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Today I'm sharing Cramer Office—my design studio for founders at inflection points.
Here's my thesis
Nicolas Cramer@cramer
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Nicolas Cramer
3.2K posts
Nicolas Cramer
@cramer
Founder and principal at Cramer Office, a design studio for founders at inflection points
Katılım Haziran 2010
334 Takip Edilen465 Takipçiler
@thenanyu what poor incentives have you seen—no check on the impulse to design for other designers?
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Yes. PMM is a product concern.
I see a lot of orgs out there combining design and product management, which I think creates all sorts of poor incentives.
But product management and product marketing are a much more natural fit together.
Tony Fadell@tfadell
Most tech companies break out product management and product marketing into two separate roles: Product management defines the product and gets it built. Product marketing wires the messaging- the facts you want to communicate to customers- and gets the product sold. But from my experience that's a grievous mistake. Those are, and should aways be, one job. There should be no separation between what the product will be and how it will be explained- the story has to be utterly cohesive from the beginning. Your messaging is your product. The story you're telling shapes the thing you're making. I learned story telling from Steve Jobs. I learned product management from Greg Joswiak. Joz, a fellow Wolverine, Michigander, and overall great person, has been at Apple since he left Ann Arbor in 1986 and has run product marketing for decades. And his superpower- the superpower of every truly great product manager- is empathy. He doesn't just understand the customer. He becomes the customer. So when Joz stepped into the world with his next-gen iPod to test it out, he fiddled with it like a beginner. He set aside all the tech specs- except one: battery life. The numbers were empty without customers, the facts meaningless without context. And, that's why product management has to own the messaging. The spec shows the features, the details of how a product will work, but the messaging predicts people's concerns and finds way to mitigate them. - #BUILD Chapter 5.5 The Point of PMs
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I ran 12 miles through the backroads of Franklin, Tennessee early this morning. I think this may be on my list of best places to live. Beautiful scenery. Peaceful, open spaces. Quiet, but near a fun, lively city. Proximity to a major airport. Nice weather but still some seasons.
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The belief that EPD is collapsing into a single role called a “builder” is based on the incorrect assumption that product manager, engineer, and designer had the right boundaries to begin with.
For example, many of the people with the title “designer” that I respected the most were already a combination of “product manager + product designer + frontend engineer”. Now they can do each aspect even better / more. But they are still a “designer” (at least imo). The same applies to product managers who can (and should) do more of the product marketing, selling, and growth work.
Anyone looking for the new neat buckets to slot into will have a hard time over the next decade. The reality is that roles are simultaneously expanding and deepening (which many are ready for, or straight up don’t want to happen).
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@karrisaarinen @kevinyien @thenanyu you’re right, though i’m seeing it break down to two: an auteur and engineer. like we saw happen in film x.com/cramer/status/…
Nicolas Cramer@cramer
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My thinking too is that everyone can now do more of everything, you still have a lot variance in skills, interests or taste.
On average PMs tend to optimize impact/metrics/completeness, engineers optimize efficiency/delivery, designers expression/vibes. Try to make engineer, PM and designer design something. All turn out differently.
I think why lot of products has degraded the last decade that it’s been data and metrics driven, and often engineering driven. Rarely design driven.
One argument is that two former aspects matter more than design, therefore it’s rational companies optimize it. But the other factor is that designers rarely start companies so we haven’t seen enough examples of the latter.
Now in this new decade if we think about how to build great products, and products with great experiences, I’m not sure what is the right model. If anything, the most ai forward teams follow the former speed > impact optimization.
I have bit hard time trusting a “builder” just do all the product aspects well. The former model relied ideally some equal tradeoff negotiation between these roles (which in practice maybe didn’t happen much or enough).
I don’t have the answer but wish we could find model that optimizes for a great product experience, and aligns the people roles around it. It’s very easy everything turn in to slop now so wish there would be some counterbalance to it.
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December 2022 ( #Bitcoin ~$16,800–$17k, near the bear market bottom): @Cramer said he sold all his crypto and “wouldn’t touch crypto in a million years.” He also called it “never too late to sell an awful position.” Bitcoin then surged over 500% in the following three years
April 2021 (Bitcoin ~$63k): He sold his Bitcoin “to pay the mortgage” and dismissed it as “fake money for real money.” That was right near the local top before a sharp multi-month decline, but the long-term uptrend resumed strongly afterward.
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Jim Cramer says, "I don’t believe Bitcoin can reach $500k, let alone $1.0m, that’s improbable."
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i feel like i'm going crazy, but almost every reply i see on twitter is just ai generated slop.
i don't even know if it's actual bots, or people using AI to write stuff for them, or...
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@jsngr tech is having its new wave moment and it will take an auteur's vision to create remarkable stuff
x.com/cramer/status/…
Nicolas Cramer@cramer
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design seems to be viewed as dispensable in this very moment
but the reality that will become clear, as time has shown, is that design is what will make you rise above the rest
Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan
I don’t know exactly what’s going on here, but it does feel AI-related. Unlike PM and eng, which started growing in 2024 (two years post-ChatGPT), design didn’t. If I had to venture a theory, I’d say that because AI is allowing engineers to move so quickly, there’s less opportunity—and less desire—to involve the traditional design process. That said, you’d think design would become a differentiator as more products compete for attention. Something to think about for your company! We’ll keep watching this trend and AI’s impact on org design more generally. One interesting observation we made when we went a level deeper: the ratio of demand for PMs vs. designers has flipped. In mid-2023, we went from more open designer roles to more open PM roles. And ever since, PM demand has been pulling away (currently 1.27x). This will be another trend to monitor, in terms of how AI is reshaping org design.
