Bizarre Love Triangle

At a conference many years ago, I heard a keynote talk from web design expert Jeff Veen, author of the seminal web design book The Art and Science of Web Design and a former design leader at Wired Magazine, Adobe, and Google. Veen’s keynote featured a memorable mantra: Love the Web.

I was struck by this successful web pro’s comfortable use of the gooey word love to describe his audience’s professional relationship to the world wide web. We should love it.

But you know what? His plea made perfect sense. Still does. The web—when it’s open, standards-based, human-centered, well-structured, and accessible—is a miraculous format. It enables essential human activities like telling stories, organizing social movements, or buying socks. Like many Pollinator readers, I’ve always wanted to spend my career improving the quality of human discourse; anything else seems frivolous. That’s why I’ve always loved the web.

I remembered this talk and its “Love the Web” slogan when I recently received a LinkedIn message from someone wanting “to connect with other people who love AI.” I thought: love AI? Artificial intelligence? Who told this fellow that I love AI?

To be clear: I don’t hate AI. I surely don’t ignore it. The tech is real, powerful, and astonishing. (And yes, occasionally problematic, sometimes deeply so, like when it pollutes and deceives. Hey humans: let’s solve those problems before we give the robots control of the greatest repository of information in the history of humanity.)

In fact, every resource featured in this issue of the Pollinator touches on artificial intelligence. Here at Solution Design Group (SDG), we have some serious AI talent on our roster, and we’ve done some wonderful things to solve real problems for our customers and their customers using our Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning capabilities.

Our AI experts here at SDG are among the most thoughtful technologists I know. They’re curious, principled, and deeply attuned to the human implications of their work. But I don’t think love is the right word to describe anyone’s relationship to this technology. We may learn from, manage, use, deploy, or even master artificial intelligence.

But love? That’s something else entirely. The object of love should be rooted in reality—a human being, a pet, a place, a story. It’s a part of human experience, not a simulation of it.

So I’ll reserve my love for my family, my dog, a few beloved lakes and rivers—and yes, for the web. Especially when it helps people understand each other better, work together more effectively, and engage in discourse that is messily, wonderfully human.

On to the Garden,

Around the Garden

Words may fail me

Check it out: The Thing You Are Expert at Will Be Your Career Downfall from Through The Looking Glass, by Julie Zhuo

Julie Zhuo, former head of product design at Facebook, is fast becoming one of The Pollinator’s favorite writers on product. Zhuo is a successful product leader, designer, and entrepreneur—and a thoughtful, sensitive writer about technology and culture. In this recent issue of her Through the Looking Glass newsletter, Zhuo explores ideas about AI, writing, technology, and careers.

Before reading Zhuo’s perspective, I had uneasily concluded that AI tools are an inadequate substitute for the fundamental purpose of writing: turning inchoate thoughts into reasonably coherent collections of words. I think this for two reasons:

• Like many of my fellow humans, I primarily write to work out what I think, with (I hope!) some degree of nuance and depth. Doesn't AI just skip that whole thinking process? It seems to mistake "producing a written thing" for "writing." An analogy: Using AI to write is like saying the purpose of lifting weights is to push a couple hundred pounds of weights off the ground, and a forklift can do that well, so let’s skip the squats and the presses, fire up a forklift, and call that weightlifting.

• For me (perhaps not for everyone), writing sentences—fighting to find exactly the right word, in the right sequence—is a deeply satisfying activity. It's just really fun. Why would I—why would anyone—want to cede that pleasure to a computer? The analogy here? Someone who enjoys fishing can’t satisfy or demonstrate their joy by picking up a box of frozen fish sticks at the local supermarket.

Zhuo’s thesis: sometimes, yes, we write to experience a kind of pleasure, explore an emotion, or understand our own thinking. AI is not great for those use-cases.

But other times AI is in fact the best tool for the job. In Zhuo’s words, it’s “the way the wind is blowing,” so we should get over our hang-ups.

I appreciated how her essay reminded me to check my pride. Sure, sometimes it is really fun to go fishing. But when the kids are hungry and the cupboard is bare, even the most avid angler can appreciate a quick meal of fish sticks.

AI for Strategy—pragmatically

Check it out: AI and Product Strategy, by Roman Pichler, Pichler Consulting

This piece from Roman Pichler is—like most of his thinking and writing—pragmatic, helpful, and kind. Pichler here is less interested in big issues and thorny anxieties about artificial intelligence. He sets those concerns aside and offers methods and advice to help product strategists and product managers better perform their daily, demanding work.

Pichler recommends a handful of tasks that Product Strategists need done and that AI tools can do. These include:

• Conducting market research (“AI-based tools can discover user and customer trends”)

• Generating product ideas, based on customer insights

• Suggesting opportunities to differentiate the product itself with AI

• Monitoring product performance

I appreciate that Pichler’s piece recognizes limitations and real risks of AI, like environmental ethics. And he advises product pros to continue to get out of the building (GOOB), where their users and customers live. That’s one of our favorite foundational concepts.

Survey says: AI & Product Data from Figma

Check it out: Figma’s 2025 AI Report, from Figma

Thanks to Allison Lorenzo, SDG UX Consultant, for recommending this report.

The team at Figma, the popular online product design platform, recently published the 2025 edition of a report summarizing how Figma users are employing AI in their work. They surveyed over 2500 users across seven countries, mostly designers, developers, and other members of product teams.

Wisely, the report is divided into two parts: (1) how Figma users are adding AI features to the products they build, and (2) how they’re using AI in their own workflows.

Among the statistics we found most insightful:

• “34% of Figma users say that they’ve shipped applications and software that includes generative AI, compared to 22% last year.”

• “Figma users at small companies were twice as likely to say the majority of their work is on AI projects compared to those at larger companies.”

• “Over 80% of respondents felt that learning to work with AI will be essential to their future success.”

This is directionally consistent with what we’re hearing from SDG customers, too, especially those building internal tools or customer-facing features with generative AI components.

To download the full report, you’ll need to give an email address and a little personal information. There’s also a publicly available summary at https://www.figma.com/blog/figma-2025-ai-report-perspectives/.

Outside the Box

Coloring—that is, filling in black and white illustrations using crayons, markers, or colored pencils—remains a popular activity for kids and adults alike. iColoring AI is an AI-based coloring sheet generator. Enter a description of something you would like to color, and the AI will generate a downloadable coloring sheet. Warning: hallucinations happen. When I prompted it to create a coloring sheet of “a turtle and a chicken playing badminton in the park,” the turtle had an extra limb, and instead of a shuttlecock they were smacking around a little soccer ball.

Check it out at https://icoloring.ai.

About the Pollinator

• The Pollinator is a free publication from the Product practice at Solution Design Group (SDG). Each issue features an opening reflection and a curated digest of noteworthy content and articles from across the internet’s vast product community.

• Solution Design Group (SDG) is an employee-owned digital product innovation and custom software development consultancy. Our team of over 200 consultants and other technology and business professionals includes experienced software engineers, technical architects, user experience designers, and product and innovation strategists. We serve companies across industries to discover promising business opportunities, build high-quality technology solutions, and improve the effectiveness of digital product teams.

• The Pollinator's editor is Jason Scherschligt, SDG's Head of Product. Please direct complaints, suggestions, and especially praise to Jason at [email protected].

• Why The Pollinator? Jason often says that as he works with leaders and teams across companies and industries, he feels like a honeybee in a garden, spending time on one flower, moving to another, collecting experiences and insights, and distributing them like pollen, so an entire garden blooms. How lovely.