behaviour"
"AI-native designer"
You will find some version of this in a random X or LinkedIn headline, said with confidence, as though the discipline itself just changed.

It did not. What changed is that a generation of practitioners arrived at the depth the craft always had, and mistook the arrival for a shift.

I wrote about what that framing costs. What it does to junior designers who replace curiosity with trend-chasing, and what to hiring managers who start writing job descriptions for roles that already exist. And why calling yourself "AI-native" credits the tool with value that belongs to the person at the keyboard.

https://t.co/sB0A7ZDF6r

[aleksicivan @aleksicivan_]

We let an algorithm judge people by keywords, and reduced the most consequential decision in organisational building to a pattern-matching exercise.

The headhunter who understood people, not profiles, was the mechanism that solved this. That person is largely gone. The gap is real, and it is an opportunity.

I wrote an article on what leadership is actually losing, and what comes next.

#Hiring #Recruitment #Leadership

https://t.co/kY5gB6WE0S

[aleksicivan @aleksicivan_]

Building the wrong thing is an obvious failure. You see it immediately. There is a subtler one that looks like success right up until the moment the money stops, building too much of the right thing, and calling it preparation.

I learned this by doing everything right and watching it fail anyway.

#startup #mvp #product #design

New piece on Medium ↓
https://t.co/w6GDQLhnSZ

[aleksicivan @aleksicivan_]

I have spent almost three decades watching the same conversation repeat itself inside companies. The discipline, product and design get crowded out of the decisions. The first fix that comes to mind is a new seat at the table. The seat helps, but I have changed my mind about whether it is enough.

The companies where the discipline actually holds its ground are not the ones with the best org chart. They are the ones whose culture, starting at the very top, actually wants customers' and users' realities in the room when decisions are made. Structure follows culture. It has never been the other way around.

I wrote about what that looks like, why the easy answer keeps failing, and what the discipline actually needs under a culture that wants it there.

The org chart is the evidence, not the answer.

#Product #Design #Culture #Leadership #Organization

Read the whole article ↓
https://t.co/symrJfmhGj

[aleksicivan @aleksicivan_]

Seven years ago, Mike Monteiro wrote Ruined by Design — a book with the argument in the title. Every harmful product was made by someone who could have chosen differently. His point was about intent. The people who built manipulative interfaces, deceptive flows, and discriminatory systems knew what they were building. Harm was a choice, and it was an expensive one — it took teams, time, and effort to build something that could manipulate people at scale.

That era is over. Harm is cheap now!
But you can still choose what should and what shouldn't be built!

#AI #ethics #product #design

[aleksicivan @aleksicivan_]

I know people who are very good at what they do who have lost their jobs in the last few months. Not because they were doing it badly. Because the training itself was what became absorbable. The question nobody wants to write down honestly: if execution is no longer the bottleneck, what is?

Read the whole article ↓
https://t.co/Ip8F5DBQEz

#AI #Product #Design #Innovation

[aleksicivan @aleksicivan_]

Design, product, and innovation are not three disciplines. They are one job, wearing whatever name the decade preferred.

The hardest part is still explaining what the job actually is. To peers. To stakeholders. To the C-level signing the contract. To the customer who is not the user.

Read the long argument ↓
https://t.co/NuV7Pmgbof

#design #product #innovation #productmanagement #leadership

[aleksicivan @aleksicivan_]

Most hires look right on paper. Three months in, the gap isn't skill — it's behaviour.

The strongest hiring question isn't "can they do the job?" Almost everyone you'd seriously consider can do the job. The real question is "who are they when they're doing it?"

Read about the framework and its origin ↓
https://t.co/EcfAvZvf5w

#hiring #leadership #management #product #design

[aleksicivan @aleksicivan_]

"In the UAE, everyone is Emirati."
In a country where citizenship cannot be earned, the president's words appeared on billboards across the country during its most difficult chapter.

Seven years in Abu Dhabi taught me that he was describing something I had already been living.

I wrote about what the outside world gets entirely wrong — and why my days here are, in one way or another, counted.

Read the whole story ↓
https://t.co/ICEk1c9Q0K

@dctabudhabi @ADMediaOffice