The house wasn’t built for you to live in. It was built for one person—and it worked for her. But walk through it now, and you feel the difference between a space designed for its owner and one designed for anyone else.

It feels like a carnival fun house. It’s actually a mansion in San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley. The Winchester Mystery House was constructed continuously for thirty-eight years by its owner, Sarah Winchester, with no master plan. Room after room added without anyone asking how people would move through them. Today it’s a tourist attraction. People pay to experience the disorientation.

She taught herself architecture from journals: an amateur with extraordinary resources, accountable to no one but herself. When a hallway came out wrong, she tore it out. When she wanted a room, she added it, whether or not it connected to anything. Staircases climb into ceilings. Doors open onto walls. The dysfunction didn’t matter because she was the only user.

Software teams build houses like this every day.

It happens when teams build in silos — each optimizing for its own roadmap, its own definition of done, its own launch. Each room works. The journey between them breaks.

The Missing Role

Over thirty years ago, Mitch Kapor named this problem. Kapor had founded Lotus and created Lotus 1-2-3, the spreadsheet that turned the PC into a business tool. He wasn't an outsider critiquing the industry; he was someone who'd built massively successful software saying we're doing this wrong.

His “Software Design Manifesto” argued that software needed a role like the architect, someone who asks how people will move through what you're building before construction begins.

I discovered the manifesto in Terry Winograd’s Bringing Design to Software, a title that made the argument before you opened the cover. It gave voice to a journey I was already on. I'd trained as an architect and shifted to software before the web went mainstream. The need was the same, the scale was global. Kapor was naming the role from inside the industry.

His reasoning was simple: when you design a house, you talk to an architect before you talk to an engineer. Not because engineers aren't essential, they are, but because the first questions aren't structural. They're about how people will live. Where should the kitchen be relative to the dining room? That emerges from understanding human purposes, not technical constraints. Software, Kapor argued, had skipped this step entirely.

“One of the main reasons most computer software is so abysmal is that it’s not designed at all, but merely engineered.” — Mitch Kapor

Two thousand years ago, the Roman architect Vitruvius argued that good buildings exhibit three qualities: firmitas, utilitas, venustas. They're built to last, they fit the need, and they reward the experience of being in them. Kapor saw the same test for software.

Three decades later, Kapor’s argument feels less like a manifesto and more like a timeless principle, one that becomes even more critical in an agentic world.

That’s why “how people move through what we’re building” isn’t a design preference. It’s the foundation.

A blueprint isn’t a spec. It’s a shared view of how people will move through what you’re building: how this feature connects to the next one, what happens after someone completes a task, where they go when something goes wrong. It keeps the team oriented to the person on the other end, not just the product taking shape.

And like any blueprint, it has to go deeper than the rooms: the permissions architecture, the data boundaries, the failure modes, the trust infrastructure that holds everything up.

The people inside the building are depending on that infrastructure whether they know it’s there or not. They don’t see the footings. They just trust the floor won’t give way.

We’ve seen too many times what happens when that layer is assumed rather than designed. Data breaches aren’t surface failures. They’re architectural ones — something that should have been in the blueprint wasn’t.

In an agentic world, where systems act on people’s behalf and have access to their accounts, files, and finances, the cost of getting it wrong isn’t inconvenience. It’s exposure.

What’s Changed

Design leadership has become essential to technology innovation. What Kapor described as a missing role is now embedded across the industry — in product teams, in engineering orgs, in how companies hire and build.

In 1996, when his manifesto reached print, roughly 36 million people were online. Today it's 5.5 billion, across 18 billion connected devices. The discipline didn't just evolve. The scale grew exponentially.

But the organizational challenge Kapor identified persists.

Teams still build in silos, and the rigor to connect learning across user journeys rarely survives the pressure to ship. Kapor noticed something I've seen throughout my career: when software fails people, they blame themselves. “People are embarrassed to say they find these devices hard to use,” he wrote. “They think the fault is their own."

If anything, the pressure has intensified. Jenny Wen, Head of Design for Claude at Anthropic, described the shift on Lenny's Podcast: planning and prototyping work that once consumed 60 to 70% of a designer's time has dropped to 30 to 40%. Vision horizons that once stretched years now compress to months. The blueprint work isn't being eliminated. It's being squeezed until it may not function as a blueprint at all.

But principles don’t self-implement. Sarah Winchester could afford to tear out a hallway when it came out wrong and try again. She had the budget to iterate forever. That’s a rare luxury.

There’s a brutal asymmetry here. A tiny handful of companies can afford to fix the house after it’s already built. Google is one of them. They’ve published this as explicit principle: “prioritize landings over launches”, because they’ve seen what happens when incentives reward shipping and the experience fractures. And they can bankroll the unsexy work: refactors, consistency, performance, accessibility, the connective tissue that makes the whole thing feel inevitable instead of accidental. Alphabet generated $73.3 billion in free cash flow in 2025 alone.

Most companies don’t have that luxury. Not the cash cushion, not the talent density, not the time. So if you skip blueprint work up front, you’re not being bold. You’re deferring the bill. You pay later in engineering thrash, support load, and the more dangerous cost: customers who hit friction in the journey and leave because it’s easier than fighting your organization’s seams.

The cost is measurable. Gartner found that 96% of customers who experience high-effort interactions become more disloyal, compared to just 9% for low-effort experiences. U.S. companies lose an estimated $168 billion annually to avoidable churn. Customers who rate their experience highest spend 140% more.

The Winchester problem isn’t just bad design. It’s the exit sign for customers.

Sometimes a napkin sketch is enough to align on how to serve people. The blueprint should match the stage. When you're testing a hypothesis, when learning requires something to be live, precision would be premature. And when you're building something that needs to hold together across teams and time, that shared understanding becomes your foundation.

I’ve seen what becomes possible when teams invest in that foundation. At Google, I led user research and design for unifying fragmented payments experiences into a single platform, what became Google Pay. At Meta, we brought fragmented business tools together into Meta Business Suite, unlocking product-market fit for millions of small businesses.

Different companies, same opportunity: the blueprint work turns inherited complexity into impact.

The pressure to copy makes this harder. When a competitor ships something and leadership asks “why don’t we have that?”, the blueprint work feels like a luxury.

Copying is a version of the same mistake. You import someone else’s room without understanding how it connects to your house, or whether their house had the same floor plan to begin with.

Amazon had a phrase that shaped how I think about this: “We don’t obsess over competitors. We obsess over customers.” Customer obsession forces the blueprint work. Competitor obsession lets you skip it.

The Agentic Shift

When building was slow, unclear intentions got corrected along the way. Friction created space for reflection. The blueprint could be fuzzy because construction would sharpen it.

That’s less true now. AI can generate entire products in hours. If your blueprint is unclear, you’ll get a well-constructed house where the rooms don’t connect, and you’ll get it fast.

There's a reasonable objection here: AI-powered products are non-deterministic. You can't mock every state. But that misidentifies what the blueprint is for. You're not predicting every output. You're deciding how agents relate to each other, what context they share, what happens when one fails. The less predictable the rooms, the more the hallways matter.

The promise of AI is speed. Ship faster, build faster, iterate faster. But speed is only valuable if you’re moving in the right direction. A blueprint doesn’t slow that down. It’s what makes the speed mean something. Without it, you’re not moving faster. You’re just getting to the wrong place sooner.

The data bears this out. An MIT study of 300 enterprise AI deployments found a consistent pattern: failure wasn't driven by model quality. It was driven by approach.

