About design talks at Okta

Last Friday, I attended an incredibly thought-provoking event on “The UX of Trust & Security” hosted by Friends of Figma, Bangalore x Okta .

I went in expecting conversations around security, authentication, and enterprise UX.

I came back reflecting on something much bigger: What does it really mean to grow as a senior or principal designer in the AI era?

For example, The interfaces we see are often just the visible layer of much larger systems underneath.

Something as simple as:

• ordering food,
• accessing a banking app,
• or logging into a product

is powered by deeply interconnected systems handling:

• identity
• operations
• pricing
• workflows
• infrastructure
• security
• trust

And increasingly, AI.

One statement from leadership was: “We are not looking for titles. We are looking for builders.”

The expectation today is no longer: “Design this screen.”

It’s: “Help define what should exist.”

The panel spoke about how senior / principal designers are increasingly evaluated on:

• systems thinking
• storytelling
• product thinking
• decision-making
• stakeholder navigation
• handling ambiguity

—not just execution.

It’s true. The strong designers are great at:

• asking the right questions,
• connecting dots,
• influencing direction,
• and making thoughtful tradeoffs.

The AI discussion was also very good.

Yes, AI can now:

• generate interfaces,
• create prototypes,
• speed up workflows,
• and even write code.

But one line summed it up perfectly:

“AI can generate options. Humans provide judgment.”

In an interesting activity, everyone in a room was given the same 8 LEGO pieces and one minute to build a duck. Surprisingly, every duck turned out to be unique.

The exercise symbolized how each designer thinks differently. Even with the same resources and constraints, every person interpreted the task in their own creative way, showing that there is no single “right” outcome in design.

A few other ideas from the event that I found particularly valuable:

• Postcard research at scale to gather broader and more inclusive feedback
• Understanding participant mental models through focused research questions
• Cognitive walkthroughs with cross-functional teams to uncover usability gaps early
• Using frameworks like Six Thinking Hats to explore problems from multiple perspectives
• SUS score gatekeeping to maintain usability quality as teams ship faster

There were also some really interesting discussions around:

• multi-player workflows involving researchers, PMs, designers, and AI agents,
• and how tools like Figma are evolving product development itself through ideas like Figma Weave and Code Connect.

My biggest takeaway from the evening:

The value of designers is slowly shifting from execution → judgment.

One final line from the panel was: “Don’t ask: What should I do next? Ask: What should we do next?”