Hey đź‘‹
You can ship a lot of “smart” UI this year while quietly making it less trustworthy, less coherent, and harder to operate.
This week is about picking the boring defaults that keep humans in the loop: strip fake personality from AI copy, make cross-team dependencies visible before you “empower” anyone, and design automation like a controllable tool, not an opinionated ghost.
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This week’s email edition includes the copy/paste templates (missing from this public post) plus a planning sanity-check set of irreversibility questions for roadmap decisions.
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Dig in & Enjoy 🦄 - Adam at Unicorn Club.
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🏗️ Build
Make better interfaces.
The useful bit is the clear line between polite system feedback and full-on human cosplay, plus why “warmth” often trades off against reliability. This shows up in design review when someone wants the assistant to sound “friendly” and you end up shipping filler, not help.
- Why it matters: Teams add personality to cover model limits, which raises expectations and increases errors, so design the UI copy to be direct and tool-like instead.
- Adopt this week: Use an “AI copy red flags” checklist for any assistant UI.
Copy/paste template available in the email edition: Use an “AI copy red flags” checklist for any assistant UI.
A quick checklist to strip fake personality and keep assistant copy reliable and tool-like.
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🧩 Shape
Shared foundations across teams.
Why Most Product Teams Aren't Really Empowered
This bites when a team is “empowered” to fix onboarding, then discovers navigation and half the page is owned elsewhere. Empowerment without shared component ownership turns into meetings, documents, and a Franken-solution.
- Why it matters: Organisations say “own outcomes” while splitting screens across teams, which creates coordination tax and incoherent UI. Make dependencies visible and agree a decision path for shared components.
- Adopt this week: Create a one-page “shared screen map” for your top 1 journey and store it next to your design system docs.
Strategic Portfolio Management Meets Product-Centricity
Full email edition includes: a planning sanity-check set of irreversibility questions for roadmap decisions.
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🚀 Ship
Release, measure, iterate.
Who’s spotting you when you automate
Stop shipping automation that only works when everything goes right. The practical frame here is operational UX that shows boundaries and time context, especially around approval gates and rollback moments.
- Why it matters: Automation relocates responsibility but hides boundaries, which erodes trust and pushes people back to manual control, so make escalation, notification, and rollback behaviour obvious.
- Adopt this week: For one automated approval gate, add a “Changed / Why / Watch” block, including who is notified and the rollback path.
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Thanks for reading
Adam from Unicorn Club
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