Teams layering AI onto existing workflows without redesigning the journey first. The technology worked. The house didn't. That's the blueprint problem, at billion-dollar scale.

Imagine agents acting on your behalf. One books your flight, another reserves a hotel, a third checks your calendar, each completing its task. But no one mapped how they'd work together. The flight lands at midnight, the hotel check-in closed at ten, and your calendar shows a breakfast meeting you'll never make.

The agents weren’t broken. They were just never introduced. Each did exactly what it was designed to do, in isolation.

But when orchestration works, it’s invisible in the best way. Think about what happens when you request an Uber. One system predicts demand across the city, another sets pricing based on supply, a third matches you with a driver weighing distance, traffic, direction, and driver preferences, and a fourth optimizes the route in real time. Each component feeds data to the others, creating feedback loops that improve with every ride. Fifteen million trips a day, matched in milliseconds. You don’t see any of this. You just see a car arrive. Google Photos works the same way — you don’t ask it to remember your best moments; it just does. That’s what happens when the rooms line up.

That’s what good orchestration looks like: agents working in the background while you get where you’re going. The blueprint came first. And at the center of that blueprint is a question that turns out to be surprisingly hard to engineer: what does this person actually want? Amazon calls it intent detection, the orchestration layer’s ability to correctly read a user’s goal before routing to the right agent. When it works, the experience feels seamless. When it fails, the cascade is immediate: wrong agent, wrong response, compounding frustration. Getting that question right is now a core engineering challenge, not a design afterthought.

Agentic customer support is the counterexample. You start hopeful, but quickly you’re shuttled between agents: “order details,” “returns,” “tech help.” None remember you. Each door leads to a new room, and you’re not sure there’s an exit. You end up in a closet, no context, no way out, and drop the chat. Next time, you’ll shop somewhere else.

Most production failures in agentic systems aren't model failures. They're architecture failures, the connections between agents, not the agents themselves. Rooms again.

Well-designed agent systems have an orchestration layer, something that holds the user’s goal and coordinates the sub-tasks. But that layer doesn’t design itself. Someone has to map the dependencies, define the handoffs, decide what context each agent needs from the others. Service designers call this the backstage. In an agentic world, most of the experience is backstage. As one 2026 design analysis put it: we’re no longer designing screens for users, we’re designing intelligence that acts for them. The interface has moved backstage. So has the blueprint work.

Kapor understood this when the medium was screens. The principle holds as the medium shifts to agents. Teams who bring that rigor to orchestration, who design the backstage as intentionally as they once designed the interface, will build experiences people actually want to live in.

The craft isn’t disappearing. It’s shifting from construction to intention.

The tools will keep getting faster, and some interfaces may fade. What won’t compress is the human work of understanding: observing behavior, mapping journeys, asking how people actually move through their lives. There’s no shortcut to the conversation where someone shows you what they really need, as opposed to what you assumed they wanted.

That’s the blueprint work. As building accelerates, the cost of skipping it doesn’t disappear. It compounds.

The Cascade

Kapor’s question, do we have shared understanding of how people will move through what we’re building, was written for a conference in 1990. It’s still the right question.

Enforcing it is the real work. When teams are rewarded for shipping features, asking how people move through the whole experience feels like friction. It’s not. It’s the blueprint. Without it, you’re not designing like an architect. You’re just adding rooms.

Brilliant work is being done across the industry by people asking that same question. And there are still broken experiences, teams adding room after room without stepping back to see the whole.

The Winchester House still stands. Stairs to nowhere, doors to walls. It worked for the woman who built it. Today it’s a tourist attraction. People pay to experience the disorientation, to wander through something that was never designed with them in mind.

Most of us are building for people we’ll never meet. That’s the opportunity: to build somewhere they want to live.

Mitch Kapor’s “A Software Design Manifesto” was delivered at Esther Dyson’s PC Forum in 1990. It appeared as the opening chapter of Terry Winograd’s Bringing Design to Software (Addison-Wesley, 1996).

Designing Impact is a series by Scott Hines about work that lasts — why some ideas and innovations continue to shape the world long after the people who created them have moved on, and what it takes to build that way.

In my work on Designing Impact, I’ve been exploring what it takes to create something that lasts beyond you—work that others can own and carry forward. MIL is a case study. The local farmers and foragers now have markets that sustain their families. The techniques being documented are passing to the next generation. Impact that continues without the people who started it.

This visual companion is a way to celebrate their intention—by sharing the inspiring beauty and thoughtfulness of their craft.

The Sacred Valley of the Incas—heart of an empire that once stretched from Colombia to Chile. MIL sits at the edge of Moray, an Inca archaeological site on the plateau above. A restaurant designed to continue what the Incas started.

Concentric circular terraces carved into the earth five hundred years ago. An agricultural research station. The temperature difference between top and bottom reaches 27°F, creating twenty distinct microclimates to test which crops would thrive at different altitudes.

The road from Cusco climbs through high meadows for ninety minutes. Past shepherds and their flocks, the air thinning with each mile.

Adobe walls the color of the surrounding earth. Thatched roofs. MIL looks less like a restaurant and more like a geological formation

Quiet. Contemplative. An endangered queñua tree grows in the central courtyard. Pressed botanicals line the walls.

Inside MIL, the work of Mater Iniciativa — the research lab led by Malena Martínez — is displayed as art: pressed botanicals and preserved ingredients lining the shelves, a quiet celebration of the land this kitchen cooks from.

The meal begins with objects on the table. A hand-stitched menu cover. A woven napkin. A carved stone bowl. Everything made from materials found within miles of where you sit.

The first card hints at what’s coming: chuño, corn, uchucuta sauce, oxalis. “A potato, for today, for tomorrow, for the year.”

Before the courses begin, small bites arrive. Each plate is handmade ceramic, each garnish foraged from the surrounding hills.

The opening spread. Five vessels, five preparations, five ways of understanding what grows at this altitude.

Bread served on stone. The pink comes from local produce—nothing here traveled far.

Texture and color. The wafer shatters; the stems beneath are tender. Contrast built into every bite.

The philosophy, stated plainly: “The circular terraces have determined that our way of connecting with the environment is strictly vertical.”

At over 3,800 meters, where almost nothing seems to resist, it is necessary to pay attention to everything that does exist.

Duck from the high plateau, dressed with flowers that grow at the same altitude. The plate’s circular indent echoes the terraces outside.

Cushuro: dark spheres from high-altitude lakes. Rich in protein, gathered by women and children when it rains. An ingredient most of the world has never seen.

Greens and flowers in a speckled black bowl. The yellow petals aren’t decoration—they’re food.

Creamy, cool, scattered with petals. The green pools are herb oil made from plants growing just outside.

Textures layered: silky cream, tender leaves, the pop of grain. Each component from a different part of the ecosystem.

“An extreme place that has been known to accommodate hundreds of cultivars that take root strongly in the earth, and cactus fruits of vibrant colors that break up the monochromatic landscape.”

Black quinoa cooked until tender. The pink petals come from flowers that bloom briefly at this altitude.

Multiple quinoa varieties in one dish—pink, gold, white, black. Each grown in the valleys nearby.

The raw ingredients, displayed. Barley, quinoa, kiwicha. Grains that have sustained Andean communities for millennia.

Not every element is edible. Some are meant to be seen—to show what grows here, thorns and all.

The final preparation in this course. Warmth on top, grain beneath, petals throughout.

An image of what’s coming: native corn varieties, red and black, still in their husks.

