Author
Antoine Buteau

Antoine Buteau

3 min read Free

Customer Profitability in the AI Era Series #3: The AI COGS Problem

Traditional SaaS trained operators to think of product usage as mostly good. More seats, more activity, more workflows, more data, more stickiness. Infrastructure costs mattered, but the basic economic model was generous enough that usage usually meant progress. AI changes that instinct. Every generation, retrieval, classification, transcription, evaluation, and agentic
3 min read Free

Customer Profitability in the AI Era Series #2: Growth Stage Changes the Answer

Customer profitability is not a fixed rule. The right answer changes with stage, growth rate, capital context, and what the company is still trying to learn. In very early markets, a company may accept ugly customer economics on purpose. The team needs proof that the problem is real. It needs
3 min read Free

Customer Profitability in the AI Era Series #1: Good Revenue, Bad Revenue

The old SaaS habit was to treat revenue as a clean signal. If a customer paid, the customer was good. If the account expanded, the company was working. If ARR grew, the motion deserved more fuel. That was always too simple, but it becomes actively dangerous in the AI era.
1 min read Free

The Design Engineer Era — Series Index

The Design Engineer Era is a 10 part series. Use this index as the table of contents and read the posts in order. Read the series in order Designers Become...
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The Design Engineer Era Series #10: The Design Engineer Audit

The design engineer era is not a title change. It is a quality audit. The practical question is whether the team has closed the gap between design intent and shipped product. If not, changing job titles will not help. The product will still lose quality in translation. Start with behavior.
3 min read Free

The Design Engineer Era Series #9: Hiring And Managing Design Engineers

The design engineer role is easy to describe badly. Some companies will hear it as "designer who codes." Others will hear it as "front-end engineer with taste." Both descriptions are too thin. The role matters because it sits between product behavior, interaction design, implementation fluency,
3 min read Free

The Design Engineer Era Series #8: AI Raises The Floor, Not The Standard

AI makes it easier to produce something plausible. That is useful. It is also dangerous. A designer can generate interface options faster. A founder can create a prototype without waiting for a full team. An engineer can ask for a first-pass UI. A product manager can turn an idea
3 min read Free

The Design Engineer Era Series #7: Design Systems Become Product Infrastructure

A design system is not a sticker sheet. It is product infrastructure. That distinction matters more in the design engineer era. If designers are working closer to implementation, the system cannot be a parallel artifact that looks like the product but does not shape the product. It has to define
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