Building for a World That Is No Longer Predictable: Tammy Coombs & the New Rules of Product Design

For most of software’s history, designers could assume that an input would produce a predictable output. AI is changing that.In this episode, Ousman speaks with Tammy Coombs, a product designer and design engineer with more than 15 years of experience building complex tools for security, reliability, and operations teams. Her work has included leading UX initiatives at Palo Alto Networks and designing AI systems for security researchers, Site Reliability Engineers, and other expert users working in high-stakes environments.Tammy explains how product design must evolve as software moves from deterministic workflows toward probabilistic systems that interpret human intent—and sometimes get it wrong.They discuss the growing overlap between design and engineering, the role of Figma in an AI-assisted workflow, designing guardrails around natural-language interfaces, and why AI should support human judgment rather than quietly replace it.The conversation also explores what remains unchanged: understanding users, learning the language of a complex domain, experiencing failure firsthand, and knowing when technology should simply get out of the way.