“During harvest months, the Valley offers a spectacle of different corns. For hours men and women dedicate themselves to removing the corn husks, stacking them into mountains of colors.”

Thirteen varieties, each in its own charred cup. This is what diversity looks like when it hasn’t been bred out.

Bright green, studded with toasted corn. The swirled bowl is as striking as what it holds.

Fresh cheese, grilled and nestled in husks. Simple. The corn that made the dish also presents it.

Purple, red, yellow. Each color from a different variety, each variety with its own flavor.

“Markhu is a very warm plant, to be used with care. If evil is cold, markhu ‘restores us.’”

Peru has more than 4,000 native potato varieties. Here, three sit in volcanic rock, looking like they were just unearthed.

Yellow, purple, green, striped. Colors you won’t find in any supermarket. These are the ancestors of every potato you’ve eaten.

Vivid green, surrounded by living plants. The succulents around the bowl grow wild on the hillsides.

“A magical high forest, with ancient trees, with trunks that seem to flake off, the queñuales.”

Pork from the forest course, scattered with petals. The deep purple comes from reduction, not dye.

Cornbread resting on a bed of tarwi—an Andean lupin bean, high in protein. The raw ingredient becomes the presentation.

The same beans, now cooked in broth with rocoto pepper. A complete dish from a single legume.

“When you look towards the peaks of the mountain gods (Apus) from where we are, you can’t help but imagine yourself in that place, at a temperature below zero.”

The transition to sweet. Smooth cream, scattered with petals that look almost frozen themselves.

Muña herb, tuber ashes, cream. The flavors of the frozen peaks, translated into dessert.

The front side of the sweet huatia card is a photo of the rugged, unforgiving landscape that produces delightful food at the hands of the talented producers in Peru.

“A huatia is a pause after a day of hard work in the fields. Sweet, to reward us for being. Here and now.”

The final course arrives in pieces: a bowl, a crisp, a cup, a spoon. Cacao, mullaska, malva. Each meant to be eaten slowly.

The meal ends here. A golden infusion, two small flowers floating. Quiet. Contemplative.

Designing Impact explores what it takes to create impact that cascades beyond the people who started it. Read the full article: Centuries in Every Course: Designing Impact That Lasts

I found one of those lessons in the Peruvian Andes. A restaurant 11,500 feet above sea level, built from the same earth as the hillside, serving ingredients grown within sight of the kitchen.

The road from Cusco climbs through high meadows for about ninety minutes. When you finally arrive, it doesn't look like a restaurant. It looks like the hillside grew a building. Adobe walls the color of the surrounding earth. Thatched roofs. A metal logo, MIL, embedded in the chimney, the only sign you've found the right place.

The building was austere, almost severe against the landscape. But that simplicity was deliberate. When the first dishes arrived, the contrast between those spare walls and the care on each plate was immediate. Simple elegance rooted in deep traditions.

I'd traveled to Peru for a five-day trek through the Andes, a way to challenge myself with something unfamiliar before starting a new chapter. The meal turned out to be the beginning.

At 11,500 feet, your lungs notice the altitude before your eyes adjust. The restaurant sits on a plateau next to Moray, an archaeological site where the Incas carved concentric circular terraces into the earth. Essentially an ancient agricultural research station. Each level creates its own microclimate, letting farmers test how crops performed across different temperature gradients. Five hundred years before anyone called it science, the Incas were running controlled experiments.

The Sacred Valley once formed the heart of an empire stretching from Colombia to Chile. MIL sits at the edge of what they built: a restaurant designed to continue what the Incas started.

MIL exists because of those terraces. The rule is simple: only ingredients from this altitude, this place, these communities. Everything else follows.

MIL is a family operation. Virgilio Martínez, the chef whose Lima restaurant Central was named the world's best by the World's 50 Best Restaurants in 2023, conceived it with his wife Pía León. But the intellectual architecture comes from Virgilio's sister, Malena Martínez, a physician who became research director of Mater Iniciativa.

Mater is what makes all of it possible. The mission is preservation: documenting Peru's endemic species, understanding indigenous food systems, building partnerships with local communities. The team includes anthropologists, biologists, and ethnobotanists alongside cooks.

“There is a whole ecosystem linked to every produce,” Malena has explained, “and everything has a function in that system.”

The concern is real: every time Mater documents an ingredient, they risk creating demand that the ecosystem can’t sustain. So they move carefully, working with communities to understand what increased interest might mean for the people who’ve harvested these ingredients for generations.

Virgilio puts it simply: "It's not about doing your recipes, being creative and seeing yourself as 'I create this.' It's not about creation... We have to create more empathy in our dishes. Let's take that force and empower our farmers, our producers, to make greater things.”

The goal isn’t to create something new. It’s to participate in something that continues.

Paul Rand, the legendary graphic designer, once said: “Don’t try to be original. Just try to be good.”

I kept thinking about that line as the courses arrived. MIL isn't chasing novelty. It's trying to honor something old with enough clarity that it is fresh. That's harder than invention. You have to understand what exists deeply enough to know what to strip away.

The space shows you this. Quiet. Contemplative. Pressed botanicals on the walls, labeled in handwriting. Glass jars holding specimens. Educational displays that teach you about the ecosystem before you eat from it. Nothing competes for your attention. Everything serves the same purpose.

The menu works the same way. Hand-stitched cover. Cards printed on textured paper. Eight courses, each named for an ecosystem and an altitude. The design is spare. What sits underneath it is not.

Preservation

chuño · corn · uchucuta sauce · oxalis

The meal opens with time.

The card reads: “The potato harvest is followed by its selection: those that are consumed immediately, those that are stored for the days to come and those that are converted into chuño can be food for the next few years. We take care of products, which determine in their own ecosystem, the subsistence of many other elements, but also techniques that transform. A potato, for today, for tomorrow, for the year.”

Three temporal horizons in a single ingredient.

Chuño is freeze-dried potato, a preservation technique developed in the Andes thousands of years ago. You leave potatoes out in the freezing mountain nights, press out the moisture, then dry them in the sun. The result lasts for years.

The restaurant didn't invent this system. It joins it.

Altitudes

the framing

The next card states the constraint explicitly: “The circular terraces have determined that our way of connecting with the environment is strictly vertical, and always thinking about the unevenness of the Andes and the hundreds of cultivars that were achieved.”

Not horizontal. Not global. Vertical. Everything that follows emerges from that single decision.

“The products tell the stories of people, of this magical place, and of a challenging geography to which they have adapted. Our intention: engage in this ecosystem. And be an addition to the entire context of this wonderful cultural space.”

Engage, not dominate. An addition, not a replacement.

Altiplano

cabuya · pato · kañiwa · cushuro

The card reads: “At over 3,800 meters high, on flat land, where almost nothing seems to resist, it is necessary to pay detailed attention of everything that does exist. See the tiny leaves peeking out from ground level, or plants that served to fence land and later exploited for its nectar. Then, the plants of Andean grains, with long panicles looking towards the sky, and bodies of water as life systems that house hundreds of other species to admire.”

One element stopped me. Cushuro. Dark spheres in a stone bowl, glistening. A cyanobacteria that grows in high-altitude freshwater lakes. I'd never heard of it. I have never seen anything like it.

The flavor, the texture, the strangeness of finding it here on a plate. Something precious, harvested from lakes above 13,000 feet, rich in protein and iron. A hedge against malnutrition in communities where food security depends on altitude and weather. When it rains, women and children from Andean villages gather cushuro from the lakes. Malena Martínez describes it simply: "It's like a game. This has happened for ages."

