This latest Mickensy report on Rewiring software delivery for the agentic era got me thinking about whether teams are converging or diverging on approaches to create design impact (thanks for the share James Hartman). Last year’s State of Product Design highlighted some emerging trends we’re seeing play out this year, but seem to diverge from “software manufacturing.”
My biggest takeaway is that if agentic systems compress production, decision-making becomes the bottleneck. I wrote about this in my own post. This means for many teams, the challenge shifts from managing delivery to maintaining a decision system: shared context, research, documentation, user feedback, metrics, and organizational memory.
Software may be built faster than ever, but teams still need to decide what to build, why it matters, and how new learning changes direction. That’s where I see product and design work increasingly moving.
As James calls out in his post:
“These truths are decades old. But they’re notoriously postponed. Addressing them requires rethinking how organizations work. That’s hard. It doesn’t provide instant results.”
There’s a freedom that can emerge from removing some of the grunt work, but I’m also wondering whether we’re sterilizing the build process.
Curious how all this makes people feel?