Reinvention

The Reset

Team Meetup, Vancouver, BC — 2024

After nine years at FICO, I was unexpectedly laid off. It wasn't the ending I expected, but it became the beginning of something much bigger.

Rather than rushing into another position, I treated this moment as an opportunity to rethink how products could be designed and built. I began exploring the strengths and limitations of emerging AI tools while questioning every part of my existing workflow.

Highlights

• Completed nine years at FICO
• Began researching AI-assisted product development
• Evaluated emerging AI tools
• Started rethinking traditional UX workflows

Sometimes the biggest career shifts begin with unexpected change.

Reflection & Direction

For the first time in years, I paused to reflect on my career, my process, and the kind of work I wanted to create next.

I redesigned my portfolio using Figma, WordPress, and Divi while documenting two decades of experience and preparing for a new chapter. Around the same time, a longtime business partner approached me with an ambitious product idea that would eventually become Surviving ComicCon.

Highlights

• Portfolio redesign
• Career reflection
• Product discovery
• Early planning for Surviving ComicCon

Learning Faster

While interviewing for Product Design and Product Management roles, I immersed myself in AI-assisted product development.

Tools explored

Experiment AI Builder Evaluation: Tax Agent Dashboard

One of my earliest experiments was building an AI Builder Evaluation for a Tax Agent Dashboard, comparing how multiple AI design tools responded to identical prompts.

Rather than evaluating aesthetics alone, I wanted to understand each tool's strengths, limitations, and practical value within a professional product workflow.

Identical prompts, four builders, side by side. read the case study.

I also redesigned the Jane Lazarre and Violetta Markelou websites using Figma, WordPress, and Divi, reinforcing the contrast between my established workflow and the emerging AI-first approach.

For years, Figma, WordPress, Divi, and Photoshop were at the center of my workflow. While they enabled me to create polished digital experiences, every iteration required significant manual effort.

Finding My Workflow

I began treating Claude Code as a collaborative design partner. I also used Claude Cowork to conduct research and explore ideas before committing to a direction. Ideas moved from concept to working prototype in hours instead of days. Visual Studio Code gave me direct visibility into the underlying code, allowing me to jump in, make adjustments, and keep iterating. For the first time, designing and building felt like one continuous process.

During this period

• Built additional AI workflow experiments
• Continued evaluating AI-generated interfaces
• Surviving ComicCon reached Beta v0.1.0
• Expanded networking and job search efforts

Moviefone concept — one of the AI-generated interfaces I evaluated.

The distance between an idea and a working product had never been shorter.

Research and Development

I experimented with prompt engineering, agent-based workflows, AI-assisted coding, rapid prototyping, and product strategy.

A highlight during this period was creating an AI-Assisted Course Design Platform, exploring how AI could streamline educational content creation while maintaining thoughtful user experience.

AI-Assisted Course Design Platform.

I also revisited ideas that had been waiting for the right time. One of those ideas was Sthuf, a personal inventory app that helps friends and family organize and share the things they own.

I originally began designing Sthuf in 2012 using Sketch and Photoshop. While the concept was strong, the time and effort required to build it kept it from moving beyond the design stage.

With AI-assisted development, I was finally able to bring the idea back to life. Today, Sthuf is in Beta v0.1.0, demonstrating how modern tools can help transform long-standing concepts into working products.

Tools explored

Focus areas

Everything Changed

By this point, I was more than comfortable working with Claude Code. I decided to completely rebuild both my personal portfolio and my creative studio, Everlast Interactive.

For nearly two decades, my workflow revolved around WordPress, Divi, Photoshop, and Figma. During my career, I partnered with marketing teams, agencies, nonprofits, startups, and enterprise organizations to create websites, digital campaigns, mobile applications, and software products.

Rebuilding these sites with Claude Code challenged nearly every assumption I had about how digital products are created. Instead of manually assembling layouts, refining mockups, and handing designs off for implementation, I could describe an idea, iterate through conversation, and build directly in code. Design, development, and experimentation became part of the same continuous workflow.

The biggest shift wasn't learning a new tool, it was changing where I invested my time. Rather than spending hours producing screens, I could focus on product strategy, systems thinking, user outcomes, and rapid experimentation. AI accelerated execution, but experience remained the guide. Knowing what to refine, what to simplify, what to challenge, and ultimately what to create is still a uniquely human responsibility.

AI didn't replace my design experience. It amplified it.

Momentum

By July, months of experimentation had evolved into a repeatable product development workflow.

Surviving ComicCon reached Beta v0.8.0, marking a major milestone in the product's evolution. I built the application using Supabase for the backend and database, Netlify for hosting and continuous deployment, and GitHub for version control.

In addition to advancing Surviving ComicCon, I applied the same AI-assisted workflow to client projects.

Projects

• Surviving ComicCon: Beta v0.8.0
• Brotherhood Sister Sol: Curriculum platform redesign and modernization
• Khary Lazarre-White: Website redesign and development

Building Surviving ComicCon, Beta v0.8.0.

01 · Build

Claude Code

Design and implementation in one pass, in VS Code.

02 · Version

GitHub

Every change committed and reviewable.

03 · Deploy

Netlify

Push to main, build and ship automatically.

04 · Live

Surviving ComicCon

In front of real users, iterating continuously.

Data layer Supabase Postgres, auth, and storage behind the running app.

Primary tools

Takeaway What an experiment became

What began as an experiment had become a sustainable way of building products. By combining product strategy, UX design, AI-assisted development, and a modern deployment stack, I significantly reduced the time between an idea and a working solution, allowing me to prototype, test, and ship with greater speed and confidence while maintaining a high standard of quality.

Today

Over the past several months, one place I've visited regularly is Reddit, particularly product design and UX discussions. I've noticed a growing uncertainty among designers about their role as companies increasingly use AI to build products. Many worry that AI is taking their jobs, and given the number of talented creators being laid off across the industry, that concern isn't without merit.

But one thing has become clear to me: AI isn't a cheat.

AI output may look effortless, but this new workflow requires a surprising amount of reading, thinking, and judgment.

Once you have an idea or task, you ask AI to create a plan. But the work doesn't stop there. You have to read the plan, understand it, challenge it, and determine whether it actually aligns with the goal.

Then you build.

And you read again.

You need to understand what the AI is creating, why it made certain decisions, and how the pieces fit together. Without that understanding, you don't really know how your product was built or whether it is solving the problem you intended to solve.

AI can write the code.

You still have to know what the code should accomplish.

AI hasn't replaced experienced product designers. It has expanded what's possible.

Takeaway The Job Market

The market has changed significantly.

During the pandemic-era tech boom, UI/UX was heavily marketed as an accessible and lucrative path into technology. As interest rates rose and companies shifted from aggressive growth to greater efficiency, the industry began asking more of smaller teams.

The result is a growing demand for hybrid skill sets: designers who can understand and work with code, product managers who can contribute to design, and product professionals who can move fluidly between strategy, design, and technology.

At the same time, AI is transforming how products are built. Work that once required hours of manual effort, prototyping, UI production, and implementation can now be accelerated dramatically. The result is a shift toward smaller, more capable teams and people who can contribute across strategy, design, and technology.

That doesn't make product thinking, design judgment, or experience less valuable. It makes them more important.

I continue to interview with companies that are embracing AI and looking for new ways to build. As my skill set continues to expand, I'm excited to bring that experience to teams solving meaningful problems, combining strategic thinking, product craft, design, and emerging technology to create products that matter.