Something that has sustained communities for centuries, invisible to most of the world. And here it was on a plate in front of me. The restaurant didn't invent cushuro. It built the conditions for someone like me to discover it, and for the communities who harvest it to benefit from that discovery.

Extreme Altitude

alpaca · black quinoa · multigrains · airampo fruit

The card reads: “There, where each step is more demanding. High, where we arrived unintentionally, following yet another route, guided by a character, which leads us to an extension of his land. An extreme place that has been known to accommodate hundreds of cultivars that take root strongly in the earth, and cactus fruits of vibrant colors that break up the monochromatic landscape.”

Above 13,000 feet, where each step costs you, the land produces the most variety. Hundreds of cultivars adapted to conditions that would seem to permit nothing. Constraint breeds diversity.

One dish made it visible. Multiple varieties of quinoa, each a different color, each adapted to a slightly different altitude or soil condition, gathered into one stone bowl. Constraint didn't limit what grew here. It multiplied it.

We tend to assume that opening up possibilities leads to better outcomes. But the opposite is often true. The tighter the boundary, the more creative you have to get.

Corn Diversity

piscoronto · chullpi corn · urubamba corn · fresh cheese

The card reads: “During harvest months, towards the first half of the year, the Valley offers a spectacle of different corns. For hours men and women dedicate themselves to removing the corn husks, stacking them into mountains of colors that dress their fields. As Apus. Gods of diversity.”

Twelve varieties of corn, each in its own hand-formed vessel. No two the same color, size, or shape. All from the same narrow corridor of land. This isn't agricultural output. It's thousands of harvests made visible, each one a communal act of selection and care.

The harvest isn't efficient in a modern sense. It's slow, collective, intergenerational, closer to ritual than production. And from that process emerges something no industrial operation could replicate: corn varieties developed over centuries for this place, this altitude, these communities.

A bright green broth, toasted kernels scattered across the surface. One of several corn dishes that moved through the meal, each from a different variety, each with its own texture and depth. The diversity that looked so striking in those raw vessels became something quieter on the plate. Subtler. But unmistakably varied.

What's on the plate is more than ingredients. It's people, place, traditions, time.

Central Andes

potatoes · stems · chaco clay · markhu leaves

The card reads: “Markhu is a very warm plant, to be used with care. Useful plants in the Andes are classified as warm or cool, females or males, white or black, and fulfill different functions according to their category, which determine their ability to restore balance. If evil is cold, markhu ‘restores us.’”

A taxonomy built on balance, not just utility. Warm and cool. Male and female. The indigenous communities around Moray developed classification systems for plants that consider properties Western science doesn’t measure.

Peru cultivates over 4,000 varieties of potatoes and edible tubers. At MIL, they arrive at the table looking like they've just been pulled from the ground, which, in a sense, they have. The presentation doesn't say "look how creative we are." It says "look what was here all along.”

This is craft without a single author. The work of generations, accumulated through attention, passed down through practice. What arrives at the table isn't a chef's invention. It's evidence of a design process so slow and distributed that we barely recognize it as design at all.

Andean Forest

tarwi · pork · kallampa mushroom · rocoto pepper

The card reads: “A magical high forest, with ancient trees, with trunks that seem to flake off, the queñuales, home of cocoons and chachacomos. Mushrooms that occur every rainy or very humid days, and lupinus flowers, tarwi, appear to shade both green and ocher with purple.”

Purple pork in dark sauce, scattered with petals. You see the forest floor before you taste it. Nothing exists in isolation. The mushrooms appear because of the rain. The lupinus flowers shade the forest floor. The dish arrives as a system, not a collection of ingredients.

Frozen Cordillera

qolle · muña · tuber ashes

The card reads: “When you look towards the peaks of the mountain gods (Apus) from where we are, you can’t help but imagine yourself in that place, at a temperature below zero, in which one and several decided to settle, despite its challenges. Higher than 11,500 ft (3,500 meters), accompanied by wilderness that resists and what ancestors tamed with extreme skill.”

The people who first settled at these altitudes were solving problems we can barely imagine. Less than 0.2% of humanity lives this high.

The knowledge held in their techniques (how to preserve food, which plants restore balance, when to harvest cushuro) represents centuries of experimentation by communities the rest of the world barely knows exist.

MIL doesn't claim credit for this work. It builds the conditions for it to continue.

Sweet Huatia

mullaska · cacao · malva

The final course arrives with the simplest card of all: “A huatia is a pause after a day of hard work in the fields. The most rewarding work, to collect what has been waited for months and a year. A celebration, conscious and consistent effort. Sweet, to reward us for being. Here and now.”

The meal ended. Sitting in the quiet, the through line was clear: attention to people, craft aligned with community, trust earned over centuries.

I sat with that for a while. The quiet of the room. The view of the terraces through the window. The sense that I’d just experienced something that couldn’t be extracted from this place and reassembled somewhere else.

Twenty-four dishes over eight courses, each one crafted with the same attention, all of it at 11,500 feet, from ingredients grown within sight of the kitchen.

In my work, understanding customers means surveys, interviews, data, testing concepts. But the research here was different. It was about landscape and ritual and heritage. About ingredients that have sustained communities for centuries. And they'd found a way to bring all of that to the table in a form that was delicious, yes, but also moving. Educational. They honored knowledge rather than just presenting it.

The next morning, I started hiking. Five days through the Andes, ending at Machu Picchu. But the real exploration had started the night before. MIL had shifted something. I was paying closer attention. Curious about what I didn't know. The landscape had been teaching people for centuries. I was just the newest student.

Most people won't make it to MIL. It's a long drive from Cusco, in a landscape that demands your attention just to breathe. But that's part of why I wanted to write about it, to share what I found there, and what it taught me.

The meal taught restraint. Honoring what exists rather than chasing what's new. Designing for a place so deeply that the design and the place become inseparable.

The local farmers and foragers now have a market for ingredients that sustains their families. The techniques being documented are passing to the next generation. The communities around Moray have an economic stake in preserving knowledge that might otherwise fade. The impact spreads in ways the restaurant can't predict or control.

Most of us aren’t starting from zero. We inherit systems, traditions, knowledge that others built. The question isn’t whether we can create something original. It’s whether we can honor what we’ve received well enough that others carry it forward.

A restaurant designed to continue what the Incas started. The traditions don’t belong to MIL. But they reach further because MIL exists.

That's the pattern this series explores: how impact cascades beyond the people who started it.

Welcome to Designing Impact, a series from Scott Hines, who has led design at Amazon, Google, Meta, PayPal, SoFi, and startups building products and teams whose work continues to reach billions of people.

I attended TEDAI 2025 to learn how leading researchers are thinking boldly about the future, and what that means for designing AI systems that serve people.

The past three years brought incredible advances in generative AI. The next phase requires equal innovation in ensuring these systems remain human-centric. Across two days and 25+ speakers, I synthesized the sessions into five themes for designers, content designers, and design leaders: human-centric AI design, balancing short-term needs with long-term visioning, infrastructure realities, leadership transformation, and the workforce challenge.

1. Human-Centric AI Design

Eric Zelikman (formerly at xAI, co-author of the Quiet-STaR paper) opened with a challenge that set the tone for everything that followed: Current AI is optimized for task completion, not understanding user intent.

He explained that when models are trained purely on correctness — did they get the answer right? — they become what he calls “sycophantic.” They try to please without understanding context or goals. They’re obedient servants, not intelligent partners.

