Onwards, by Design: 5 takeaways from Lead with Tempo 2026

Ditto got to be in-person as a lead sponsor of Lead with Tempo 2026, London's conference for content design leaders. Here's what stood out for leaders navigating the AI shift, and our five takeaways you can bring back to your team.

This year's theme was "Onwards, by Design," and it showed. The industry has moved past the fear of AI disrupting work, to the harder question of how to actually work with it well. A few themes showed up again and again.

AI is costing teams their built-in alignment

Work that used to be multiplayer is now single-player mode. A few content designers and a product designer from Miro took the stage to describe how manual, slower workflows used to force alignment. Teams were in sync almost by accident, just from the coordination that used to be required.

With AI, that's dropped. Their team's alignment fell noticeably as people started ideating solo with AI tools instead of together. As a result, individuals need a way to update the rest of the team on their work.

How did they tackle this at Miro? They started prompting their AI tools to summarize solo work and share it with the team, and that alone brought alignment close to where it used to be.

The tension between speed and quality is real

AI makes shipping faster almost by default, but proving the result is good, and keeping it that way, takes deliberate work that speed alone doesn't buy you.

Asked whether AI has improved her team's output or just sped it up, Caroline Tecks, Content Design Manager at PayPal, said she's not convinced yet. Without system maturity, she shared, some projects and parts of the team fall behind, even as others move impressively fast.

The real work now is systems, not production

Your job now includes building the thing that makes future work easier, not just doing today's work well.

Our own co-founder Jess Ouyang spoke about how content designers need to be thinking about AI tooling: establish the system, make it visible, treat governance as non-negotiable, and set things up to compound. She noted that the workflow to build a product isn't shrinking with AI. It's growing and fragmenting, creating more to maintain than ever before.

Ellen Gofton, UX Writing Manager at John Lewis, shared some advice here, specifically for smaller teams who don’t have a dedicated content resource for each product pod. Step back from day-to-day product work entirely and put that time into content systems, guidelines, and AI foundations instead.

Start with conversations — talk to your design and product collaborators, and observe how they work. Then use AI as a springboard for the foundational work that always loses to daily production: content audits, content standards, information architecture.

It's the only way, Ellen argued, to stop having the "do more with less" conversation on repeat.

What AI can't replace: your judgment

Caroline Tecks' talk argued that in the age of AI, human judgment is valued more than anything else. And Ditto CEO Jess spoke about the importance of soft skills right now, referencing OpenAI's Joe Hudson: the people thriving most right now share traits like discernment, trusting conflict, and a willingness to fail, none of which AI can do for you.

Content designers have always brought a specific kind of judgment to the table — distilling confusing ideas into something people can use, obsessing over the user's experience over everything else. That judgment is what's needed to keep AI-driven workflows pointed at the right outcome, not just a faster one.

Content design leadership means growing beyond "content"

A content designer's job description might be shrinking on paper, with less actual writing, but it's growing in scope at the same time, with more ownership of how writing happens.

Felicia Wu, Teradata’s Product Knowledge Leader, argued that content design leadership is not the same thing as "leading content design." Her take reframes the whole discipline around product outcomes, rather than output.

"Content was never the point. Building a product that consistently makes sense is.” — Felicia Wu, Product Knowledge + Content Design Leader

Tim Hetland, Senior UX Design Manager at Google, shared something similar. As AI collapses the line between design and language, he states that "the better you can write, the better you can design." But he noted that leadership involves growing beyond the craft of content design. It takes steps like building technical fluency and getting comfortable directing rather than doing.

5 practical takeaways we got from the day

1. When something breaks, don't spiral — reset.
   Caroline Tecks shared a four-step framework she uses for changing direction after a failure:
   • Stop and talk it out rather than catastrophizing.
   • Retrace your steps back to the foundations (the problem, the users, your assumptions, your evidence).
   • Take the smallest possible step in the new direction to get fast feedback.
   • Communicate the change clearly and directly.
     
     
2. Use AI to rebuild the alignment it costs you.
   After Miro’s team noticed their alignment had dropped, they started prompting their AI tools to summarize and share individual progress updates with the rest of the team. It brought their alignment back up, close to where it used to be.
   
   
3. Use AI as a springboard for the foundational work you've never had time for.
   Ellen Gofton encouraged us to leverage AI for the work that always loses to daily production, like content audits, content standards, and information architecture. Jess's example was swapping a static PDF style guide for a living Markdown file that AI can read directly, so it surfaces guidance proactively instead of waiting for someone to look it up.
   
   
4. Ask your team open-ended check-in questions, regularly.
   Candi Williams, Head of Content Design at Our Future Health, uses regular check-ins as one way to take back control over how the environment and workday feel for your team, and you as a leader.
   
   A few questions Candi suggests:
   • "What's taking up the most space in your mind this week?"
   • "What feels harder than it should?"
   • "What's one thing we could try to make this a little easier?"
     
     
5. Reframe your value in terms that stakeholders care about.
   As content designers, factors like usability and branded content are inherently valuable to us — but do our organizations care? Torrey Podmajersky, Catbird Content's Founder, walked through a technique for translating what you value into what your org values in the work.
   
   For example, "I design for usability" becomes "I reduce support costs, because people who can use the experience and solve their own problems don't need to contact support as often." To do this, consider the business value your team creates and communicate it to your stakeholders in terms that matter to them.

Thanks for a great day

Lead with Tempo is ending as a conference, but the learnings live on. Thank you to Tempo, every speaker, and everyone who made the series what it was. Now, take your next step and apply what you’ve learned here to your team’s work.