Author
Antoine Buteau

Antoine Buteau

3 min read Free

The Design Engineer Era Series #6: The Smaller Product Team Needs Denser Roles

AI changes tools. It also changes team shape. When building gets faster, the cost of coordination becomes more visible. A team with many narrow roles can spend more time translating work than improving the product. Requirements move through PM, design, engineering, QA, and stakeholder review. Every handoff loses context. Smaller
3 min read Free

The Design Engineer Era Series #5: Craft Sign-Off Cannot Be Outsourced

Craft fails when no one owns the final product. Many teams care about quality in theory. The mock is careful. The design system is thoughtful. The prototype feels good. Then the shipped product arrives with awkward spacing, unclear states, rough copy, janky transitions, broken edge cases, and small inconsistencies that
3 min read Free

The Design Engineer Era Series #4: Front-End Fluency Changes Taste

Taste improves when it understands the medium. For digital products, the medium is not a canvas. It is working software. It has state, constraints, layout rules, components, browser behavior, accessibility requirements, performance limits, and real content. A designer who understands those forces makes different decisions from one who only sees
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The Design Engineer Era Series #3: The Prototype Is The Argument

A static mock asks people to imagine the product. A prototype makes them confront it. That is why prototyping is becoming central to design work. The prototype is not a decoration after the real design is done. It is the argument. It shows how the product responds, where the flow
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The Design Engineer Era Series #2: How It Should Work Is the Design Problem

The most important design question is not how the screen should look. It is how the thing should work. That sounds obvious until you inspect how many product teams still treat behavior as an engineering detail. The designer owns the screen. The engineer owns the logic. The product manager owns
3 min read Free

The Design Engineer Era Series #1: Designers Become Design Engineers

The old product-design handoff is losing its authority. For years, a designer could be effective by producing the right artifacts: flows, wireframes, high-fidelity mocks, prototypes, annotations, and design-system references. Those artifacts still matter. But the gap between design artifact and working product is becoming harder to defend
1 min read Free

The Foundation Model Lab Operating Model — Series Index

The Foundation Model Lab Operating Model is a 10 part series. Use this index as the table of contents and read the posts in order. Read the series in order...
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The Foundation Model Lab Operating Model Series #10: The Model Lab Scorecard

The wrong way to evaluate a foundation model lab is to ask only one question: how good is the model? Model quality matters, but it is not enough. A lab can be technically impressive and commercially fragile. Another lab can be slightly behind on visible benchmarks and stronger as a
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