Why Anxiety, Not Capability, Is the Real Barrier to AI Adoption

Most of the conversation around AI and design skips past the real problem. It's not whether the tools are good enough. It's the anxiety sitting underneath: are we already behind, how do I evolve my craft alongside this technology, and how do I do that without losing what makes me good at my job in the first place.

When I joined Matillion, I could feel that uncertainty inside the Product Design team. Not because people lacked talent or didn't care, but because the noise around AI had become exhausting, and there was nowhere safe to just explore.

So we built DesignJam.

How the day worked

Every designer picked a real problem sourced from across the business. Ahead of the session, I worked with teams across Matillion to surface problems worth tackling outside the pressure of deadlines and roadmap commitments, so there was already momentum and support behind the work before it started.

From there, we moved through a series of workshop exercises designed to turn loose thinking into something worth building. We explored the opportunity space, aligned on value, reframed the challenge, pushed ideas quickly, and focused on what was genuinely worth taking forward.

Then came the fun part. We connected our Figma, Design System, and GitHub repositories directly into Claude, along with a Product Design plugin built from custom skills, so anyone on the team could spin up a fresh canvas, build straight from Figma, or pull a real area of the platform into a local sandbox to experiment with safely.

Once everyone had something, they recorded a quick Loom walkthrough and shared it with the wider business: not just the output, but the outcome they were driving toward and the key decisions and trade-offs behind it. That turned DesignJam from an internal exercise into a company-wide conversation, and it's exactly the loop we want to keep building: problem, concept, make, share, learn, outcome.

We even made it a little competitive. There were no real winners, but designers pushed hardest for the (fully unofficial) Matillion Heavyweight Title, awarded to whoever went furthest outside their comfort zone.

What actually changed

The output mattered less than what happened around it. People who normally held back started jumping in. Rough ideas got shared openly. When someone brought a concept to life on the big screen, the room reacted like it mattered, because it did.

That's the part worth paying attention to. The shift wasn't the tools or the AI. It was a team giving itself permission to experiment, and discovering that curiosity is a lot stronger than fear once you remove the pressure to already have the answer.

DesignJam is now a fortnightly fixture. Eight designers running eight experiments every two weeks adds up to close to 100 new concepts a year, on top of everything already on the roadmap.

Read my full story on how DesignJam came together on Medium.