At most companies, design is a gate. A team has an idea, they wait for a designer to produce the first pass, and the work moves forward only after that handoff is complete. Miguel Luis Ablaza, a product designer on Abnormal's R&D team, saw that same pattern early in his career. Then AI changed the equation entirely.

From Mockups to Momentum

About a year and eight months into his time at Abnormal, Miguel's day-to-day looks nothing like a traditional product design role. He creates prototypes faster than ever before, but the speed isn't the headline. What changed is where he spends his time.

"Design is deeply connected to the product and engineering teams," Miguel said, "and that kind of collaboration pushes you to think bigger than just screens."

That shift freed him to collaborate with PMs and engineers at a different level. Instead of delivering polished screens and handing them off, he works alongside cross-functional partners from the start, refining direction together. "It allows us to work more cohesively as a unit," he said.

The V0 Workshop That Changed Everything

The turning point came when Miguel started showing non-designers how to use V0, an AI-powered tool that generates usable product UI from prompts. PMs and engineers who used to wait for design to start building could now generate their own first pass in minutes.

"Instead of waiting on design for the first pass, PMs and engineers were able to come up with that first pass," Miguel explained. "It was more along the lines of, 'let's explore this together.'"

He ran V0 workshops across the company, and the reaction followed a consistent arc. Early on, the questions were cautious: Can we use this? Is this going to be accurate? But as people saw real outputs working in front of them, something shifted.

"The questions shifted in tone from cautiousness to curiosity," Miguel said. "They were asking things more along the lines of, 'What if we generated a full-on workflow?'"

For Miguel, AI at Abnormal shows up less as a single tool and more as a way of thinking. That shift from permission to possibility signaled something bigger than tool adoption. It was changing how teams think, not what tools they use.

Inside the Prompt-to-Code Team

That momentum is what led Miguel to join the Prompt-to-Code team, a group focused on rethinking how ideas move from concept to implementation using AI tools. His role: bring the design lens.

"I'm constantly testing outputs, defining guardrails, and making sure it fits within our design system so it doesn't slow these teams down," he said.

The team works on tightening the loop between design and engineering. PMs now provide the first design pass with the help of AI, and design works on refinement and iterations while figuring out constraints with engineers. "It feels less like a handoff and more like co-creating in real time," Miguel said.

AI lowered the cost of exploration. Miguel could test ideas fast, validate directions sooner, and bring more concrete starting points into conversations with PMs and engineers before anything was locked in.

It's a fundamentally different model. Design doesn't disappear when AI enters the picture. It moves upstream, focusing on quality, systems, and direction rather than pixel-level execution.

When AI Outputs Miss the Mark

Working at the frontier of AI-assisted design means outputs don't always hit the quality bar. Miguel says that's the point.

"It's kind of weird to say, but it happens often here," he said. "I think that's the nature of our jobs. The fact that we're able to experiment and see what works and doesn't work is the beauty of working at Abnormal."

On the Prompt-to-Code team, when AI generates something that doesn't meet the design system's standards, the team doesn't scrap it. They treat it as a system problem and use the output to refine prompts, clarify rules, and document patterns.

"The mindset was 'not yet,' not 'this doesn't work,'" Miguel explained. "That experimentation culture makes a big difference."

That culture of support extends beyond any single project. "No matter what I've tried to do here, even if I've had some hits or misses, I've felt that support across the board," he said.

A Role That Keeps Expanding

Miguel's scope has grown significantly in the past year. He's moved from executing individual designs to working at an operational level, thinking about scale, about how design integrates with AI tools across the organization, and about how to empower teams to build with quality on their own.

"I'm not thinking about static mockups or minuscule design things anymore," he said. "I'm thinking about scale and optimization, and more on an operational level."

His role has become less about individual features and more about how Abnormal builds as an organization. That's the kind of growth that happens when a company trusts people to try things before there's a perfect roadmap, and backs them up when the results are messy.

A Challenge Worth Taking

When asked what he'd tell a designer considering Abnormal, Miguel didn't sugarcoat it.

"Be prepared for one of the hardest challenges that you'll have, in the best possible way," he said. "Cybersecurity on its own is a huge Pandora's box, and AI makes that box even bigger."

But the complexity is the draw. "If you're curious and comfortable with ambiguity, this is a great place to grow," he said. "The problems are complex. AI is central, and collaboration is real. You won't design screens. You'll help shape how intelligence shows up in products."

And the opportunity for design specifically? Miguel sees it expanding, not shrinking.

Abnormal's R&D team is redefining what design looks like in an AI-native company. Check out our open roles and join us.