What Designers Are Actually Talking About Now

June 29, 2026 · 2 min read

Next week, our Product Design team is converging from across Europe for a full day — going deep on a handful of topics that will define how we work in the coming months.

After putting the agenda together, I found myself scrolling back through notes accumulated over the years from offsites at previous companies. The recurring themes are surprisingly consistent: what does good look like, how do we track design quality, how do we align on execution standards across teams.

There was a lot of energy spent on design craft — making sure everyone had the same bar, that requests were well-scoped, that the cost of design work was understood and justified. Important work. But fundamentally, we were talking about outputs, execution — deliverables, pixels, components.

What's interesting is that the questions on next week's agenda are different. More fundamental, more focused on the reasoning behind the output:

How do you design for AI agents?
How do you deliver high-quality UX when AI can generate interfaces on demand?
How should design career frameworks evolve when AI handles more of the execution?

A couple of years ago, none of these were real questions. A year ago, they were on the horizon. Today they're central to our work.

Here's what we're spending the day on:

0900 CET - AI Agents UX — A show & tell of real prototypes across the team, benchmarked against the best agent UX patterns out there. What's working, where operators hit friction, what's worth keeping.
1100 CET - Product Design Levels — We adopted career levels a while back. AI-assisted design is changing what the job actually is. Time to check if they still hold.
1400 CET - Product Design Principles — What makes a Helsing product feel like one? We're putting it in writing.
1600 CET - Product Design Skills for LLMs — Building the LLM Skills that generate on-brand, quality-controlled UIs, grounded in the principles we define earlier that day. Setting the guardrails before we need them.

Wonder what we'll be talking about at the next one.