When Everyone Can Build, Who Decides?
The ability to demonstrate an idea doesn’t mean we understand whether it belongs in the product.
AI tools like Claude and Figma Make are changing who can prototype product ideas. Stakeholders can now turn a suggestion into something tangible, often in minutes.
I think that’s a good thing. It makes ideas easier to communicate, challenge and explore.
But there’s a problem: the ability to demonstrate an idea doesn’t mean we understand whether it belongs in the product.
A prototype can look convincing without accounting for existing components, data, permissions, technical constraints or the product’s wider direction. It can solve a local problem while creating a larger one.
One experiment isn’t much of a concern. Scale that behaviour across an organisation and the picture changes. Teams build overlapping features, introduce inconsistent patterns and create expectations that the underlying product may not support. Individually sensible ideas can collectively produce a fragmented experience.
The answer isn’t to restrict who can build, or make design a gatekeeper for every experiment. It’s to create a system that helps an organisation capture ideas, understand their value, identify overlaps and decide what deserves to progress.
This is where I think design has an increasingly important role to play.
Design has always been about more than producing interfaces. It connects user needs to business objectives, individual interactions to the wider experience, and ideas to the realities of implementation.
That makes it well suited to helping organisations navigate a world where the volume of possible solutions is growing faster than their ability to evaluate them.
The process doesn’t need to be heavy. An idea should be easy to explore, but moving from prototype to product should involve deliberate decisions: Who is it for? What problem does it solve? How does it fit with what already exists? What evidence would justify building it?
Some ideas will progress. Others will reveal useful insights, overlap with existing work or simply not be worth pursuing. All are legitimate outcomes of experimentation.
The important thing is that building a prototype doesn’t silently become a commitment to build a feature.
AI is making creation more accessible. The challenge now is helping organisations make better decisions about what they create.
When everyone can build, design’s job isn’t to decide who gets to. It’s to help the organisation decide what is worth building, and make sure the pieces fit together.