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Chapter 4
What We Know We Know
00:00 / 01:04
5 min read
“Managing through chaos” became a buzzword a few weeks into COVID. But even a global pandemic, design communities under violent conflict, and market volatility didn’t prepare us for the chaos of the past year. This chaos is different – it isn’t geopolitical, it’s professional. And it is reshaping almost everything.
AI has stirred the air, set everything in motion. Yet, in the middle of this turbulence, design leaders still need to draft roadmaps, set directives, and chart a course for their teams – hoping that when the dust settles, they’ll be in the best possible position. There’s opportunity here too: organizations that transform wisely, that don’t just scramble to keep up but also think long-term, will be the ones to reap the benefits.
This is an exciting time for any design leader – one that demands experience, invention, and yes, sometimes taking a gamble.
At the start of the year, when we sat down to draft our roadmap for 2025, I found myself leaning on the Rumsfeld Matrix. Like any good model, it comes with a story.
The Rumsfeld matrix (former US secretary of defense) was born out of what may be the most quotable – and most ridiculous – press briefing in modern politics. In 2002, Donald Rumsfeld mused about “known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns,” offering an explanation that seemed clear only to him.
Mocked at first, the phrase has since enjoyed a second life in boardrooms and MBA courses – as a neat reminder that not all uncertainty is created equal. The irony writes itself.
In our case – uncertainty, rapid change, professional anxiety – We chose to wipe away the “noise,” the spaces that amplify fear and ambiguity. In times like these, a leader’s role is to be a sense-maker: to carve out certainty, or at least to create a sentiment of leveraging uncertainty.
We focused only on one quadrant: what we know we know. Everything else, for now, is secondary.
Of course, there’s a paradox. In truth, you don’t really know much during times like these. Nobody does. But you can read the field, dive deep into trends, mobilize your experience, and articulate working “truths” to act on. It’s a gamble – but a gamble grounded in experience and capable of generating momentum. Standing still is not an option.
Here are four truths we distilled, which shaped our annual plan – at least when it comes to adapting design processes, designer profiles, and design tools. Three quarters in, I can already say they are proving to be the right bets.
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1. The Profession is Moving Toward Art Direction
We used to think of an art director as a design team lead, a senior designer, or perhaps an IC who could play all-around. But now, with image-gen tools, every designer - yes, even a fresh junior - is expected to art-direct the machine.
What’s the essence of art direction? The ability to envision the final outcome and know how to steer toward it using all available tools, techniques, and processes. There’s no substitute for experience here, nor for broad technical literacy. Yet, we now need to equip designers at every level of seniority with art direction skills.
2. Semantic Skills, Self-Learning, and Critical Thinking Are Core Design Skills
Semantic fluency was never part of a designer’s basic toolkit – until now. But the gap in AI outputs between someone with sharp semantic skills and someone without them is striking.
Interestingly, some of our strongest prompt engineers come from photography. As one of them told me: “In four years of studying photography, you mostly just talk about photography.” That vocabulary became an asset.
But semantic skills alone aren’t enough. To channel them into great design – or great prompt engineering – you must question, doubt, and above all, keep learning. No school, studio or company can pace training fast enough to match the waves of new AI releases. And even catching up isn’t always enough. Without self-driven learning, resilience, and patience, you won’t stay ahead.
3. From Narrow Specializations to Generalism
I’ll keep this short – we’ve covered plenty of this already.
4. Meta-Design (Ops, Engineering, Infra, Research, Strategy) Matters More Than Ever
This one may be more Wix-specific, but the point stands. Designers today are busier than ever, producing at almost double the pace we were used to. That’s because Wix is both building AI and integrating it into products, growing across multiple product lines, and maintaining old practices while inventing new ones.
When you need to produce twice as much, the instinct is to double headcount. But that’s a trap. Even if you could scale from 320 to 640 designers overnight (and you can’t, not without compromising quality), you’d drain managerial and training resources right when you need them most. The real multiplier lies in processes.
It means questioning how we design, building tools project by project, and creating true design velocity. Organizations that invested in design ops are now enjoying a real competitive edge.
These four truths shaped much of our annual plan. They are what "we know we know". We’re still working on them, and they’ll carry us into 2026 – affecting how we recruit, how we evaluate, and how we define the profession.
“Good design” remains a constant. Its aesthetic criteria and cultural values haven't changed – not even with AI. But what counts as a "good designer", and the path to achieving good design – that’s where the change is dramatic. Design leaders who ignore this risk being left behind. And designers hate nothing more than showing up only at the end of the trend.
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