The problem is fundamental to how we’re building these systems. We optimize heavily for immediate task success: Did the AI book the right hotel? Did it write the email? Did it generate the code? These are valuable outcomes. But we’re underinvesting in whether the AI understands why the user wanted those things — using memory and context to serve their broader goals, not just complete isolated tasks efficiently.

John Thickstun (Cornell professor, Chief Scientist at San Patreon) reinforced this from a different angle. His research on generative music models showed that people don’t want fully autonomous systems — they want collaborative tools they can control and direct. His “anticipatory music transformer” was designed for interactive composition, not automated composition.

The principle: Controllability and collaboration beat automation when humans want to maintain agency over meaningful work.

For designers, this means enhancing task completion with context and agency. Build AI that executes efficiently and asks clarifying questions, understands context, and preserves human control over creative decisions.

What this means for your work:

• Design AI interactions that gather context before executing

• Build in “why” questions: Why are you doing this? What’s your goal?

• Create transparency about what the AI understands vs. what it’s inferring

• Design for iteration and refinement, not just one-shot task completion

2. Balance Short-Term Needs with Long-Term Visioning

Llion Jones (CTO and co-founder of Sakana AI, co-author of the original Transformers paper) raised an important tension: Industry pressure for incremental gains can crowd out the exploration that leads to breakthroughs.

Jones shared a historical example: When RNNs were the dominant architecture, the field focused on optimization — making them faster, more efficient, more scalable. Then Transformers arrived and opened up entirely new capabilities that optimization alone couldn’t reach.

His observation: We’re seeing similar patterns with Transformers now. Most efforts focus on making them bigger, faster, cheaper — all valuable work. But what if the next architectural innovation requires exploring approaches that look inefficient by current metrics?

He framed this as the “explore vs. exploit” tension. Competitive pressure naturally drives toward exploitation — optimizing what’s proven to work. Breakthroughs come from exploration — investigating approaches that might not pan out but could unlock new capabilities. Both matter, but the balance often tilts heavily toward the former.

Rafael Rafailov (Stanford Ph.D. student, researcher at Thinking Machines) offered a concrete example: meta-learning. Current AI systems excel at specific tasks but can’t easily adapt to new ones without retraining. Humans naturally learn how to learn — we apply patterns from past learning to new domains. Meta-learning research explores whether AI can develop similar capabilities.

The challenge: Meta-learning appears less efficient than task-specific optimization in the short term. It requires more compute, more time, more experimentation. In competitive environments focused on shipping, it’s difficult to justify the investment.

The tension isn’t that optimization is bad — it’s essential for turning research into reliable products. The question is whether organizations create enough space for exploratory work alongside optimization efforts.

For design leaders:

• Assess your team’s time allocation: What balance exists between optimization and exploration?

• Consider protecting dedicated time for exploratory work without immediate ROI requirements

• Value investigation of new approaches, even when current solutions are working well

• Ask: What work wouldn’t happen without us? If multiple teams are solving the same problem, consider exploring different territory

3. Infrastructure and Global Implications

Kai-Fu Lee (who led AI at Apple, Microsoft, and Google China) offered a stark prediction: 2026 will be the most disruptive year yet as AI agents become the fundamental unit of work.

His reasoning: AI inference costs are dropping 10x per year. When agent-based workflows become economically viable at scale, work will fundamentally reorganize around AI agents as the primary doers, with humans as directors and decision-makers.

Janet Egan from the Center for a New American Security grounded this vision in geopolitical reality: Who controls AI data centers will significantly influence how AI develops globally.

She pointed out that computing power is the fundamental resource that unlocks AI potential — at development, training, deployment, and improvement stages. The geographic distribution of data centers, the energy infrastructure that powers them, and the regulatory frameworks that govern them all shape whose values get encoded into AI systems.

Rodrigo Liang (CEO of SambaNova) brought this down to practical constraints. He described the reality of chip design: 2–3 years to design an AI chip, 6–9 months to fabricate prototypes, another 9–12 months for testing and verification. A single bug can cost $100 million and a year of time.

The implication: Infrastructure decisions made today will constrain what’s possible 3–4 years from now. Design choices compound with infrastructure choices to shape long-term outcomes.

Why designers should care:

• Infrastructure determines access — who can build AI-powered products

• Energy and compute costs shape what interactions are economically viable

• Data center locations influence latency and user experience globally

• Regulatory frameworks in different regions constrain design choices

4. Leadership in the Age of AI Automation

May Habib (CEO of Writer) highlighted interesting challenges for how leadership must evolve as AI capabilities scale. When AI can significantly multiply output, what is the impact and what does effective leadership look like?

Jeremiah Owyang (General Partner at Blitzscaling Ventures, organizer of the Llama Lounge AI Startup Event Series) shared data from San Francisco startups that illustrates how AI is amplifying revenue effectiveness across different levels of AI adoption:

• AI Followers/AI Forward: ~$240K revenue per employee

• AI First companies: ~$500K revenue per employee (2x)

• AI Native startups: ~$2.2M revenue per employee (~10x)

That 10x gap between AI Followers and AI Native startups isn’t primarily about having better AI tools — many companies have access to similar technology. It’s about organizational architecture built for AI from day one versus retrofitting AI into existing complexity. When execution capacity expands dramatically, leadership emphasis shifts from managing complexity to architecting simplicity.

Habib identified three leadership shifts for this new environment:

1. Become an architect of radical simplicity — Habib argued that organizational complexity — approval cycles, coordination overhead, systems requiring seventeen browser tabs — made sense when human execution was expensive. But when AI can compress what took 7 months into 7 days, that complexity becomes the constraint. The leadership challenge is distinguishing necessary structure from accumulated bureaucratic friction, then systematically removing the latter.

2. Become a champion of human potential — When AI handles execution, humans focus on judgment, strategy, and creativity. Habib acknowledged the difficulty: people resist when their self-worth is tied to task completion. The leadership response is helping teams reframe their value from executing work to orchestrating systems, and creating roles that are more strategic and creative than what’s being replaced.

3. Become a hunter of greenfield opportunity — Habib distinguished between optimization — making processes more efficient — and transformation — building products or services that weren’t previously feasible. When execution constraints are removed, the question shifts from “how do we do this better?” to “what becomes possible now?”The Workforce Challenge: Developing AI Management Skills at Scale

Habib’s observation about expanded execution capacity raises a practical challenge: If AI agents can multiply individual output, more people take on management-like responsibilities — directing work, evaluating quality, providing feedback.

Aparna Chennapragada (Microsoft’s Chief Product Officer) articulated this during Day 2 panels: When your role shifts from “doing the work” to “directing agents that do the work,” you need management skills many people haven’t developed yet.

Consider the core capabilities of effective management:

• Setting clear goals and expectations

• Providing context and constraints

• Giving constructive feedback and iterating

• Course-correcting when things go off track

• Building trust through consistency

These skills typically develop through experience managing people. Now organizations need to help employees develop them for managing AI systems — often while the technology capabilities themselves evolve monthly.

Anthony Abbatiello (PwC’s Partner and Future of Work Leader) noted that 77% of companies are stuck in “pilot purgatory” — they can’t scale AI from experimental projects to production deployment. The technical barriers are real, but the people and organizational barriers are often more significant.

As Robin Braun from Hewlett Packard Enterprise put it: “Culture eats AI strategy for breakfast.”

