Capital One — divisional Head of Design Research
A different era of design leadership.
I'm Devin Harold, Global Director of SmartOps Product Design at Byte by Yum! Brands. My work examines how design leadership changes when AI makes execution abundant and judgment becomes the scarce resource.
Making got easier. Knowing what to make did not.
AI collapsed the cost of making and exposed that organizations were never limited by production capacity, but by how well they decide. The shift isn't a new tool in the stack but instead a rethink of how design organizations operate.
I embed AI into research, product strategy, design execution, and organizational decision-making, so teams move faster, learn continuously, and create more business value. The future of design leadership isn't about producing more screens but about building intelligent organizations where human judgment and AI improve how products are imagined, validated, and ultimately delivered.
The discipline is what you do with the capacity AI frees: treat it as investment capital by reinvesting in strategy, paying down UX debt, or deepening business impact rather than being absorbed by default as more output.
AI should increase the quality of judgment, not the volume of output.
I build AI-native design organizations that turn human insight into measurable business performance — AI as infrastructure for judgment, people accountable for context, intent, and consequence.
When production gets cheap, the cost of a wrong decision goes up: a team can now build the wrong thing faster — and more convincingly — than ever before.
The real leverage is compressing the distance between a question and the evidence that answers it, so more decisions get made on evidence instead of seniority or opinion.
Sharpen thinking
AI widens the set of options a team can seriously evaluate before committing.
Accelerate delivery
Decisions land inside the window where they can still change the outcome.
Free capacity
Recovered production time gets reinvested in strategy, research, and craft.
Human-driven
When the call is wrong, a person answers for it — never the model.
Where I've shared my thinking with the design community
The future of design is at the system level
Up next, back to back in Europe: World Usability Congress, Messecongress Graz, Austria, 13–15 October 2026, and PUSH UX, Alte Kongresshalle, Munich, Germany, 22–23 October 2026. Previously: a Carnegie Mellon MHCI guest lecture, my sixth year returning.
Invite Devin to speakSelected writing
- How to create a rapid research program — Smashing Magazine
- How to position UX as a business model — dscout
- The CHANGE canvas — dscout
- On communicating insights — Greenbook
Outcomes at enterprise scale
Byte by Yum! Brands — Smart Operations, 2025–present
As Global Director of SmartOps Product Design, I lead a 16-person global design team in the $1T quick-service restaurant industry, across 62,000+ franchise locations.
16 sec
Removed per order by the Kitchen Display redesign — est. $8.3M annual labor capacity across 1,000 restaurants
33%
Shorter inventory workflow, tablet-first — est. $4.5M annual labor capacity across 1,000 restaurants
4.5 hrs → 5 min
Routine authoring compressed — est. $640K annual labor capacity
−47%
Project rework, with design earlier in the lifecycle
−40%
Design delivery costs, quarter over quarter
100%
Of product initiatives grounded in user validation
Capital One — Director of Design, Internal Products
Elevating design impact and efficiency
Read case studyCapital One — Head of Design Research
Building new research value
Doubled recruitment speed; built an AI-powered research repository.
Read case studyVerizon — Head of UXR, Digital Channels & Touchpoints
Growing accessory sales
Read case studyVerizon — Head of UXR, Digital Channels & Touchpoints
Driving mobile plan strategy
Read case study“Devin led our research team, and impressed me from the time he walked in the door. He is a tremendous people leader with great influence and communication skills. He knows design and research, and adds both strategic value and process at scale.”
“He stands out as an outstanding leader as he time and time again, elevated his team to bring an ever increasing level of quality to the practice of research. This helped to continue to reinforce the importance of research and how it can help a business as well as the end customer.”
“Devin's skill set is vast - he's lead multiple enterprise website redesign projects, is incredibly polished and articulate with clients, developed UX process, people, and teams to drive business growth. He has an incredible passion for all facets of user experience...”
