The Design Team That's Outnumbered 20-to-1 | How Sierra Designs with AI

At Sierra, engineers outnumber designers many times over. Rather than treating that as a constraint, designers Wayne Fan and Nick Hiotis have turned it into leverage: using AI to build the systems and components the whole engineering org ships from, while still hand-drawing the details that matter - like the ghost icon that became the company's unofficial mascot. In this case study, they share: ◼ The unexpected advantages of a small design team inside a large engineering org ◼ Prototype on real data to learn in hours, not days, whether an idea works ◼ Build the shared components engineers reuse, instead of polishing screens one at a time ◼ Look across the whole product to catch where teams are rebuilding the same thing ◼ Keep hand-drawing the details that give a product personality, even when AI could do it AI in Design 2026 is the second annual research project from Designer Fund and Foundation Capital on how design teams work with AI. Alongside data drawn from a survey of 900+ designers, we're publishing case studies on how design happens at companies like Anthropic, Sierra, Stripe, Notion, Shopify, Linear, and Framer. Explore the AI in Design 2026 report: https://stateofaidesign.com Designer Fund: https://designerfund.com | https://x.com/designerfund Foundation Capital: https://foundationcapital.com