What this means for design leaders: Teams need to develop what might be called “AI management fundamentals”:

• Alignment skills — Translating ambiguous business goals into specific, verifiable AI instructions

• Coaching capability — Iterating on AI outputs through feedback and refinement

• Change management — Adapting workflows as AI capabilities evolve

• Judgment frameworks — Knowing when to trust AI output versus when deeper verification is required

This isn’t about becoming prompt engineering experts. It’s about applying interpersonal and strategic management skills to working with intelligent systems — skills many organizations already value but now need to develop more broadly across teams.

Organizations that invest in developing these capabilities early will likely have advantages over those treating AI adoption purely as a technical deployment.

5. Democratizing Storytelling and Creative Expression

Prem Akkaraju (CEO of Stability AI, previously Oscar-winning VFX leader) focused on how AI is fundamentally reinventing storytelling — which he called “the greatest human invention in history.”

His vision centers on democratization: AI can enable everyone to tell their own stories, not just those with access to studio resources or technical expertise. Breakthrough creative work may come from individuals anywhere, as AI provides capabilities that were previously available only to well-funded organizations.

The shift he described: AI is closing the gap between imagination and creation. The tools that once required teams of specialists — visual effects, animation, music composition, video production — are becoming accessible to individual storytellers. This isn’t about replacing human creativity; it’s about removing the technical and resource barriers that prevented people from expressing their creative vision.

The next evolution: Moving from 2D screen-based interfaces to 3D spatial intelligence. AI systems that understand and operate in three-dimensional space rather than just processing text and images.

For product designers, this suggests focusing on how we help people communicate ideas effectively and bring their vision to life. The challenge isn’t just building better interfaces — it’s designing tools that help users tell their story clearly, whether they’re explaining a business strategy, presenting data insights, or communicating a creative concept. AI can handle technical complexity, but the design challenge is ensuring people can express what they mean and be understood.

Effective communication remains the final frontier.

What This Means Monday Morning

The conference theme was boldness, but the practical message was more specific: Being willing to question established approaches and rebuild from first principles when appropriate.

Three actions to take:

1. Audit your AI interaction design

• Does your AI just execute tasks or does it gather context first?

• Do you design for iteration and refinement or one-shot completion?

• Are you preserving human agency in meaningful creative work?

2. Create protected exploration time

• How much of your team’s capacity goes to optimization vs. exploration?

• What research wouldn’t happen if you didn’t do it?

• Where are you at risk of missing architectural shifts by over-optimizing current approaches?

3. Invest in AI management capability

• Who on your team has actual management experience?

• How are you teaching alignment, coaching, and judgment skills?

• Are you measuring effective AI use or just deployment?

Three questions to keep asking:

1. Are we building AI that executes tasks or AI that understands user goals?

2. Which organizational processes add genuine value versus accumulated friction?

3. What work becomes possible if execution constraints are removed?

The companies that succeed won’t just deploy AI faster. They’ll develop workforces that can manage AI effectively — at every level of the organization.

Scott Hines is Head of Design for Onshore Trading & Payments at OKX, focusing on AI-powered experience design for regulated crypto markets. He previously led design teams at Google, Meta, Amazon, SoFi, and PayPal.

Breakthroughs begin when people see a peak others consider impossible, transforming entropy into action.

After over two decades leading design teams and innovation at companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, PayPal, SoFi, and early-stage startups, I took a purposeful pause to reflect, research, and set my sights on new peaks — starting with summiting Mount Whitney in a day.

My journey to Mount Whitney became a design challenge that brought together planning, training, continuous learning, and determination in service of a broader purpose.

At 14,505 feet, Mount Whitney stands as the highest peak in the contiguous United States. Climbing Whitney isn’t just a hike — it’s a beauty and beast of a 22-mile endurance adventure with 6,600 feet of elevation gain on knife-edge granite trails where thin air demands both scanning the horizon for conditions and precision in every movement.

What I didn’t expect was how the journey — from initial planning through months of preparation to the final ascent — would parallel design leadership: setting vision, teamwork, navigating ambiguity, solving hard problems, and finding flow when the trail disappears.

As Mike Davidson, VP of Design for Microsoft AI, puts it: “The air can be thin at times for a designer, but that’s how we train our minds and bodies to be resilient, creative, and unorthodox.”

Here are five insights that Mount Whitney reinforced — apparently I can’t climb a mountain without turning it into a design opportunity. These insights are forged by granite and pixels, steep switchbacks and user research, summits and product launches.

1. Design a North Star to Light Your Path

“Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.” — Charles Eames

At Whitney Portal in the darkness at 1:30am, my headlamp barely illuminated the trail to the summit ahead. But I wasn’t relying on what I could see — I was following a North Star I had crafted.

Setting my sights on Mount Whitney mirrored how I’ve set direction throughout my career. Whether launching new ventures or aligning design teams, I’ve learned that effective North Stars don’t emerge naturally — they require intentional design through clear vision and unwavering principles.

My vision for Mount Whitney was straightforward: approach this challenge as part of lifelong discovery, where difficulty becomes a path to greater wisdom and resilience. This wasn’t about conquering a peak — it was about embracing growth through challenge and inspiring others to pursue their own transformative journeys.

The principles followed naturally: safety first, leave no trace, support the team, focus on learning over ego, and strive to be present in each moment. These weren’t aspirational concepts but practical boundaries that would guide decisions and action, much like the foundational values that anchor successful companies and design organizations.

Jim Collins, author of “Good to Great,” discovered that enduring companies master a similar process — they deliberately define a bold future vision alongside unchanging core ideology. Having applied Collins’ framework when building teams, setting organizational culture, and creating new products, I understood that the intersection of these elements creates purpose that sustains performance through difficulty.

This adaptive visioning approach — maintaining clear long-term direction while scanning the horizon for changing conditions — proves essential when leading organizations through market volatility and technological disruption.

Research consistently demonstrates the power of purpose-driven organizations: research published in the Harvard Business Review shows that more than 90% of companies with a well-defined purpose deliver growth and profits at or above industry average, while Gallup research reveals that purpose-driven organizations attract both talent and customers more effectively. But purpose must be designed, not discovered. The process of defining clear vision and principles creates the clarity that makes difficulty meaningful — whether you’re shipping products or summiting peaks.

The elements of my Whitney journey were arranged around my purpose. Every constraint became a creative challenge because I had a North Star that gave obstacles both meaning and direction.

But having a North Star only gets you started. The real test comes when the trail disappears and you must navigate forward with incomplete information.

2. Blaze Trails Through Ambiguity

“Don’t be afraid to expand yourself, to step out of your comfort zone. That is where the joy and adventure lie.” — Herbie Hancock

Whitney reflects a key innovation challenge: venturing beyond comfort zones with incomplete information and transforming uncertainty into competitive advantage. Despite well-marked trails, the journey to the summit demands constant adaptation to risks no planning can eliminate.

When I’ve launched new ventures or created breakthrough approaches, the early stages felt similar — moving forward with conviction despite limited visibility, knowing that healthy skepticism from others often sharpens the vision. Innovation leaders must develop comfort with ambiguity and the temporary isolation that comes from pursuing possibilities that others don’t yet see, while remaining prepared to adapt in dynamic, fast-moving businesses.

Whitney’s challenges echo what often makes innovation demanding, highlighting the courage it takes to step into unfamiliar territory. While technical problems are more tractable with defined solutions, it is the adaptive challenges that require learning and behavioral change.

