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John Maeda's AI Upskilling for Product Designers

A note on the E-P-I-A-S × SAE framework and a self-assessment tool I built with Cursor.

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#ai #design #product design #cursor

John Maeda recently published a draft upskilling framework for “AI-Readiness” aimed at product designers and design leaders. It’s from the Design in Tech Report 2026 and frames where you stand with AI and how to grow.

The E-P-I-A-S × SAE framework

The framework has two axes:

  1. E-P-I-A-S — maturity from Explorer (trying things out) → Practitioner → Integrator → Architect → Steward (setting standards for others).
  2. SAE levels (0–5) — adapted from automotive driving automation: how much of your design workflow AI is responsible for (L0 = fully manual, L4 = mostly automated, L5 = aspirational full autonomy).

You find your SAE level first (via a self-assessment checklist), then your E-P-I-A-S stage within that level. The point Maeda stresses: depth of judgment beats breadth of tooling — an S-Steward at L1 (e.g. org standards for ChatGPT use) is more mature than an E-Explorer at L4.

A tool to assess yourself

I used Cursor to build a small app that walks you through the framework and helps you self-assess. It’s based on the same E-P-I-A-S stages and SAE levels from the article.

AI upskilling for product designers

AI Design Maturity Assessment →

~10 minutes, 5 sections, 25 questions, no login. If you’re a product designer (or adjacent) figuring out where you stand with AI, it’s a concrete way to use the framework.

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