I’m Kenny Mortimer, Director of Product Design at Smule. I lead the team behind how millions of people sing, perform, and find each other. I spend the rest of my energy on a second question: what does a design organization look like when AI collapses the distance between an idea and a working product?

I’ve been designing for over a decade across fitness, sports, streaming, and music. In that time I’ve built brands, apps, websites, marketing, apparel, and custom artwork, with a Bachelors Degree in Graphic Design behind it. I’m still process driven, but only where the process still earns it. A lot of what I was taught is now overhead: static mockups that die on handoff, linear stage gates, research that takes a quarter to synthesize. AI-accelerated workflows let a designer go from a hunch to something real and clickable in an afternoon, and I’d rather rebuild the team around that than defend the old shape of the job.

In practice that means I live in Figma and Claude Code in roughly equal measure, still write HTML, CSS & JavaScript, and pick up whatever tool got good last month. When I’m not doing that, I’m on a road bike, training for a triathlon, behind a drum kit, or with my kids.