d.MBA

🎟️ WHO GETS TO DECIDE? Brighton, 23 September 2026
Want to experience Melin’s workshop for yourself? Join us at Sea Lanes in Brighton for an evening exploring where designers fit in leadership as AI changes our work.
You’ll work through real AI decisions, practise navigating difficult stakeholder conversations, and leave with a practical decision checklist and your own AI manifesto.
Tickets are just £30 including food and a drink, £25 each if you bring a friend, and even less if you come as a team.
👉 Get your ticket: https://d.mba/sessions-brighton
Before you add AI, ask these 5 questions.
Designers are increasingly being asked to put AI into products, processes and workflows. But how do you know when it’s actually the right decision?
In this episode of In Practice, I’m joined by Melin Edomwonyi, founder and UX Director at Seedable Studio, to explore five areas we should be questioning before reaching for AI: value, trust, cost, safety and ethics.
We talk about starting with the problem rather than the tool, the risks AI can introduce to users and brands, and how designers can bring balance and critical thinking into conversations about AI without getting caught up in either the hype or the backlash.
Melin also shares how designers can use the skills we already have to ask better questions, bring evidence into the room and have more influence over the decisions being made around AI.
FIND MELIN
Seedable Studio: https://seedable.studio
LinkedIn:   / melinedo 
🎓 APPLICATIONS FOR d.MBA ARE OPEN
Our next five-month d.MBA cohort starts on 5 October 2026. If you want to build your confidence around business, strategy and having more influence in the decisions that shape your work, applications are open now.
Apply: https://d.mba/apply
00:00 The AI mess that took years to clean up
01:30 Conversation starts: meet Melin
02:06 Pressured to use AI in 2023 — and the fallout
04:54 Inside "Leading With Clarity in the AI Era"
07:09 Love and hate: how you really feel about AI
07:51 Personal values vs organisational values
10:27 The five hard questions
11:09 Value: don't start with the tool
14:24 Trust & UX: hallucinations and who's accountable
18:03 Cost: compute, maintenance and the tech giant risk
22:12 Safety & ethics: bias, data leakage, energy
25:03 ChatGPT vs Gemini vs Claude
27:42 Pushing back without being "the AI skeptic"
34:45 Writing your AI leadership manifesto
38:00 Seedable Studio and where to find Melin

Would anyone miss your product if it vanished tomorrow? It's one of the best strategic questions you can ask, and it's just one part of the Worth-It Test.
Juju (Juliana Muñoz Uribe) is a strategist and writer whose Substack, Unfluence Lab, tracks how behaviour and meaning are shifting in tech. Her argument: as products mature, extraction creeps into the business model, meaning breaks, and users quietly stop caring. Her answer is a scorecard built on four pillars of meaning from social psychology, coherence, connection, contribution, and something bigger, that lets you audit any product, filter ideas, and work out whether what you're building is genuinely worth it. In this episode she opens it up on screen, scores real products with it, and then does something braver: she scores this podcast, live, with me pushing back on the grades.
We get into:

The four pillars: does it hold together, does it create a space people return to unprompted, is it genuinely useful, does it serve something beyond the transaction

The vanish test: would anyone miss it if it disappeared tomorrow

Live audits: Too Good To Go (where trust is cracking) and Cosmos (the intention economy done right)
The self-audit: Juju scores In Practice, and I argue two of her grades down

Using the scorecard to filter ideas now that building is no longer the bottleneck

What to do when the scorecard tells you your work isn't worth it, and why frustration is the most useful emotion you have

The shift from the attention economy to the intention economy

TRY IT YOURSELF
The scorecard comes from Juju's essay The Worth-It Test, read it, run it on your own product, and she'd genuinely love to hear how it went
https://unfluencelab.substack.com/p/t...
JUJU'S LINKS
Unfluence Lab, Juju's Substack on psycho-technology shifts: https://unfluencelab.substack.com
Juju on LinkedIn:   / jujumunoz 
d.MBA
Business education for designers: https://d.mba
00:00 "When extraction breaks meaning"
01:01 The conversation with Juju
01:30 Deleting Facebook: where the question started
02:57 The product playbook that erodes meaning
05:39 A model for "is it worth it?"
06:39 The four pillars of meaning
08:45 Turning the pillars into a scorecard
14:00 How the scoring works (0–3)
16:33 Auditing the DMBA podcast live
24:03 Real-world audits
30:06 The crisis of meaning
34:33 When your product isn't worth it
39:51 Final advice & where to find Juju

