Head of Design Engineering @RocketOTD, prev Product & Growth @FlutterFlow | Design x Engineering x AI Systems
New York, New York
Joined November 2016
- Tweets1.5K
- Following168
- Followers4K
- Likes1.6K
Pinned Tweet
Still coming down from an incredible few days at Config 2026.
Emily Strobl and I had the chance to present to a packed room on how @RocketOTD is preparing for the AI era by embedding @figma's ecosystem deeper into the product development lifecycle.
Catch the 20 minute talk below!
Loving @figma's new features from Config India!
New projects look like:
• Creating Specs with project requirements
• Mapping our user journeys, etc with Figjam
• Pulling updated Spec into Figma Design to start ideation
• Using the Figma Chrome Extension to bring design/code inspiration onto the canvas
• Drafting design system components on canvas
• Creating repo with new components + Code Connect
• Iterating with Code Layers to perfect chrome
• Drafting PR
🔁
The growth strategy here has been fun too.
Invite-only after the first 25 students onboard so each school can start to build critical mass for school polls, etc. Invite 3 friends to instantly skip the waitlist.
Have @Muse create an Instagram account for each new high school. It automatically creates relevant posts for the students and posts them daily. Automatically follow students from associated sport accounts (e.g. X_football, X_soccer, X_cheer) to spark interest.
Added dynamic SEO images for each school so you can speed through onboarding too.
The biggest challenge: iMessage pricing at scale.
With @thelinqapp, a new number is required every 200 contacts, for an additional $260/month.
At scale, you'd likely be able to monetize via fees through Apple Pay, or through things like local ads or a typical subscription to unlock more features (school polling, for example)
Last week's project: Instinct for High Schools
School information is incredibly fragmented, scattered across websites, PDFs and student handbooks. Students shouldn't have to navigate through resources just to find out what's for lunch next week.
Taking a page out of @nikitabier's playbook, the concept is simple: Give every high school its own social AI agent, powered by a dedicated school knowledge base.
Rather than searching for information, students can simply text their school's agent to get answers, coordinate plans, and stay connected.
A few examples:
"Send me weekly lunch menu every Monday at 8 AM."
"Are other students going to next week's away game?"
"Help organize dinner with my friends on prom night."
--
Using things like the @Shopify MCP, students can easily shop for products for upcoming social events, sports themes, etc.
@browser_use allows students to do research or complete tasks for them, such as buying movie tickets or making reservations.
@firecrawl makes searching the web extremely fast and easy, so students can learn more about certain subjects, or find information online.
--
For a generation that has grown up entirely digital, why introduce another app?
Instead of building another social platform that competes with Snapchat, bring this functionality directly into iMessage, where students already communicate.
Students can add the agent to their group chats, while it remembers preferences, anonymously polls the school and proactively text students to keep them engaged and build the knowledge base (correcting possible errors and learning more).
Will Hobick retweeted
The best thing new grad designers can do when starting a job is try to forget most of what they just learnt in school.
As a design engineering leader myself, I’ve seen a ton of these tweets and find them extremely ironic.
I guarantee @Cloudflare gained MORE traffic/awareness because of this, and likely shipped faster.
Their designers could focus on higher priority items assuming a >10-1, engineer to designer ratio, and could fast follow with updated branding post launch if successful.
This quoted post is unavailable.
AI adoption takes more than access to new tools. It requires practical skills, shared workflows and ongoing support across disciplines.
Grateful to share how @RocketOTD's Design Technology team is helping designers apply AI consistently at scale during our recent Product Management & Design event in Detroit.
Special shoutout to our friends at @figma for their ongoing support!
Recent exploration for Rocket ✨
Played around with some blur/fade animations to mimic clouds in the sky, along with some gyroscopic effects.
Explored a dynamic composer for chat, with slight scale/fade transitions to keep button/input transitions clean.
My favorite time-saving hack was animating a 2D lock image with Figma Motion by breaking up and masking layers (see more in thread)
I tried numerous models to animate a clean, transparent background lock but couldn't get the output I wanted.
The lock needed to be triggered by the user and haptic needed to line up as well.
I ended up breaking the image down into different layers/opacities and animating each with masks to fake the actual locking animation.
Will Hobick retweeted
While I really like prototypes, because you can convey ideas easier by interacting with the real thing, it’s also important to know when not to do them.
Prototypes have this flaw that because everything is already built, and it looks so real, people might assume that all the decisions have already been made.
That’s because the building step was the most expensive before AI, but it’s not anymore.
So sometimes, it’s better to ask the why first. Why are we making this in the first place?
Allow yourself to be slow, write a doc with your reasoning, and only after you are aligned, start prototyping.
It all comes down to judgement and taste at the end of the day, whether it’s an animation or an important product decision.
You need to develop great taste, it’s more important than ever.
Will Hobick retweeted
1/ We’re entering the era of agentic commerce, and we believe that world models are the missing engine.
Instead of browsing static product pages, agents will let you interact with products inside your own world before making decisions.
Today, @DecartAI we're releasing Anywear👇
🤖 Made with AI
Will Hobick retweeted
Meet Replit Design ✨
Built to be the best place to design with AI, with an agent that feels like a true design partner
I’ve spent most of the past year working on making @Replit the best place to go from exploration to reality. Can't wait to see what y'all make 🤗