Here are three specific challenges that reflect this:

The Endurance Challenge: Hiking over 22 miles with nearly 7,000 feet of climbing at altitude with 25-pound packs creates unique demands. My background competing in sports like soccer, football and basketball built fast-twitch fibers optimized for explosive power, but endurance requires slow-twitch adaptations for what endurance athletes call ‘time on feet’ — where success is measured in hours of sustained effort rather than bursts of speed, adaptations that take months to develop.

Similarly, design leadership builds different muscle memory on top of execution expertise — simultaneously exercising big-picture thinking and detail-oriented craft, long-term strategy and immediate solutions. The adaptive behavior required is learning to maintain steady, consistent effort over extended periods rather than trying to sustain maximum intensity continuously.

The Oxygen Cliff: At 14,505 feet, partial pressure of oxygen is approximately 40% lower than sea level due to decreased barometric pressure — creating what’s called “hypobaric hypoxia.” It’s like breathing through a straw. Acute Mountain Sickness compounds this challenge, typically occurring above 8,000 feet and affecting about 20% of people who rapidly ascend to this altitude (40% above 10,000 feet). This cognitive impairment can cause life-threatening disorientation when decision-making becomes critical on narrow trails with thousand-foot drops.

Design leaders often work in similarly demanding environments: resource constraints, unclear user needs, disruptive technologies, and shifting market conditions that demand efficient thinking under pressure. The adaptive behavior is developing efficient decision-making frameworks that preserve good judgment under pressure.

The Fear Factor: Whitney’s 99 switchbacks and narrow trails feature thousand-foot drop-offs that can trigger intense fear responses. This physiological fear response — increased heart rate, tunnel vision, compromised judgment — creates a technical challenge that requires behavioral adaptation: learning to make sound decisions while your body actively works against rational thinking. While I’ve hung from an airplane wing and let go thousands of feet in the air, just watching videos of Mount Whitney’s narrow trails tested my courage before I stepped on the trail.

Innovation demands similar comfort with discomfort — launching products before they feel ready, making decisions without complete data, leading teams through uncertainty. The adaptive behavior is developing emotional intelligence (EQ) skills that preserve clear thinking during high-pressure decision-making moments.

Ronald Heifetz, in “The Practice of Adaptive Leadership”, describes the “productive zone of disequilibrium” — maintaining enough challenge to motivate growth without creating overwhelming stress that shuts down learning. Effective innovation leaders help teams stay in this zone, recognizing when members approach tolerance limits and providing support to gradually expand everyone’s adaptive capacity.

Each Whitney challenge reminded me that you can’t eliminate ambiguity, but you can develop the skills and confidence to navigate it successfully and experience joy through the adventure.

3. Seek People Who Elevate the Team

“If you are the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room.” — Confucius

Throughout my career, I’ve been fortunate to hire and support brilliant designers, researchers, and program managers while partnering with visionary CEOs, talented design leaders, innovative entrepreneurs, world class engineers, and gifted product leaders. Working alongside people whose expertise constantly challenges and expands my thinking has been one of the greatest accelerators of my professional growth.

This principle came alive during my Whitney journey, where I sought out co-explorers who would challenge my abilities. With Whitney permits awarded to only 25–30% of the 50,000+ annual applicants and only 100 day hikers a day, securing a permit for our date felt like winning the lottery.

I was lucky to form a team with a group of friends where I was clearly the “runt of the litter” in terms of endurance training. And, approaching the adventure with a “beginner’s mind” was exactly where I needed to be.

Pat hikes in the Rocky Mountains where he devours “14ers” for breakfast. Erik competes in 30-mile Spartan races with diabolical obstacle courses. Brandon was a collegiate cross-country runner who swims miles in San Francisco Bay’s frigid waters for fun. Joe has completed dozens of ultramarathons, including the Leadville 100 — a 100 mile race that climbs over 12,000 feet at elevations between 9,200 and 12,600 feet.

More importantly, each brought diverse perspectives alongside shared qualities of curiosity, creativity, trust, and commitment to collective success. Combined, this meant that each team member demonstrated high care and high accountability, creating what Amy Edmondson describes in “The Fearless Organization” as the foundation of high-performing teams: psychological safety paired with rigorous standards.

Google’s Project Aristotle, which analyzed 180 teams, confirmed that psychological safety was the strongest predictor of team effectiveness, with high-performing teams showing 32% faster project completion and 41% more new ideas. In an alpine adventure with real risks, these strengths proved as valuable as physical conditioning.

Warren Buffett captures this perfectly: “It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.”

This reflects combining everyone’s strengths in action — where collective intelligence emerges when teams naturally work well together rather than through top-down control, creating competitive advantage through diverse expertise working in concert.

The camaraderie of planning and collaboration became its own source of joy — each person’s expertise elevating the entire team through mutual accountability and shared ownership. My contributions included a design perspective: research, problem solving, ideation, deliberate preparation, iterative learning from training hikes.

The experience reminded me that leadership strength often comes not from being the smartest person in the room, but from orchestrating expertise in service of shared vision — whether reaching an iconic summit or creating products that transform millions of lives.

4. Execute Your Vision Step by Step

“Ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.” — Steve Jobs

Vision creates purpose, but execution delivers results. In innovation, this dual rhythm is critical: strong teams master both bold experimentation and incremental progress through rapid iteration and continuous improvement.

Execution demands experimentation — and experimentation requires failure. When you’re building something new, you rarely have a complete playbook to follow. Amy Edmondson’s research in “Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well" on ‘intelligent failures’ reveals why this uncertainty is actually valuable — thoughtful experiments in unknown territory provide insights that couldn’t be gained any other way.

Research from MIT Sloan Management Review confirms that venture-backed companies backed by failure-tolerant investors are significantly more innovative, with early-stage failure tolerance being particularly crucial for innovation culture.

Whether you’re executing a business strategy or climbing Mount Whitney, the principle remains the same: breakthrough performance requires the discipline to treat setbacks as data points, not verdicts.

Turning setbacks into stepping stones: Ninety days before our planned ascent, an unexpected injury sustained during a routine training hike on Mount Tamalpais required surgery and threatened to make Whitney impossible. When I asked my surgeon about my timeline to simultaneously recover and train, his hesitant “It’s…possible” response revealed everything about the gap between possibility and probability.

Two weeks post-surgery, I laced up my boots and returned to the trails determined to close that gap. My injury 90 days before Whitney exemplified Edmondson’s research: rather than viewing it as a basic failure, I treated it as an intelligent failure that revealed preparation gaps and forced innovative training adaptations.

The key was treating setbacks as data rather than judgment — each limitation revealed insights about preparation gaps and threshold points, just like user research reveals critical insights about real customer needs.

The setback required a methodical approach with limited time: research recovery protocols, prototype different training methods, and test approaches adapted to my specific constraints — all while uncertain how my body would heal and respond to intense training in parallel.

The approach felt like design methodology in action — research, prototype, test, iterate. “Training for the New Alpinism: A Manual for the Climber as Athlete” by Steve House became my guide, teaching ways to apply sports science to mountaineering. I focused my training not only on physical endurance but also on mental fortitude. House’s key insight resonated deeply: “When you are training, you are not just training your body, but also, maybe even primarily, training your mind.”

