Jon Williams

AI-READY UPSKILLING: I spent three weekends (and 15 years) building a framework to help product designers figure out where they stand with AI. It's called E-P-I-A-S × SAE. And before you ask, yes, I know it'll need updates before the ink is dry. The name? Yeah. It ain't perfect. But something is better than nothing right now. The idea is simple: there are two ways to grow with AI tools. - DEEPER - WIDER Let me quickly clarify. DEEPER = (Explorer → Practitioner → Integrator → Architect → Steward), or E-P-I-A-S as an acronym that really rolls off the tongue ;-) WIDER = (Manual → AI-Assisted → Partially Automated → Guided Automation → Mostly Automated), or basically the Society of Automotive Engineers' self-driving framework you may have heard about with all the "auto pilot" talk these years Most designers are somewhere between SAE L1 and L2, trying to figure out what "good" looks like. And within that level of AI sensibilities, they're in one of the E-P-I-A-S stages. This framework gives you a map for where you might be, and where you might want to go next. Here's the thing everyone misses: an S-Steward at L1 (someone who's built org standards for ChatGPT) is more valuable than an E-Explorer at L4 (someone fumbling with advanced toolchains). If you're a fan of the T-shaped approach to design, then you won't have a problem figuring out whether you want to find more breadth, or else more focus. That said, right now depth of judgment beats breadth of tooling. For sure. If you're a designer trying to level up your AI skills (or a design leader trying to upskill your team) this approach should be useful to you. It's open-sourced over here github.com/aji-ai/dit-2026 as a markdown file in case you want to ingest it with your agent. linkedin.com/pulse/ai-upskil…