From Doing the Work
to Directing the Agent
There's a difference between using AI to work faster and rethinking which parts of your work humans should be doing at all. I moved a 150+ person design org from the first to the second. Same-day adoption. No mandate.
AI-enabled is not agentic
AI-enabled means you use AI to do your work faster. Agentic means you decide what work is yours to do at all. That's not a subtle distinction. It's a completely different relationship with your tools and your time.
UXD had two problems that both pointed to the same gap. Designers were spending hours on work that had nothing to do with design: formatting Jira tickets, breaking down Epics, writing acceptance criteria at the end of a long week. And they were designing agentic experiences for Red Hat customers without ever having used one themselves.
The entry point was Jira, because the pain was real and the demo was immediate. But Jira was just the door in. The real goal was changing how 150 designers think about their own time.
Built it. Documented it. Taught it.
The goal wasn't to get 150 designers using a new tool. It was to get them asking a new question: "Is this work mine to do, or should my agent handle it?" The agentic Jira workflow was the first concrete answer to that question, and the one most likely to make an immediate difference in someone's actual day.
I built and validated the workflow using Cursor + Claude + MCP (Jira and Confluence), then made it teachable: a Confluence guide written in plain language for non-technical people; a video built around real use cases, not installation steps. Beta tested with my team first. When the feedback was clear, I took it to the full org.
Standards that actually get followed
Every team has ticket standards. Almost no one follows them consistently, not because they don't care, but because remembering a template at 4:30pm on a Friday, ticket seven deep, is just not how humans work.
A Rules file transfers that mental overhead to the agent permanently. Write your team's standards once in plain English. The agent reads it automatically every session, and from that point on, that work is gone. Not reduced. Gone. Every Epic, every story, every required field applied correctly without anyone thinking about it.
I built a UXD-specific Rules file and published it on Confluence. Any designer on any team could reclaim that time in under five minutes.
150 designers. One new question.
On March 17, 2026, I presented to the full 150+ person UXD org. Built around demonstration, not slides. Real prompts, real agent output, live. The goal wasn't teaching a tool. It was getting every person in the room to feel, firsthand, what it's like to hand work off to an agent and watch it disappear from their plate.
The real measure of success: did designers leave asking "What else am I doing manually that my agent could handle?" Managers sharing the deck with their own teams unprompted. Designers setting up independently the same day. No follow-up. No nudges. That's a yes.
"Thank you for showing this to me visually and walking me through it. It provided a real world example I can actually follow."
Why it worked
Sick! Easiest set up. Thanks!
So useful. I shared your slide deck with my team and encouraged them to set up Cursor/Jira if they haven't already.
I'm up and running with my Jira and Confluence MCP servers and Cursor. Instructions were super straightforward.