The very best design teams do more than adopt AI. They integrate AI into the team dynamic. They treat AI as a means to increase engagement across talent, tools, and processes.

As they should: according to Gallup’s research on team dynamics, closing the gap between talent and business outcomes depends on strong engagement. Teams see 23% higher profitability and 18% greater productivity when fully engaged.

This is what can happen when design teams crack what Gallup calls the team chemistry “code.” In doing so, they reveal six keys to building high-performing design teams.

1. Drive personalization and user-centric design with AI

AI gives designers capabilities that were once considered ultramodern. The ability to analyze user behavior and preferences in real time has become commonplace. And it’s transforming user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design.

Personalization

One will recognize a high-performing design team for its ability to create personalized digital experiences tailored to individual users.

The e-commerce platform that generates customized product recommendations and packaging designs, for example – is AI-enhanced personalization. As is the ability of marketing teams to scale visual content tailored to diverse audience segments.

User-centric design

This personalization extends beyond aesthetics to functional, user-centric design. For example, AI powers adaptive interfaces that respond intuitively to user interactions, including voice-based commands and motion graphics. 

Think of the healthcare app that adjusts its user interface based on a patient’s health journey. Or the productivity platform that reconfigures a user’s workflows based on the tools they use most frequently.

According to Figma’s 2025 AI Report, the majority of designers say that AI improves their work. More than 80% of both designers and developers agree that learning AI will be “critical to their success” going forward.

2. Prioritize ethics and sustainability

Top design teams tend to prioritize the ethical, environmental, and even societal outcomes of their innovations. They will: 

• Strive to adopt transparent AI practices
• Address concerns around data privacy, algorithmic bias, and design homogenization
• Emphasize human oversight to ensure that AI enhances, rather than replaces, human creativity

What does this have to do with performance?

Put simply, it’s good for business. Businesses that design with ethics and responsibility in mind set themselves up to grow as more investors and customers choose to support brands that align with their values. In Best practices for building sustainable digital products, we cite multiple sources that strongly link sustainability practices with success and innovation.

3. Promote human-AI collaboration

High-performing teams try not to overburden individual designers. Instead, they structure roles to maximize the synergy between human expertise and AI capabilities. 

In these environments, designers do more strategic thinking and creative direction. They use these skills to guide AI-generated outputs, injecting them with unique human insights. They use AI to automate and enhance day-to-day ops, too. It’s now quite common to work with design teams that use AI automation to summarize user interviews, competitive analyses, and other large data sets.

Promoting designer-AI collaboration promotes designer-led success. NN/g found that AI improves employee productivity by 66%. It’s a big reason why structuring human-AI interactions – and creating human-AI hybrid teams – remains a core focus of the foremost research on human-AI collaboration.

4. Enable data-driven design decisions

AI tools provide powerful analytics that inform design choices with real user data. Designers use AI to track user behavior, test hypotheses, and optimize interfaces, shifting design from intuition-based to evidence-based decision-making. This data-driven approach improves usability, accessibility, and overall product success. It also makes for more efficient teams. 

As to what this process looks like on the ground, teams must first create a comprehensive data strategy. Typically, key stakeholders such as data scientists and data engineers will gather and organize available data.

With a data strategy in place, design teams can leverage data to optimize for a particular indicator or metric.

5. Employ cross-functional decision-making frameworks

Designers wear many hats. They collaborate beyond their own teams, too, with engineers, marketers, and product managers. High-performing teams not only recognize the necessity of this collaboration but elevate it.

Take the relationship between design and engineering. Promoting design and engineering alignment can speed up time to market, improve product UX, and influence cost efficiency. Nevermind the impact that alignment has on organizational morale.

Behind most collaborative environments is some form of cross-functional decision-making framework. This framework can come in many different forms: 

• Formalized design systems with standardized plans and guidelines
• Decision pods with embedded stakeholders from different business units
• Continuous validation models that eliminate staged approvals
• Decision-making metrics that gauge speed, quality, and value.

6. Build flexibility into design systems management

High-performing teams find innovative ways to navigate the complexities of design systems adoption. This requires built-in flexibility to account for evolving design needs, organizational growth, and varying technical requirements across platforms.

Here’s what flexible design system management might look like in 2025: 

• Dynamic design systems that use AI to adapt to user context and device requirements
• Branching strategies in which designers maintain core components while creating parallel versions for different product lines, market segments, or features
• Automated documentation and versioning with the help of AI assistants

How we can help to close the gap

Among the high-performing design teams we work with, AI enhances and empowers human talent, rather than replacing it altogether. These teams integrate AI into their workflows, using it to automate routine tasks, personalize user experiences, and enable rapid, data-driven iteration.

Yet the step from integrating AI to building a high-performing design team can be significant. Some teams, even those with talented designers and a track record of standout products, wonder where to begin.

This is where a strategic design consulting partner can help bridge the divide. Nurturing the relationship between teams and technologies is a cornerstone of our product design services. Our team has experience guiding organizations through the restructuring and workflow changes needed to achieve higher performance along with direct support to projects. Let’s talk about ways to refine a design approach that serves product and delivers a better experience for customers.