Curation Is the Real Craft

“I don’t hire professional managers. Period.”

That’s Josh Payton, VP of Design at Wise. This week on the Near Future Podcast, Jonny and I sit down with Josh and Design Director Hollie Lubbock to get into how their ~150-person design org is putting AI to work. We cover new ways of working, mindset, tooling, and a few spicy takes along the way.

A few takeaways:

1. Wise wired a prototyping kit into their design system. Prototyping ‘send money’, once a nightmare of manual sums, now takes minutes, and allows designers to quickly flip between business and personal users, ten currencies or one.

2. Hollie’s rule: share it early and rough around the edges. A vibe-coded prototype looks finished long before the thinking underneath has been stress-tested.

3. Josh on the new bottleneck: “agents outpace you three to one, so the slowest thing in the system is you, the operator.”

4. “AI raises the floor, not the ceiling.” Or as Josh put it, a bunch of people in a finished basement thinking they’re on the roof. Average is table stakes now, so specialisation matters more, not less.

5. Josh’s two-by-two for when design actually needs to be in the room: a small, well-trodden tweak, let a PM or engineer run at it; a zero-to-one, ill-structured problem needs a PRD and real design thinking.

6. On leaders staying hands-on: design is a practice, like medicine or law. A leader who’s stopped using the tools is losing touch with what’s actually possible today.

7. Both landed on the same answer for what they wouldn’t hand over to AI: curation. As Josh put it, “taste” is a bit of a cop-out; curation is the real craft.

More guest episodes through the summer. Listen to the full episode at nearfuture.works/podcast.