Two decades of experience building products and scaling design teams across Australia, Europe and North America. Darren thinks deeply about the Product, Design and Engineering triad — and how AI is changing where each discipline creates value, without changing the need for all three. Find him on LinkedIn and Medium. We chatted with Darren for our Ducks in a Row newsletter.
Introduce yourself
I’m Darren Smith, a product design leader based in Sydney, Australia. I’ve spent more than two decades helping organisations build products, scale design teams and solve complex business problems across Australia, Europe and North America. Outside work you’ll usually find me exploring the best of NSW with my wife, reading, or planning the next road trip.
What do you do for work?
I’m Head of Design at Multiplier, leading Product Design, Content Design and User Research for a global employment platform that helps companies hire, pay and manage people around the world.
My role goes well beyond building products. I shape design strategy across these disciplines, build teams and capability, establish operating models, and help Product, Design and Engineering operate as a single leadership team. More recently, I’ve been embedding AI into our practice, creating workflows and agents that help teams spend less time producing and more time thinking.
What do you do outside work?
I’m naturally curious, so I’m usually learning something.
I enjoy writing about design leadership and AI, driving classic cars, hiking, travelling and discovering great coffee. Some of my best thinking happens away from a screen, whether that’s on a bushwalk, exploring regional NSW or behind the wheel on a long drive.
You’ve spent time working in the US, most recently at Adobe in Seattle. What was that experience like, and was there anything about design leadership there that felt different?
Working in Seattle was valuable because it gave me another perspective on how large technology companies operate. There were incredibly talented people and world-class products, but it also challenged some assumptions I had about the role of design leadership.
What I found was that design leadership often sat closer to delivery than shaping the direction of the business. Product, Design and Engineering were collaborating, but not always operating as a truly integrated leadership team. It sometimes felt as though each discipline was optimising for its own outcomes rather than collectively defining the problem, making the trade-offs and driving strategy together.
That experience reinforced my own philosophy. I believe the role of design leadership is to shape the organisation as much as the product by bringing customer insight into strategic decisions, creating clarity across disciplines and helping Product, Design and Engineering operate as one team.
In the AI era, what does the Product, Design and Engineering triad look like now?
I don’t think AI changes the need for the Product, Design and Engineering triad. It changes where each discipline creates value.
As AI makes execution faster and cheaper, the hard part is no longer building features. It’s deciding what should be built, why it matters and how it fits into a coherent product experience. That places even greater importance on Product, Design and Engineering operating as a single leadership team rather than three functions handing work between each other.
Product brings business clarity. Design brings customer understanding, systems thinking and judgement. Engineering brings technical expertise and builds resilient systems. AI amplifies each discipline, but it doesn’t replace the need for shared decision-making.
The organisations that will succeed won’t be the ones generating the most code. They’ll be the ones that use AI to remove friction while strengthening collaboration, judgement and strategic thinking across the triad.
In your blog post “People or Tokens”, you mentioned the rise of the hyper IC. If you were mentoring a product designer today, what’s the first skill you’d tell them to go build that has nothing to do with Figma?
Systems thinking.
The designers who will thrive won’t necessarily be the ones producing the best screens. They’ll be the ones who can frame problems, connect customer needs to business outcomes, understand incentives across an organisation and make good decisions.
AI can generate interfaces. It can’t replace judgement. Learning how to think clearly, influence others and navigate ambiguity will be a far more durable skill than mastering any design tool.
Any podcasts you are currently listening to, or a book you are reading?
I try to balance learning with switching off.
On the design side, I’ve really enjoyed Finding Our Way. Hearing experienced design leaders openly discuss building teams, influencing organisations and navigating executive leadership is both validating and inspiring.
Outside work, I deliberately read fiction to exercise a different part of my brain. I particularly enjoy crime and fantasy, especially books by Tana French and the Cormoran Strike series. I find the contrast helps me disconnect and come back with a fresh perspective.
What is your favourite tool or resource, and why?
I don’t really have a favourite tool anymore. I have a favourite toolchain.
AI has fundamentally changed how I work by giving me both greater depth and greater breadth. Rather than relying on one assistant, I’ve built an AI-enabled workflow where different tools play different roles.
Claude has become my day-to-day thinking partner. I’ve invested heavily in context engineering so it understands how I think, the products I’m working on and the problems I’m trying to solve. That continuity means I spend less time rebuilding context and more time exploring ideas.
I also work asynchronously with AI. Before breakfast, I’ll often kick off deeper research, strategic analysis or competitive exploration so it’s waiting for me when I start the day. Rather than replacing my thinking, AI extends it. It gives me more time to focus on judgement, synthesis and decision-making while the heavy lifting happens in parallel.
Your one-sentence work-related advice
Don’t optimise for outputs. Optimise for your ability to understand problems, influence decisions and create lasting change.
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