Silber emphasizes that designers must think in systems and building blocks rather than isolated features, especially as AI products grow in complexity and need to feel like one cohesive experience. ✦ AI generated
Ian Silber · Lenny's Podcast · 2026-08-16 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 30:23
Systems thinking is becoming more and more important... we're trying to build the super intelligence that has all these different capabilities and we need to think more about the underlying primitives that we can build that can kind of build on top of each other... we don't want to build all these sort of one-off siloed experiences. We want to be able to build and ship systems that can build on top of each other so that when someone goes and uses our product it feels like one cohesive simple thing and the model can reason about how it can pull all these things together.
verbatim transcript · starts at 30:23
30:23systems thinking um is becoming more and more important and um you know especially as you're I like in our world we're it's interesting because we're trying to build you know we're building the super intelligence that has uh that has all these different capabilities and we need to think more about the underlying primitives that we can build that can kind of build on top of each other, right? Um, you know, this is something
30:53that I think like notion did really well early on was like we're going to build these building blocks, right? And then like everything kind of is composable. I think that's becoming really important too as you think about like well we don't want to build all these sort of one-off siloed experiences. We want to be able to build and ship systems that can build on top of each other so that
31:14you know when someone goes and uses our product it feels like one cohesive simple thing and the model can reason about how it can pull all these things together. So that like idea of like really understanding the system and thinking about that is becoming even more important especially because it's kind of complex of all the things that it could possibly do. This is the fifth podcast in a row I've done where systems
31:34thinking has come up as a skill that people are more and more looking for and it's it's like so funny. I need a bingo card for systems thinking but it makes so much sense and I think it especially makes sense from the designer perspective. If we come back to just why my take on why designers are kind of frustrated and and stressed right now is just there's less time to do design the
31:56traditional design process. things are just moving like engineers are shipping 5,000 PRs a day and so to your point this idea of building blocks and design system langu and and just a platform for people to build on feels incredibly important. >> Totally. It's very hard but I um I I yeah it's like it's funny we've had these conversations where I'm like just do less [laughter] like my encouragement has been do less