John Reese — Design Leadership & AI https://jreese.com Thinking on design leadership, AI-augmented workflows, and building design orgs at scale. By John Reese — 15 years leading UX at Walmart, Home Depot, and beyond. en-us Reese@jreese.com (John Reese) Reese@jreese.com (John Reese) Copyright 2026 John Reese 2880 https://jreese.com/favicon.svg John Reese https://jreese.com Design Systems in the AI Era https://jreese.com/thinking/design-systems-ai https://jreese.com/thinking/design-systems-ai Nearly two decades of design systems, from building Amazon's form patterns in 2008 to Walmart's first enterprise design system and Home Depot's unified B2C system. Token architecture, ADA compliance, content strategy, and teaching your design system to AI. My first design system work was at Amazon in 2008, building form patterns that did not exist yet. Since then I have built Walmart's first enterprise design system, unified Home Depot's B2C system, and contributed at Dell and PayPal. The discipline that made products consistent at scale is about to become something bigger. It is becoming the layer that teaches AI how to design.

Tokens are the contract. Accessibility is a system property, not a review step. Content strategy belongs in the system. And an AI can generate a thousand screens an hour, but your design system decides whether any of them are yours.

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]]> Design Systems Reese@jreese.com (John Reese) How AI Compresses the Design Workflow https://jreese.com/thinking/ai-design-process https://jreese.com/thinking/ai-design-process Discovery transcripts to an interactive prototype in five or ten minutes, with no wireframes. The PRD, developer handoff, and QA test script all come out of the prototype afterward. Record discovery. Run it through Claude. Ship an interactive prototype in five or ten minutes. Here's the exact workflow.

The paperwork moves to the end. Instead of writing a PRD before anyone has seen the product, the prototype comes first and Claude generates the PRD, the developer handoff, and the QA test script from the working code.

The step most design teams skip: partnering with engineering to train Claude on their design tokens and code conventions, so what you hand off is genuinely buildable rather than a screenshot they have to rebuild.

Faster does not mean smaller. Work that took a week in Figma takes five or ten minutes in Claude, but the judgment still has to come from you.

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]]> AI + Design Reese@jreese.com (John Reese) The Power of Northstar Design https://jreese.com/thinking/northstar-design https://jreese.com/thinking/northstar-design What Northstar designs are, why they create org-wide alignment, and how to use them to earn executive buy-in — even before a single line of code is written. What Northstar designs are, why they create org-wide alignment, and how to use them to earn executive buy-in.

A Northstar isn't a prototype. It isn't a concept. It's a shared language — a picture of the future that every team, every executive, and every engineer can point to.

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]]> Strategy Reese@jreese.com (John Reese) What Makes a Great Design Leader https://jreese.com/thinking/great-design-leader https://jreese.com/thinking/great-design-leader Four pillars built from 15 years of leadership: Define Success, Build Culture, Elevate Craft, Develop Skills. What separates design leaders who scale from those who plateau. Four pillars built from 15 years of leadership: Define Success, Build Culture, Elevate Craft, Develop Skills.

Great design leadership isn't about being the best designer in the room. It's about making everyone else better — and building the conditions where great work is inevitable.

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]]> Leadership Reese@jreese.com (John Reese)