The year ahead: a conversation with Soleio, Julie Zhuo, and May-Li Khoe

Design leaders on what 2022 holds for creative work

As teams settle into another year of hybrid and remote workflows, three design leaders — Soleio, Julie Zhuo, and May-Li Khoe — shared their thoughts on how creative work is evolving. Their reflections cover shifting team dynamics, the changing role of designers, and practical advice for navigating the year ahead.

Rethinking team rituals and connection

Soleio, a design leader and early Figma investor, sees the biggest challenge for teams as maintaining the casual, low-stakes interactions that spark collaboration. He points out that while async tools have made execution more efficient, they can leave less room for the spontaneous exchanges that build trust and shared understanding.

Julie Zhuo, former VP of Product Design at Facebook and author of The Making of a Manager, echoes that sentiment. She notes that many teams are still operating with habits formed during the early rush to remote work — and that those habits are not always sustainable. Her advice is to deliberately redesign rituals around how your team actually works today.

May-Li Khoe, former VP of Design at Kickstarter and a visiting scholar at NYU, suggests focusing on the "in-between" moments. She recommends carving out time for open-ended conversation, even if it's a structured stand-up slot.

The designer's role is broadening

On the craft side, all three see the designer's remit expanding beyond pixels and prototypes. Soleio observes that the most impactful design work now happens at the intersection of engineering, product, and business. He encourages designers to develop fluency across those areas rather than deepening specialization alone.

Khoe adds that designers have a natural capacity to bridge disciplines, and that teams benefit when designers take part in technical debates and product strategy from the start. Zhuo cautions, though, that breadth without depth thins out the work. She wants more from designers when he gives feedback: more rigorous thinking about the logic and systems behind a design.

From work plans to career arcs

When asked about career advice, Zhuo says designers should imagine their path as something like a portfolio: a collection of distinct chapters, each with focus. She recommends thinking in multi-year arcs and picking opportunities that compound over time and grow reputation and skills.

Soleio encourages newer designers to optimize for mentorship and learning surface. He says the work itself is the curriculum and the people around you are the teachers.

Khoe closes with a reminder that creativity — and careers — need rest. She advises everyone to protect their energy and make choices that keep the work generous and joyful, without running down.

Design beyond the office: three perspectives on 2022

For this edition of “In Conversation,” we brought together three voices from across the design spectrum — longtime designer and investor Soleio, author and former Facebook VP of Design Julie Zhuo, and interdisciplinary artist May-Li Khoe — to talk about where creative work is heading. Figma’s Alia Fite moderated.

Soleio: hybrid teams, automated feedback, and the leap to spatial computing

Remote and hybrid work has become a permanent fixture. How does that change creative work in the coming year?

Creative work will keep reflecting the transition to a hybrid workforce. Context and institutional knowledge will shift toward digital environments. Traditional whiteboarding will move from conference rooms into tools like FigJam, and more people across the workforce will feel comfortable using creative tools as those tools become more collaborative and accessible.

You relocated to the UK recently. What has that adjustment been like?

The hardest part is building a mental model of how London differs from Silicon Valley. In the Bay Area, tech is the dominant industry; elsewhere it is the up-and-coming, disruptive sector. Much of what we consider common knowledge in tech hubs is still new in emerging markets.

London is an ascendant ecosystem, with a notable influx of investors supporting British entrepreneurs at the earliest stages. Founders no longer need to relocate to Silicon Valley to raise financing and build competitive businesses. The UK can now be home to the next generation of tech giants, and founders can help shape the city itself.

Design is becoming more collaborative and more global. What effects do you expect?

Teams will need to coordinate asynchronous feedback across time zones, which requires more deliberate process design. We will rely more on clear writing and video recordings for feedback and direction. Shared context from offices and in-person meetings is giving way to clear documentation and transparent decision-making — good organizational hygiene will become a bigger advantage.

At Config 2020 you said design is the future of open source. What else seems inevitable?

Design exploration and feedback will become increasingly automated. Just as we collaborate with people today, we will work alongside non-human agents tuned to the manual tasks we now do. That changes the nature of teamwork — individuals can move through an opportunity space much more quickly when virtual collaborators handle more of the work.

Where do you see the most design innovation?

Software development tools and next-generation productivity tools keep impressing me. Knowledge work will operate very differently in five years than it did five years ago, largely because software and data have become directly accessible to non-technical workers, reshaping the modern workforce.

What excites you about the design community?

The range of problems designers are tackling — from first crypto wallets to next-generation space transport to assistive AI for coding. Products will span dozens of devices and contexts: AR/VR headsets, phones, smartwatches, automobiles, smart mirrors, and more. That breadth of approaches signals the maturation of the field.

What else should we be thinking about?

We are moving toward spatial computing — the metaverse — and designers should expect a more disruptive leap than the transition from desktop to mobile. Augmented reality will force us to revisit almost all design patterns accumulated over the past decade. It wipes the slate clean for how we interact with information, other people, and virtual collaborators.

Julie Zhuo: management rituals, input goals, and the web3 education gap

Your book “The Making of a Manager” drew on leading a design team for the first time. How do those lessons apply to hybrid or digital-first work?

Principles of good management haven’t changed, but the challenges have — far beyond what we imagined pre-pandemic. The biggest difference is that connecting as humans remotely is harder. We miss body language, hallway conversations, lunches, sharing screens. Making space for that is critical, whether through more intentional 1:1 check-ins or new team rituals.

A practice that has stuck on our team: starting large meetings with a prompt on a collaborative whiteboard that everyone answers in the first five minutes. Seeing everyone’s words appear at once recreates a sense of shared effort and gives everyone a chance to be heard. There is still a breakthrough product waiting to be built — one that senses who is physically together and who is remote, and makes that a seamless experience.

