Design · AI · Teams
What Changes When Design Is There From the Beginning?
One year inside Pitang Labs changed how I think about the boundary between design and engineering—and what a team can build in the space between them.
When I joined Pitang, Labs was beginning again. The previous team had gone through a restructuring, and the area was rebuilding both its role and its credibility inside the company.
It was known primarily as a place for experiments. The open question was whether those experiments could become something the organization could rely on.
One decision captured the change already underway: the first hire for this new phase was not another developer. It was a designer.
A different starting point
In a department historically shaped by engineering, bringing in a designer first was a subtle but meaningful shift. Design would not arrive after the technology was built to refine the surface. It would participate earlier, helping define what should be built and how the experience should work.
That change was less about giving design a ceremonial seat at the table and more about changing the sequence of the work. Design was present while the problem was still being framed—before implementation had narrowed the range of possible answers.
My first project at Pitang already involved AI as part of both the design and development process. At the time, much of the conversation around AI and design focused on replacement. Designers were expected to be among the first professionals affected, especially when their work was understood mainly as producing screens.
The work changed first
Almost a year ago, during an internal Digi session, I shared some of the first AI design tools I had been exploring. A year later, many of those tools have changed. The more important change, however, has been in the work itself.
Today, my role includes designing interfaces, building prototypes, working closer to code, exploring agents, and asking how design-quality criteria can become reusable tools and processes.
This is not simply a designer taking on more production. It is a shift toward working closer to the material of the product—and toward making design intent easier to carry from an early idea into something that can actually be used.
The interface was never the whole job
AI did not remove the need for design. It made the limits of defining design as screen production much easier to see.
The harder work remains: understanding the problem, handling complexity, making trade-offs, connecting business and technical constraints, and ensuring that what gets built remains useful outside the ideal scenario.
The value of design is not ownership of a final layer. It is helping a team make coherent decisions across the system. Interfaces are one expression of those decisions, but they are not the decisions themselves.
From experimentation to capability
The same evolution can be seen in Labs. What was once viewed mainly as an experimental area has become a more trusted and strategic part of the company.
That did not happen simply because the area adopted new technology. It happened as experimentation became delivery, knowledge became internal capability, and isolated initiatives became repeatable ways of working.
This was not the result of one person or one discipline. It came from designers, developers, leaders, and teams learning how to work differently together. I was fortunate to be there at the beginning of this new phase and to grow alongside it.
The space between disciplines
The most interesting lesson from that first year is not that AI changed design or engineering independently. It is that the distance between them became smaller.
The point is not that every team should hire a designer first. It is that the moment design enters changes the questions a team can ask—and how long those questions remain open.
When design is involved from the beginning, it does more than improve the interface. It can help turn uncertainty into direction, experiments into capability, and the distance between disciplines into a place where better products and stronger teams are built.