Every brand team is being handed AI tools and told to do more with less. What they&#x27;re not being told is that without taste and a real idea, the output is just sophisticated noise at scale. Matt Scribner is a growth designer at Atlassian — a company whose brand touches tens of thousands of visitors a week — and he&#x27;s been inside the AI-enabled design workflow longer than most. His take isn&#x27;t a sales pitch for the tools or a doomsday headline about job loss. It&#x27;s something more useful: an honest account of where AI actually helps, where it quietly fails, and why the designers who thrive won&#x27;t be the ones who prompt the best. We also cover: AI can get you to 60% — but if you couldn&#x27;t get past 60% without it, you&#x27;re not getting past it with it either We&#x27;re heading toward a &quot;singularity of design&quot; where everything starts looking the same, and the only antidote is taste you built before the tools existed The Arts and Crafts movement followed the Industrial Revolution for a reason — and the same correction is coming for brand

Taste Is the Only Thing AI Can't Generate (Yet) with Matt Scribner of Atlassian

Best Story Wins

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Best Story Wins

## Participants

- **Josh** (None)
- **Ross** (None)
- **Matt Scribner** (Atlassian)

## Transcript

I think an important thing too is not following inspiration too closely. We're heading quickly towards the singularity of design where AI is just going to start like eating its own tail and everything's going to look exactly the same. So the more that you can develop your taste and have good ideas, that'll help break through that noise even when we're all using the same tools and the same data sets and all of that.

So hello and welcome back to Best Story Wins. I'm your host Josh and I'm here with my co-host Ross and today our guest is Matt Scribner from Atlassian. Hey Matt, thanks for joining us today. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, man. So Matt, as we dive in here, I'd love it if you could just get us started with a brief overview of who you are, what you do, and if you could also touch on your backstory a bit too, that would be awesome.

Yeah, of course. My name is Matt Scribner. I am a growth designer currently at Atlassian. And my backstory is I did not go to school. I originally went to school actually to be a film student and dropped out of that after about a semester because I thought that would be too hard. And I was, you know, 19 and wanted to just hang out with my friends.

Um, but soon realized that I probably should lean into something and found design and started learning some stuff and had some friends teach me a bunch of things. Um, looking over the shoulder, getting bootleg copies of Photoshop, a lot of that and learned about doing that there. And over the course of time, just kept developing skills, kept wanting to learn new things, caused me to become kind of a generalist.

Uh, so I worked at an agency, um, for about 11 years before I was laid off. And while I was there, did everything from like UX design, brand design, led teams, art direction, creative direction, um, the gamut and became a pretty big generalist there. And then in 2020, at the end of 2023, got laid off.

And a few months later started working at Atlassian as a growth designer, um, now working on their websites. So primarily like Jira's website, Confluence's site, and, um, what we now call the teamwork collection site. Those are kind of my purview. Um, and then a couple of screens post clicking sign up. That's cool. I love a good self-taught designer story.

Um, I feel like it's, uh, it's a, it's a different vibe to like it kind of come up that way. And absolutely. Yeah. Curious how that, how that experience, both in the kind of teaching yourself, but also coming up through the agency world. How has that translated to your work at Atlassian? Like, is that a big shift or where's the serving you and where is it maybe was some of the more of a shock?

I think that it translates really well coming from agency to enterprise. Um, I picked up a lot of bad habits being self-taught that I think got worked out of me early...

Taste Is the Only Thing AI Can't Generate (Yet) with Matt Scribner of Atlassian

Transcript

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Taste Is the Only Thing AI Can't Generate (Yet) with Matt Scribner of Atlassian

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.