Tashfeen is a Senior Product Designer at Microsoft, working on AI products used at global scale (including Microsoft Word and Copilot). His work focuses on how design processes evolve as AI agents become active collaborators in building software. He works closely with engineering, product, and research teams to design intelligent systems that balance speed, usability, and human judgment. Tashfeen is particularly interested in how designers can transform their workflow work closer to code using AI coding agents without losing craft, intent, or responsibility.
Tashfeen Ahmed
Senior Product Designer @Microsoft
Keynote: Designing by Shipping Code: How Designers Use AI Coding Agents Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, and the rise of the designer-builder
AI coding agents (like Claude Code, Cursor and VS Code) are lowering the barrier between idea and execution, making it easier than ever for designers to move from designing products to building and launching them. This session explores how tools like AI coding agents enable a designer-founder mindset, where designers use their product intuition, user understanding, and design craft to experiment, validate ideas, and ship real software.
The talk introduces a practical framework for becoming a designer-founder in practice, not by starting a company immediately, but by thinking in terms of ownership, experimentation, and learning through building. It focuses on how designers can use agentic coding to test ideas quickly, reduce dependency on handoffs, and develop stronger product instincts by shipping end to end.