You have written about staying in the “discomfort zone.” How do you hope to see that this year?

I started setting input goals rather than output goals years ago, because design taught me to trust the process: repeat something enough and it moves from hard to habit. For 2022, I am deepening data viz skills by designing a graphic every week and expanding my understanding of systems through an hour a week of history, finance, or business reading.

Designing for web3 has exploded as a conversation. What challenges and opportunities do you see?

In the short term, the primary challenge is education. Most people associate web3 with scams and environmental destruction, and many web3 sites do not help — insider terms, gas fees, DAOs, long random strings. That perception changes only with demonstrable value, good metaphors, and design patterns that transparently show users what is happening and when to think twice.

Long term, there are huge opportunities to solve existing problems in new ways. As blockchain transactions become cheaper and scalable, use cases will extend beyond finance and art. We cannot imagine them all today, just as we could not have predicted ride-hailing from early mobile phones, but there are green fields in creator-dominated areas like music, gaming, video, writing, and social communication.

What should be top of mind this year?

Designers are founding companies every week. After the pandemic’s period of reflection, more people want to create the thing they want to be part of — based on mission, problem space, or ways of working. I would love to see conversations widen the creative-to-entrepreneur path. Designers have always been inventors and problem solvers; now we need to scale that into sustainable businesses.

May-Li Khoe: care, collective imagination, and finding hope locally

“Unprecedented” has worn thin. How do you describe 2021, and how should 2022 differ?

To quote an ancient error dialogue: “Something went wrong.” When people say “we have never seen anything like this,” I ask: who is “we,” exactly? I hope this is a chance to look for answers in better places.

I think of 2021 as a blacklight — it made visible the breakages and faulty designs of the current world order. The gap between market indicators and people thriving is glaringly obvious. At the same time, there were new beginnings and headway in labor organizing, some of it with real historical precedent.

Adversity can spark incredible creativity and amplify the hope-giving aspects of human nature. I hope 2022 is a year to find and cultivate what is good in the face of hardship — valuing lives, labor, care, maintenance, and our collective imagination of a different future.

At Config 2020 you spoke about “joyfully subverting the status quo.” How should that come to life this year?

Design acts as a gardener for the collective imagination. We observe the world in nuanced ways, imagine multiple futures, and render possibilities so others can picture them too.

I would love to see designers build a stronger critical foundation and a wider range of historical, societal, and cultural understanding, so we stop recreating historic problems. We are past technology’s era of naive optimism. Conversations should shift away from manicuring capitalism — truly new ways of thinking do not happen overnight, and they rarely generate easy buzz. Fads are fun but rarely sustainable answers.

Great design considers the well-being of others and creates conditions for thriving. Systems of care should be valued over extraction and denial of responsibility for harm.

What makes you optimistic?

Interesting thinking from the margins is finding its way to more hearts and minds. Years ago, a technologist citing bell hooks or Grace Lee Boggs drew question marks. Today it draws less. Popular culture is centering more interesting voices and narratives, thanks to hard work behind the scenes.

There is a pop-up community clinic in my neighborhood run by Unidos en Salud, UCSF, and the Latino Task Force. It is great design in action — designed by the neighborhood, for the neighborhood. The team observes operations daily and adjusts. By the time I got my booster, I could feel care in every moment: the registration desk, a waiting area with prizes for kids and snacks, a radio playing reggaetón. They administered 500 vaccines the day before I arrived. It is 100% bilingual in speech and signage, located to serve essential workers, ready to help the digitally challenged — a model of public health despite adversity. Papel picado dances in the breeze above the parking lot, making it feel like a public health party. That gives me hope.

The Hardest Problem Isn’t Technical Anymore

When Soleio, Julie Zhuo, and May-Li Khoe look at the coming year, they don’t spend much time on the next framework or the hot new language. The real bottleneck, they argue, has moved up the stack. The hardest problems are now about people, coordination, and taste.

“The technology is the easy part,” Soleio says. “The hard part is deciding what to build and getting a group of people to build it well together.” As tools abstract away more of the lower-level work, the differentiator for teams becomes their ability to make good product decisions quickly and to communicate effectively while doing it.

This Shifts the Load Onto Leadership

That has direct consequences for engineering managers and tech leads. Their job is no longer mainly to make technical calls; it’s to set up the conditions where a group of smart people can converge on the right trade-offs. That involves structuring conversations, making the implicit explicit, and often being the one to hold the bar on what “done” actually looks like.

Zhuo points out that this is a competency that needs to be practiced just like any technical skill. “We talk about code reviews as a discipline, but rarely do we have the same rigor around reviewing each other’s thinking.” She suggests that teams start treating design and product decisions with the same kind of critical, iterative review culture that they bring to code.

The Role of Shared Vocabulary

Part of that review culture depends on having a shared language. When designers and engineers use the same terms, they can have actual conversations instead of serial translations. Khoe emphasizes this is why co-located tools matter, not just for workflow speed, but for building that mutual understanding over time. “It’s not about the artifact,” she says. “It’s about seeing how each other thinks.”

They caution against searching for a silver-bullet process that will eliminate friction. Friction is inherent—it comes from caring about the outcome. The goal is to keep that friction healthy and focused on the product rather than on miscommunication between disciplines.

Retaining Beginner’s Mind

A common thread across the conversation is the half-life of expertise. With the pace of change slated for the next year, what you know can become outdated faster than you expect. The three design veterans argue that the most valuable trait going forward is the willingness to be a novice again, particularly when confronting new material tools or emerging interaction models.

That means hiring and cultivating teams that are comfortable with not knowing. Experimental cultures do better here because they normalize the act of being wrong on the way to being right. For engineers used to mastery, this can be an uncomfortable position, but it is also where the biggest opportunities for invention lie.