October 9, 2026Sightlines issue no.3: Raise the bar for how teams use AIFigma

How do you drive AI adoption and make better decisions about what to build?

Share Sightlines issue no.3: Raise the bar for how teams use AI

    Whether in Executive Briefing webinars or at Leadership Collective events, we’ve been chatting with leaders across product, design, and engineering to understand their biggest AI-related hurdles. This month, we’re zooming in on one question that continues to surface: How do you bridge the gap between the promise of AI and its impact in practice?

    Push past faster output

    AI can help teams move faster, but that doesn’t automatically lead to better work. Speed is only valuable if teams are moving in the right direction. Leaders should set the expectation that teams use AI not just to ship faster, but to explore more directions, work through edge cases before committing, and refine the details that make the product distinctly theirs.

    Go deeper: What it takes to build great products now

    What it takes to build great products now

    Getting to a prototype is easier than ever. The harder work is sustaining speed all the way to launch, choosing the right direction, and creating products that stand out. Here’s what that takes.

    Create the conditions for team-wide adoption

    Individual AI fluency will only get you so far. To drive AI adoption across the entire team, leaders need to make learning and experimentation a shared practice. Here are a few ways to make that happen:

    • Create dedicated spaces for peer-led training
    • Bringing AI into existing team workflows
    • Encourage product builders to share what they’re trying, including experiments that didn’t work
    • Get hands-on with the tools and show your own work in progress

    Go deeper: The guide to building an AI-native org

    Worth repeating

    Across Leadership Collective events, here are a couple of lines that stuck with us this month:

    “When it looks like leadership just cares about moving fast, that’s a bad signal. We try to make it really clear that speed is not the goal. Of course we want to move fast, but if we’re moving fast and shipping slop, that’s not good.” Ian Silber, Head of Product Design, OpenAI

    “I’ve heard people say ‘I have no time to play with AI tools, I have deliverables.’ As managers, one of the first things we can do is create time for our teams to play and make mistakes and figure things out.” Gui Seiz, Director of AI Product Design, Figma

    As managers, [we should] create time for our teams to play and make mistakes and figure things out.“As managers, [we should] create time for our teams to play and make mistakes and figure things out.”
    Gui Seiz, Director of AI Product Design, Figma

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