There's a particular sensation that comes with leading a team through a year like this one. You spend the first half of your career getting good at something specific. The middle bit building the systems and the teams that let that thing scale. And then, just as you've quietly worked out how it all fits together, the ground moves.
For UX and research, the ground has been moving for a while. AI didn't start the shift. It accelerated one that was already underway — toward generalists with broader skillsets, toward smaller multi-disciplinary teams, toward a discipline that needs to know more and specialise less than it used to.
The instinct, when you've spent twenty years building expertise, is to dig in. To protect the craft. To raise the bar on what counts as "real" research, "real" design. There's a version of that fight worth having. But the bigger job isn't protecting the discipline — it's helping the people inside it, and the people next to them, move through the shift without losing their footing.
I keep coming back to the phrase Manager of Change. I don't love it; it sounds vaguely like a workshop you'd attend in 2012. But I haven't found a better one. The job is to identify the change agents in your team, set the expectations, put the guardrails up, create the space — then encourage people to evolve at roughly the pace the world is already moving.
That last clause is the catch. Nothing is going to slow down so we can reset. Whatever comes next will be made by the people who stayed in the room and kept doing the work while the room was being renovated around them.
The experience, the part I lean on now, is mostly knowing what to ignore.