Defining the new design process at Elastic

I lead the “AI for designers” program at Elastic, an initiative defining a new standard for how design is practiced across our 30+ person design organization in an AI-assisted environment. The program is structured around six tracks covering research, prototyping in code, design system evolution, spec and documentation, design quality, and creative exploration. It’s sponsored by three design directors and brings together track leads and contributors from across the design team.

I authored the program charter and lead its execution. On the program side, I run a bi-weekly working group meeting with the broader design team, host office hours for designers newer to AI, record tutorial videos covering specific workflows, and brief the design directors weekly on the program’s progress.

On the tooling side, I build and maintain custom tooling for our specific use cases. For example, I built Vibe Kibana, the code prototyping environment the team uses to explore and validate ideas without touching the production codebase. I also write AI skills and prompts used across the design organization through the design-elastic repository, and I maintain the documentation site where all of this lives, giving designers a single place to find resources, guides, and examples.

What began as an informal solo effort to help a few designers use AI more effectively is now a structured program that the broader team actively shapes and contributes to. The goal is to make AI a practical collaborator across every part of the design process, and to give designers the infrastructure they need to work this way confidently.