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@thenanyu so much this. is there a name for a designer who doesn’t like designers?
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Put more bluntly, many designers I've worked with care more about the opinions of other designers than of their users.
If you had to choose
1. designers think you're cool, but low usage
2. heavy usage, other designers think its lame
which one do you choose? every PM picks 2
claire vo 🖤@clairevo
I’ll say the thing no one is saying: design culture is broken in lots of companies. Often design teams & designers are the most resistant to change org in the EPD triad, with highly vocal AI opponents, and little skill or interest in the art of campaigning for influence or resources. Won’t hold a number like a PM, not yelled at about timelines like engineering. While I have brought design topics to the board convo, not a single board has pressed me our design talent, strategy, or velocity. Most teams treat design like a tax they don’t want to pay, and those that *do* take a deep interest and want to invest in design get back big “get out of my figma” energy. And if you’re too precious about craft to dirty your hands with the dark art of corporate politics, good luck getting more headcount. If a PM or engineer can get 85% there with tailwind and a dream, you better come to the table with more than “I represent the user.” Great designers are worth more than almost anyone on the team, and I’ve worked with lots of gems, but this is 0% surprising to me.
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@elanmiller the diamond. i find i do it best when i get in a walk or workout and come back to be the editor for r2
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Trying a new thing lately:
R1 creative presentations are more of a testing ground to see how far I can push a concept before worrying about execution.
I find that if I polish too early, I end up defending a headline or design instead of exploring whether the territory is even right.
Armed with feedback, really bring it home in R2.
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@signulll when there is nothing else, chase the vision
x.com/cramer/status/…
Nicolas Cramer@cramer
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when you’re doing something genuinely new you have no market signal, no comp set, & no validation loop.
the only reliable prior is your own aesthetic judgment. that’s what artists operate on by necessity.
founders at zero should too. e.g. we are a couple of ppl having fuck loads of fun building. like we get a genuine high from this. this effectively turns our office into an opium den.
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@danshipper i recently came around to a similar metaphor
designer / pirate = writer/director
engineer / architect = crew
x.com/cramer/status/…
Nicolas Cramer@cramer
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new model for engineering team structure in 2026:
2 people only
one pirate and one architect
the pirate's job is to move as fast as possible to develop valuable, shipped product features by vibe coding.
the architect's job is to turn the product surface discovered by the pirate into a reliable, structured machine—also by vibe coding, but at a slower, more well-reasoned pace.
every product needs a pirate but most product's only need an architect once they some form of PMF, and in that case they usually don't need one full-time. architects can work across many codebases and solve interesting technical challenges. pirates go hard on a product that they own end-to-end.
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the auteur era in film happened because production got cheap.
the french new wave wasn't born because of talent alone. it was new tools unlocking a new way to make movies.
ai is doing the same thing to tech and that changes who will lead.
x.com/cramer/status/…
Nicolas Cramer@cramer
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@JacobyBrandon is that a software allegory or just really soulless apartment buildings
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when cost of labor and materials is reduced for everyone, the result is that everything starts to feel the same
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How to never lose your job to AI:
Just surf the models.
Frontier models outclass humans at any form of knowledge that can be written down.
But people who use frontier models in their field of expertise generate new, tacit, situational expertise that the models don't yet have—because the models can't be trained on how they will be used in the future.
Humans can learn to use new models faster than new models can be trained that absorb what they find out, so you can continually "surf" on top of the model's intelligence to generate new expertise.
This is a fundamental limitation of LLMs because they don't learn past their training data. Even few-shot learning doesn't account for this because whatever can be codified into a few shot prompt needs to be used in the correct situation—and this will always stay uncodified in the general case.
Just surf the models. Reap the benefits of a totally new world.
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@thesamparr @rfkenmore no man who can comfortably wear their 770s has every picked up a barbell
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@rfkenmore i own the lee buck jean. its amazing as its good for big asses and thighs. this jcrew ish got a bunch of white pancake ass mf-ers. that's a no for me, dog.
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First look at J.Crew x Lee
I wonder why they felt compelled to make it look even remotely similar to the direction of Buck Mason x Lee from last year
Not claiming they are the same, you can see for yourself
But I would think it's a mistake to invite such comparisons if I were J.Crew
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@lulumeservey when in doubt build for real people and speak plainly about it
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These are the top things Claude users wanted from AI
Meanwhile a lot of AI companies’ messaging focuses on the things at the bottom of this list:
creativity, learning, entrepreneurship, societal transformation
ie, things tech people care a lot about
Anthropic@AnthropicAI
We invited Claude users to share how they use AI, what they dream it could make possible, and what they fear it might do. Nearly 81,000 people responded in one week—the largest qualitative study of its kind. Read more: anthropic.com/features/81k-i…
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