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Published · transcript-backedIan Silber: preference
16 Aug 2026 Lenny's Podcast OpenAI’s Head of Design: This is the best time in history to be a designer | Ian Silber
“I always tell candidates, we do not expect you to have a background in AI because again, this is evolving so quickly, but we definitely expect high curiosity about it and high aptitude to jumping in and learning how you're going to use this in your process, how it works.”
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Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Ian Silber
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- preference
- Recorded
- 16 Aug 2026
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…And following that thread of the human in the loop. When you're hiring designers these days, what's trending up in what you look for? What you think is more and more important in the designers that will be successful today, especially at OpenAI? And what's trending down, if anything? This might be a luxury of having a slightly larger team, but if you're at our scale, but even at a startup or a smaller company, I think this would still be true. I really believe in hiring a well-rounded team that has many different strengths. So I think it's important to have the right ratio of generalists that can do everything. But we also hire incredible visual designers or we have a really amazing brand team that helps us with the expression of our brand both out and in the product or great prototypers. And so I think that rounding that out or great product thinkers that are a little bit more strategic or people that are really obsessed over the very cutting edge of where these things are going. And I haven't found that one designer necessarily checks every single one of those boxes. I think people just naturally are drawn to certain things. And I think embracing that and when you build a team is actually, if you have the luxury of doing that, is really valuable. Okay, so that's a broad statement. But then as far as what we look for, we do definitely... I always tell candidates, we do not expect you to have a background in AI because again, this is evolving so quickly, but we definitely expect high curiosity about it and high aptitude to jumping in and learning how you're going to use this in your process, how it works. And not just how you use it in your process, but how, especially for us, how you're going to create tools to enable more people to use it. And so it's more about the curiosity, I think, is something that we really push on or look for. And then definitely prototyping. Prototyping is something I've always valued in my career, but I just think that it's become more and more accessible. And so that's something that I think really does stand out usually when we talk to candidates. And then I do think that just having a point of view on where these things are going or just any of the tools that people have worked on and really thinking that strategic thinking. I guess last one on this is systems thinking is becoming more and more important. And especially as you're... In our world, it's interesting because we're building the super intelligence that has all these different capabilities. And we need to think more about the underlying primitives that we can build that can kind of build on top of each other. This is something that I think Notion did really well early on was like, "We're going to build these building blocks and then everything kind of is composable." I think that's becoming really important too, as you think about like, well, we don't want to build all these sort of one-off siloed experiences. We want to be able to build and ship systems that can build on top of each other so that when someone goes and uses our product, it feels like one cohesive, simple thing. And the model can reason about how we can pull all these things together. that can build on top of each other so that when someone goes and uses our product, it feels like one cohesive, simple thing. And the model can reason about how we can pull all these things together. So that idea of really understanding the system and thinking about that is becoming even more important, especially because it's kind of complex of all the things that it could possibly do.…
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