My own studio, and how it had to change. GWSK Product Studio
If developers build with AI, designers work at the same speed, in the same tools.
GWSK is my own studio, run since 2021 alongside employer work. At the start any client through the door was fine. Now I care about the product, the problem, and how far the team is willing to go. I look for products that touch agentic workflows, and for companies with distribution, marketing, and the contacts to get the job done.
The work happens in Cursor, Claude, and Codex. Figma comes out when an idea is so rough that I need to sketch it before anyone can react. That is a change from how I ran the studio two years ago, and Say Yeah is why.
The client brings the problem. I design the solution, present it to the developers and the company, take the feedback, iterate, and get sign-off before anything is built. Every significant decision is written down with the reason and the tradeoff, so the founder can defend it after I have left.
I hold direction, the system decisions, and the final pass. The designers I hire carry the fine work. One of them went from never having shipped a live product to delivering work I could put in front of a client, in five months, with clear direction.
Say Yeah is a corporate learning platform. It came to me through an old connection, and I watched them move from marketing to education to corporate training, which is where they belong. Trainers, learners, and admins all needed a home, and one person is often two of those at once.
I made it one role-aware dashboard. A trainer and a learner see the same course components. A trainer or an admin gets more functions on top. Most of the dashboard stays shared, so the component system does not explode on the developers or on the people using it.
The two developers on Say Yeah were working with AI. They were almost a sprint ahead of the designers working in Figma. The designs we handed them were refinements of things they had already built from the product manager's brief. Design was following, not leading.
So the studio changed how it works. If developers build with AI, designers have to work at the same speed, in the same tools, or the handoff arrives after the decision. That is the cost of Say Yeah, and it is the reason the studio looks the way it does now.
Say Yeah: a corporate learning platform, one dashboard for every role.
What shipped.
Say Yeah: one dashboard for trainers, learners, and admins. October 2025 to January 2026.
UnivJobs: the early marketplace product, 2016 to 2019.
Delvinia, Methodify: founding design team on an enterprise research platform, 2020 to 2021.
Studio work is separate from my employers' work. Client names and money are left out.
The earlier startups are described without numbers.