The hierarchy of competence
Nine stages of how people operate at work, in order, where the critical job it removes from your manager's plate measures each one.
Hardik Pandya
Hardik Pandya is a seasoned design leader with experience in building and scaling design teams. Read his thoughts on design, leadership, and technology.
Latest posts
The hard things about design
An honest, incomplete attempt at naming what makes design hard, not the motivational-poster kind of hard, but the structural kind, in ways that shift depending on where you work.
Making big things happen
What it looked like to break status quo inside a 20+ year old public company and reimagine AI experiences with a high agency skunk works team.
Solari split-flap
Jake Weidman pinged on WhatsApp with this tweet. That tweet is on quite a journey itself, but it got me interested in building this out with Claude. A few minutes later I had a base version ready.
Large companies can’t operate at the frontier
AI has compressed the cost of building to the point where a five-person team can attack a market you've owned for a decade. Your moat was real. It's draining fast.
Expose your design system to LLMs
LLMs drift, fabricate tokens, and start every session from scratch. Here's how to feed your design system to AI coding agents so they stop guessing.
16 pieces of design wisdom
After years of designing and leading designers, here are my honest reflections.
Power prompts in Claude Code
A single natural language prompt that runs parallel agents, captures visual regression screenshots, and creates reusable skills in Claude Code.
The invisible work
The coordination work that holds projects together disappears the moment it works. On the unfairness of recognition and finding leaders who see it anyway.
New Claude skill: Stop Slop
A Claude Code skill that eliminates AI-generated writing patterns from your prose.
Systems, stables and stars
Why mature organizations still rely on rockstars for critical work, and how systems raise the floor while stars raise the ceiling.
Exposure
For equal amount of design skills, your exposure to the world determines how effective of a designer you can be.
Age
Thoughts and reflections on where I am in life, what I've learned and how I plan to approach the years to come.
Introducing Vibe Slack
How we built a pixel-perfect Slack clone prototype end-to-end using Cursor, featuring intelligent setup, industry-aware conversations, AI integration, and rich messaging features.
Vibe prototyping & Cursor
Practical lessons I learned spending 60 hours vibe coding in a month.
Fast is a moat
Speed—turning ideas into tangible results quickly is the most powerful competitive advantage you can build.
Generative UI and early thoughts
Exploring the new conceptual unlock in interface design powered by generative AI.
Leading design with craft
With models emerging as the new material, leadership is about figuring out the unknowns again.
The age of the super IC
With emergence of AI as the new tool, there's clear signals that the IC track is becoming exciting again.
Energy of the tastemakers
Taste in building products is a function of energy and runs a real risk of waning if not cultivated properly.