Finding Roles in a Team with Generative AI

Considering different ways of looking at things can now be done easily and quickly with today’s Generative AI tools.

The Web paradigm rode the power of the search box. Into it, one can type keywords that relate to anything. Over the last 20 years, we have learned to rely on Internet search as the best way to find people, places, things, and sources of knowledge. We are always learning to script more effective search terms. And now search engines are using AI to improve results by using models of you and of what you are asking.

When we use Internet search or use a Generative AI prompt, we need to decide which parts of the responses on which to focus. Generative AI can be used to indulge and celebrate our curiosity. Instead of creating the perfect keyword search or the perfect prompt, we might start by exploring how to create great ways of looking at problems.

Our previous blog posts introduced ways of helping people experience how Generative AI can help you see things with affective emotional points of view (using faces presented to a camera) or different academic disciplines (choosing from 10 disciplines). This post encourages you to use Generative AI as a structuring tool to see the different parts of a problem, each with its own point of view. Let’s explore how different parts make up a whole.

Things, projects, and even organizations are made of parts. An organization often chooses people to fill roles to take responsibility for some aspect of solutions. Generative AI can help us work out the aspects that need be part of a solution.

So many activities have many aspects or need different kinds of contributions. The goal is to get us to make a habit of considering these parts as important, but different, points of view. This can remind us of the bigger picture and important alternatives as we flesh out a solution.

We can guide Generative AI as a “structuring tool” to take different aspects into account just by telling it to do so.

Making a company, for example, requires many different things to be considered, such as (long list alert): a brand it will be known by, the product that it will sell, a channel for how to go to market, how its products will be created, a way to deliver the product (procurement, logistics, customer/product/delivery follow-up), financial resources, regulatory and legal activities, relationships with other organizations, and the personnel and culture. We have thought of a pile of things that are needed, but are they the right parts? We will have to get organized to bring these parts together as a functioning company. For fun, we might ask AI to help us do this for some function of the company.

As a specific activity in our company, we might look at creating a product. Complementary activities all must be considered. So let’s ask GenAI:

What are some roles needed in product design?

Product Designer: Oversees the product’s design, balancing user experience, aesthetics, and functionality.
User Experience (UX) Designer: Focuses on making the product user-friendly and intuitive.
User Interface (UI) Designer: Designs the visual elements and layout of the product.
Product Manager: Coordinates development, ensuring the product meets business and user goals.
Interaction Designer: Designs how users interact with the product’s features and elements.
Industrial/Product Engineer: Develops the physical design and ensures manufacturability.
Design Researcher: Gathers user data to inform product decisions.
Prototyper: Builds physical or digital prototypes to test design concepts.
UX Writer: Creates clear, concise text for the product interface.
Visual Designer: Focuses on the branding, marketing, and aesthetic design.
Accessibility Designer: Ensures the product is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities.
Front-End Developer: Implements the product’s design through coding and front-end development.
Motion Designer: Adds animations and transitions to enhance user interaction.
System Designer: Manages design systems to ensure consistency across the product.

Wow, Generative AI made us aware of and explained the relationships between so many roles. For success in any project, someone has to take responsibility for understanding all its various aspects. But a common danger in a product design process is imagining that the parts that are not in our role description, and that we aren’t responsible for, will be taken care of by others.

Even if you are planning to have third parties take responsibility for the 14 things to create a prototype of some excellent idea, to evaluate it you will need to consider all the issues that have to be solved. We believe that everyone involved in a project needs to try to understand and consider all the parts. Even if you don’t think you have to bother with some aspects and outsource them, you are at the mercy of those you have delegated to when things don’t all work out.

Our earlier posts encouraged asking questions from different affective points of view and also from different academic domains. Here we encourage problem solvers to use Generative AI to break questions down into aspects as a structuring tool. We encourage you to let Generative AI help you consider parts of problems that are important…and even might be separated and worked on independently.

Tools that make people consider alternative perspectives can be instructive and productively valuable. The steps needed to complete big projects might be as important as the aspects that need to come together that we discussed here. Our next post will consider how AI can help us consider steps to completion as another way to view a problem.

With special thanks for input from Ellen Shay.