AI can show us patterns across millions of users, but it can't tell you what a single customer is feeling. We explored this tension with Zack Gottlieb, VP of Design at Snowflake. He offered his perspective on how designers and product teams can not only adapt but also lead in this new era by focusing on one of our most fundamental skills: customer empathy.

Tessa: How do you see the role of empathy in design evolving with the increasing use of data and AI in understanding user behavior?

Zack: I think the future of empathy and design, even with all this new data and AI, isn't going to be about less humanity. It's going to be more about responsibility. Data and AI have expanded our reach so much, but ultimately, as designers, it's still our job to care.

These powerful tools that we have help us understand user behavior, but the role of empathy is to shift us from what we would traditionally think about as intuition—our initial guess at why something’s doing something—to augmenting that intuition with evidence through data. AI can highlight where to empathize, but it's still up to designers to decide how we respond. This doesn't remove the need for empathy—it amplifies the moments where we need it most.

I also think this idea of “ethical empathy” is really important, though it's something we don't discuss often enough. AI is incredibly powerful and can recommend actions that optimize for engagement, but that doesn't necessarily serve user well-being. As designers, we need to be an ethical counterweight and advocate for our customers, making sure that designs serve the long-term trust of customers over short-term gains. I think it's not just about understanding users—in some cases, it's about standing up for them.

Tessa: Things are moving so fast. What are some ways you think teams can build customer empathy quickly?

Zack: The good news is that the methods don't change much from what we've traditionally been doing. Empathy isn't a phase—it's a muscle. Like any muscle, you have to exercise it continuously, or it will atrophy, and you won't be able to rely on it when you need it.

There are a lot of things you can do. You need to operationalize these activities and turn them into daily habits. Are you joining customer calls weekly? Are you monitoring support tickets? Do you have dashboards that highlight what customers are experiencing?

There is no replacing actually using the product for yourself. At Uber, for example, everyone drove. If you’re on the driver team, you cannot create an experience from your chair for someone 10,000 miles away. Travelling by car in San Francisco versus India is a completely different experience. You have to get in the customer's shoes, you have to use the product, you have to dogfood it. We do the same thing here at Snowflake. We are constantly playing with our products and talking to our internal data engineers, scientists, and analysts to get a signal on things before we even talk to external customers.

We also still use traditional methods like journey maps, vision and North Star stories, and data-connected personas. You have to get in there and not just imagine what it's like, but actually use the product and be that customer. That is the only way to create the great experiences we all want to build.

Tessa: As companies scale, direct contact with customers often lessens. How do you think large, complex organizations can maintain a deep understanding of the customer?

Zack: You have to operationalize it. As organizations scale, there's a risk of abstracting the customer into pure dashboards and personas, which causes teams to stop feeling the customer's needs. You have to maintain that deep customer understanding no matter your size. 

So, how do you institutionalize empathy as a principle, and not just a research deliverable?

I think that there are a few things that you can do. One of the things that I really liked at Atlassian that we did was we had weekly “pulse spotlights.” Every employee received a unique email with direct customer feedback—what they liked, what they didn't, and how our product fit into their day. It made you feel connected to the customer and their pain.

As leaders, we also have to lead by example. It's not enough to ask your teams to do these things. We need to show up to customer calls. We need to call out when great products or features are shipped and highlight how we got there: by learning from our customers and our research and design teams.

You have to recognize people—whether it's a designer, a PM, or an engineer—who have a high EQ for customers and can demonstrate the value they produce. It can't just be about speed. It doesn't matter how fast you build something if it's not the right thing. I would rather have the right thing, built more slowly, than the wrong thing built quickly.

Embedding researchers and designers with direct customer access into core product teams pays for itself many times over. You have to get that embedded customer perspective. Otherwise, teams just build features and often forget who they are building for.

Also, make sure you actually talk to the customer support teams. We did that a ton at Uber and we do it here at Snowflake. We brought our customer support teams to an on-site to ask: What problems are you hearing from customers? How do you resolve them? This gives you a totally different level of empathy because you're not just thinking about the customer, you're also thinking about how to make it easier for the customer support person who is trying to solve the problem.

Tessa: As part of, or beyond, AI, what are some emerging design trends that you believe will significantly impact the field in the next few years?

Zack: We're all caught up in it right now, trying to figure it out. Design isn't just about adapting to AI—it's really about helping shape how humans experience AI. That takes a long-term view and requires a bold, forward-looking recalibration of the skills, roles, and responsibilities that our teams need.

From an emerging design perspective, AI is already reshaping the required skill sets. We see trends like “vibe coding” bringing design and engineering much closer together. AI is about the democratization of creativity and I think it needs to be embraced that way. For a long time, the technical skill required was a barrier to getting a great idea out. Now, we have no excuse for not getting great ideas out quickly.

However, AI currently is about conveying a vision. It's not actually about achieving that vision and making it perfect yet. There is still a ton of work that needs to happen to make these things a reality.

When I think about these shifting skills, we have to move from screen design to systems thinking. As interfaces become more dynamic, the focus will shift from static designs to adaptive, intelligent systems. Understanding logic, behavior modeling, and state management are skills that designers will have to develop.

Data literacy and prompt crafting are also becoming crucial. At Snowflake, data literacy is a necessity, but it's becoming more prevalent everywhere. Another area we haven't talked about enough is multi-modal design. Again, this is about designers moving beyond pixels to design for chat, voice, gestures, and background automation. Even prompt design is now a UI skill. These are some of the trends that I’m seeing.

Tessa: What excites you about the future of design?

Zack: It's the same thing that has kept me in this field for so long: the constantly shifting set of surfaces, expectations, experiences, and customer problems. The context of how and where you design may change—from web to mobile to AI—but you are still solving fundamental customer problems and focusing on creating great experiences.

Design has been constantly evolving since before I got into it, and now it's just evolving faster. It feels like we are reimagining in real-time, and that's fun. The career continues to move forward, there's no end in sight, and the accelerating pace makes it even more exciting right now.

At Insight Out 2025, Zack sat down with Chris Abad of Pixelated Path to discuss what shapes a career in product and design. From navigating missteps to building trusted partnerships with product and engineering, Zack shared a candid look at what it takes to grow—and stay grounded—along the way. Watch the discussion on our YouTube channel.