The real skill with AI tools isn't prompting. It's knowing when to stop prompting, when to step in, do it by hand, and hand the result back to the machine.
Darshan Gajara is a design leader who actually ships. His latest is Beanpresso, a coffee journaling app built in Lovable, launched, and refined in the wild. In this episode he shares his screen and walks through the whole build, the real project, the prompt history, the dead ends, and the moments a designer's eye had to take over, from first idea to live product, plus how he's approaching monetisation and marketing as a solo maker.
We get into:

Starting in Lovable and only bringing in Figma once the idea took shape, "give it a designer's touch"

Why you don't need to design whole flows anymore: get one page right and Lovable infers your design system

The handoff problem: screenshots plus precise description, component by component, down to corner radii

The SVG trick: when the animation kept breaking, he built the UI by hand, named every layer, exported an SVG and told Lovable to animate exactly that

"I'm still a designer": choosing to do the branding by hand, and why some things are better that way

Monetising a side project: premium taste insights, and a roaster marketplace his own users suggested

Marketing by making: free tools, a Berlin coffee guide the roasters reshared, and an AI writing setup trained on his own style

GET THE APP
Beanpresso, coffee journaling for people who take their beans seriously: https://beanpresso.com
MY REFLECTIONS
I share my personal takeaways from each episode in the d.MBA newsletter, what I actually learned and what I'm stealing for my own builds: https://d.mba/newsletter
LINKS
Darshan on LinkedIn:   / darshangajara 
Product Disrupt, Darshan's design learning resource: https://productdisrupt.com
Darshan's site: https://darshan.design
d.MBA, business education for designers: https://d.mba
00:00 – "They just keep banging their heads, burning through tokens"
00:36 – Who Darshan is, and what this episode is really about
01:36 – Interview starts: scratching his own itch.
05:51 – App demo: scanning a bag, community feed, taste stats
10:51 – Validating the idea (and why the existing coffee apps weren't good enough)
14:12 – Version one: built straight in Lovable, no design
15:54 – The prompting workflow: voice notes → Notion AI → Claude → Lovable
18:21 – Why he dropped the native app and went web
19:33 – Mood boarding with Variant, and finding the visual language
23:54 – Naming it, and why AI is terrible at logos
27:15 – What AI is good at, and what he had to do by hand
30:45 – Taking the design back into Lovable, component by component
33:27 – Building new flows once Lovable knows your design system
36:36 – The SVG animation trick
38:27 – Don't expect one tool to do everything
42:06 – Monetisation: premium stats and a roaster marketplace
45:45 – Distribution: small free tools, Instagram, and SEO
49:15 – Where to find Beanpresso and Darshan

Everybody thinks they know what matters to them. Then you ask them, and they can't tell you.
Daniel Burka has stood at more career crossroads than most: Digg, Glitch (which became Slack), a company sold to Google, five years at Google Ventures, then eight years in global public health. Every time the stakes got high, he reached for the same thing: Job Rank, a weighted-scoring spreadsheet for choosing your next role. In this episode he opens the real template on screen and walks through exactly how it works, for designers, product people, and anyone in tech staring at a hard career decision.
We get into:
Why the spreadsheet isn't really the tool: 90% of the value is being forced to write down what you value and rank it

If everything's important, nothing's important: how the weighting forces the trade-offs a pros and cons list politely avoids

The moment the sheet told Daniel something his ego didn't want to hear about a big role at Google

How the tool travels with you: same values, different weights, as your life changes

Where AI fits into a decision that should stay human

GET THE TEMPLATE
Free to copy, in Daniel's full write-up: https://www.hardproblems.com/articles...
LINKS
Hard Problems, helping designers and people in tech find work that matters: https://www.hardproblems.com
d.MBA, business education for designers: https://d.mba
00:15 – What this episode is about
02:10 – Daniel's career crossroads
04:15 – Job Rank: it's just a spreadsheet
04:40 – Writing down what matters to you
06:25 – Weighting each value (and why not everything's a 5)
09:50 – Scoring the jobs you're considering
11:20 – Scoring jobs that don't exist yet
13:10 – How to make your own job
16:50 – The Google role his ego wanted
19:10 – Why 90% of the value is just writing it down
21:10 – Hard Problems: work that actually matters
25:05 – Jobs that matte

Avi Ashkenazi, Senior Director of Product Design at Deel (Shopify and iwoca before that), walks through the Shredder: the framework he built for reverse-engineering any company's strategy from the outside, using nothing but public information.
It's the skill that moves designers from executing the brief to shaping it.
We get into:
Why studying competitors through their screens is the most superficial read there is

The tree metaphor: products are the fruit, strategy is the hidden trunk, and everything around it talks

How to read org charts, careers pages, investors and partners as leading indicators of a company's next move

Why companies ship their org chart, and how to spot the seams in the product

How AI has changed the way Avi runs the framework since he built it at iwoca

Using the Shredder on your own company, to find out what your strategy actually is