Dan Brown is the kind of person who will walk into your organization, look at your product, and immediately see the structural problems nobody else will name — because he's been doing exactly that for enterprise teams for over two decades. After 18 years co-founding 8Shapes, he now runs Curious Squid Design Lab, where he focuses on product information architecture and the deep craft work that most teams are too rushed to do.

In this episode of The UX Level-Up Podcast, Sophia and Dan get into a tension that's been building for years — information architects and product designers are working in the same problem space and barely talking to each other, and AI is about to make that very, very expensive. They talk about what actually goes wrong on teams that skip the structural work, why the frenzy to use AI tools is adding pressure instead of removing it, and what Dan said at a recent workshop that made Sophia write it down on the spot.

LINKS:

Dan's newsletter, Spilling Ink: https://curioussquid.substack.com/

The Unchecked Podcast: https://unchecked.buzzsprout.com/

Connect with Dan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danmbrown/

Find out more about Dan: https://www.curious-squid.com

Continue the conversation in the OOUX Forum: https://forum.ooux.com/posts/dan-brown-product-ia-with-ai-as-the-ultimate-level-up

Connect with Sophia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiav/

Follow Sophia on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sophiavux/

Check out the OOUX Website: https://ooux.com

Follow Sophia on Medium: https://sophiavux.medium.com

Interested in training your team on OOUX? Book a call here: https://calendly.com/ooux/opportunity

Get on the Cohort 12 waitlist: https://ooux.com/certification