The iterative approach builds adaptability that transforms setbacks into intelligence about what’s possible. My plan progressed through three phases designed to build performance while keeping the team updated on my progress. I integrated weekly strength and core training for power development, hill sprints for cardiovascular conditioning, and technical skills practice alongside a structured plan for hiking progression:

Phase 1: Rebuild Foundation (0–30 days) — Local and alpine hikes focused on basic capacity, testing preparation approaches, establishing sustainable rhythms with hikes varying from 3 to 12 miles and 3,000 ft of elevation gain. Equipment failures and weather fluctuations taught valuable lessons about backup planning. Like early product development: proving core concepts work before scaling complexity.

Phase 2: Extend Capacity (30–60 days) — Cloud’s Rest (12 miles, 2,800ft gain, 9,926 feet elevation) with significant exposure at the summit, Flattop Summit in Colorado (13 miles, 2,874ft gain, 12,239ft elevation) with the team, and Mount Tallac (9.6 miles, 3,284ft gain, 9,734ft elevation) with the team. Each hike served as both training and testing — revealing what worked, what needed adjustment. Similar to design sprints and experimentation: rapid cycles of building, testing, learning.

Phase 3: Peak Preparation (60–90 days) — South Sister in Oregon (14 miles, 5,039ft gain, 10,358ft elevation), Mount Elbert in Colorado (17 miles, 5,800ft gain, 14,440ft elevation) with the team, plus Whitney acclimatization hikes. The breakthrough came through steady execution of progressive challenges — each building methodically on the previous one.

Each hike was its own gift of discovery spanning trails in Marin County, Central California, Sierra Nevada, Yosemite, Three Sisters Wilderness, and the Rockies.

Cloud’s Rest offered panoramic Yosemite views from 1,000 feet above Half Dome along its exposed “spine.” Mount Tallac demanded route-finding through chaotic boulder fields where trails disappeared among glacial moraine. South Sister’s final “red mile” climbed 1,400 feet through loose volcanic scree to Oregon’s highest glacial lake testing balance and fortitude. Mount Elbert provided a gentle introduction to Colorado’s 14ers with 17 miles and 5,800 feet of climbing into thin air.

The incremental gains from each outing compounded into transformed capabilities. By departure time, Whitney no longer felt like distant vision but destination within reach through disciplined execution.

Steve Jobs understood that ideas without execution are worthless — execution is the multiplier that transforms possibility into reality. Whitney reminded me that execution isn’t just about big leaps; it’s about the patient accumulation of small steps that can compound into extraordinary capability.

5. Find Joy in the Ascent, Not Just the Summit

“The process of growth is more important than the achievement of any single goal.” — Carol Dweck

Innovation breakthroughs rarely arrive in the first version — they often emerge during the iterative grind when you’re sketching the hundredth variation, conducting the fifteenth user interview, debugging interaction models that initially seemed perfect.

When we stay curious about each step, every project becomes a discovery about users, craft, and our own capabilities.

I felt confident approaching summit day. Pat, Brandon, Erik, Joe, and I departed our hotel near midnight, beginning our ascent at 1:30am with temperatures just above freezing but clear skies forecasted.

Ascending Through Darkness: The team nominated me as pathfinder as we set off, seeing only 5–10 feet ahead through headlamp beams. Setting the pace was challenging — balancing speed against my heart rate with the goal of staying under 60–70% of my max heart rate (Zone 2) to ensure endurance.

Two hours in, I physically felt the altitude change of the thinning air, pace demands, and my 25-pound pack weight. The slow-twitch endurance adaptations I’d built over months of training were now being tested — this was exactly the ‘time on feet’ challenge I’d prepared for.

It was strange and beautiful hiking up alpine terrain with no sense of surroundings. Our limited vision powerfully amplified the sounds — wind sweeping through trees and canyon, rushing water suggesting a spectacular but invisible landscape of cliffs rising high above and dropping hundreds of feet below the narrow trail.

The Uncomfortable Zen of 99 Switchbacks: Reaching Trail Camp at 12,000 feet, we greeted the rising sun casting reddish glow illuminating the stark beauty of rugged peaks above us. The 99 switchbacks — constructed in 1904 — represent impressive trail engineering and psychological battle against narrow winding paths, loose rock, and thin air that leaves many gasping above 13,000 feet.

At 13,000+ feet, the hypobaric hypoxia became real — that 40% oxygen reduction forcing deliberate, measured breathing. The simplified decision-making frameworks I’d developed proved essential as mental clarity required more effort with every step upward.

I experienced both the maddening repetition that defeats many hikers and moments of shinrin-yoku (“forest bathing”) — raw granite beauty and rhythmic progression providing reflection and awe in the surreal elevation drops and granite giants around us.

Trail Crest to Summit: The final push from Trail Crest at 13,700 feet includes a cruel twist — after climbing nearly 6,000 feet, the trail drops 200 feet where it connects with the John Muir Trail before the last ascent.

This counterintuitive descent feels like a step backwards after hard-won progress, but ushers in a landscape transformation. Gone are eastern Sierra’s familiar granite faces; instead, you navigate narrow ledges carved into the western face with sweeping views into Sequoia National Park thousands of feet below.

The route weaves between massive granite boulders through a maze demanding complete attention, yet constantly rewarded by breathtaking compositions of stone, sky, and infinite space. Even as thousand-foot drops triggered intense physiological responses, staying present allowed me to appreciate the stunning beauty alongside the adrenaline.

Standing at 14,505 Feet: Whitney’s summit feels simultaneously monumental and humbling. The 360-degree views encompass the entire eastern Sierra, Owens Valley stretching endlessly east, jagged Sierra Nevada peaks extending north and south like granite spine. The clarity at this elevation is startling — mountain ranges layering upon mountain ranges to every horizon.

Surrounded by wonderful co-explorers, granite giants, and endless vistas, it was a moment of pure joy even though we were only half way through the hike.

The Descent: The journey down revealed gravity’s merciless challenge at altitude — what seemed difficult ascending became genuinely treacherous on exhausted legs with oxygen-starved minds. Each step demanded absolute focus; a moment’s inattention on loose scree or a mistimed placement could mean a devastating fall.

Yet even amid this intense vigilance and physical grind, the mountain continued its gifts as afternoon light transformed granite faces into warm gold, revealing the beautiful raw landscape that had been hidden in darkness just hours earlier.

The vistas that were at our backs were now front and center, offering new perspectives about the trail. The canyons that we could only imagine in the darkness, sprung forward with the beauty of raw alpine wilderness.

When we reached Whitney Portal over 16 hours after departure, exhausted but exhilarated, the adventure had delivered a masterclass in transformation.

Dr. Carol Dweck’s insight about growth versus achievement felt true with every labored breath on the trail. The summit was profound, but the discovery happened throughout the entire journey, in moments when doubt transformed into determination.

Recent neuroscience research shows that a growth mindset actually changes how our brains work, with people who embrace challenges showing different neural patterns when facing difficult tasks. This isn’t just positive thinking — it’s rewiring your brain for resilience and learning.

Mount Whitney’s greatest gift wasn’t reaching its peak — it was showing how transformation happens through accumulated steps of commitment: how dreams take shape through preparation, how possibility becomes probable through grit and resilience, and how being fully present becomes joy when you find beauty in the journey itself.

These are the good tidings John Muir promised — not just the view from the summit, but the wisdom earned through every step of the ascent.

For design leaders, Whitney’s lessons translate directly: building products that didn’t exist before, creating transformative experiences, leading teams through uncertainty toward seemingly impossible breakthroughs. The mountain teaches that leadership isn’t about having all the answers — it’s about maintaining direction when the path is unclear, supporting others when conditions get tough, and finding joy in the climb itself, not just the destinations we reach.