*Hector Ouilhet Olmos’s corporate bio image captures his creative spirit and energy. Images courtesy of Hector.*

At Amazon’s recent Design Open House in Seattle, attendees were promised a “peek behind the curtain.” What they got was more like a backstage pass. The event covered a lot of ground, from designing hardware used by millions, to Amazon’s global rebrand, to the operational rigor behind its 5,500-person design team. (Yes, that number is real.) What lingered was the sense of a nascent design culture that felt fresh, vibrant, and full of possibility.

In his keynote, Hector Ouilhet Olmos, who leads the AWS Applied AI Design team, laid out a powerful provocation: Don’t try to out-Roomba the Roomba. In other words, designers shouldn’t waste energy trying to outperform AI at being efficient, predictable, or fast. Instead, he argued, this is the moment to double down on distinctly human qualities—taste, judgment, and wisdom—the very things that can’t be programmed or scaled. Wisdom, taste, and judgment are cultivated through experience, not compiled from data.

He also pushed back on the creeping pressure for design leaders to speak and act like capital-B Business execs. Designers, he said, shouldn’t flatten their creativity to fit corporate norms. They should use their divergent thinking to unlock unexpected opportunities and lead with desirability, not just feasibility.

The event itself was off the record, but we sat down with Hector to learn about how he leads his team, why joy and creativity are strategic levers, and how making things with pencils, pixels, and AI gives him meaning.

*Hector has a great sense of style, both in his design work and work attire.*

When you think about the future of design leadership,what does effective leadership look like?

Design leadership in the AI era means reconnecting with what makes us human, not just what makes us productive.

There is a lot of fear out there. People are worried about losing their jobs to AI. But this whole “us vs. the robots” thing is exhausting.

Trying to out-machine the machine is a losing game. And even if you won (which you won’t), congrats—you’re now a less efficient Roomba.

Instead, we need to ask deeper questions. Like what does it actually mean to be a designer? Which is really another way of asking, what does it mean to be human? We’ve stopped asking that question.

There’s no onboarding for humanity. You’re just thrown into the world and expected to figure it out between your parents, school, and now social media. It’s not very intentional. If we don’t understand and elevate our own humanity, how will we meaningfully complement what machines are doing?

Machines need human direction. That comes from wisdom, judgment, and taste, all things you don’t get by reading a manual. You earn them by living, messing up, and making sense of it afterward. That’s the real training.

You grew up in Mexico, spent time in Europe and Japan, and now you're in California. How have you developed “taste”, and have those international experiences influenced it?

I’m obsessed with range. Growing up, I thought self-expression had a fixed rulebook. Then I left the country and realized: Oh wow, the rulebook changes a lot depending on where you are.

In Mexico, people value expressive spontaneity. In Japan, it's composure and collective harmony. I was in Tokyo during the Fukushima disaster. The streets were calm, quiet, and organized. In Mexico, there would have been chaos. Both are valid. But you can’t be spontaneous and orderly at the same time. Taste is about knowing when to dial up which quality.

So now, I see taste not as a matter of preference, but placement. You’re always adjusting your position on a spectrum. Honestly, it takes screwing it up in a few countries to start figuring that out.

*The Spheres (above and below) are where Hector likes to work on the Amazon campus. Images c/o Amazon.*

One of the metrics you track as a leader is how many people you make smile each day. How did that come to be, and why does it matter to you?

That one started after I got laid off from Google in the first wave. It was a weird, disorienting time. People around me were rattled. I was too, but I tend to cope by building little things.

One of those things was an AI prototype trained on my outfits. I’d logged on TikTok 200 days of what I wore (yes, I’m that person) and fed it into a model to see what "I" would wear next. It was part vanity, part therapy.

Then I thought, Okay, what else do I actually love? Being around people. And even more, I love making them smile. So I started tracking smiles—real ones. You know, the kind with crinkly eyes and actual teeth.

Eventually, I built an app that pulled in data on sleep, steps, nutrition, and smiles. And something weird showed up. On days when I logged 30+ smiles, I slept better two nights later.

Why 30 smiles? I read some research and realized smiles were just a proxy for connection. That’s something we all need but rarely track. Once I saw it that way, everything clicked: More connection meant better sleep, better sleep meant I woke up happier, being happier made me more generous, and that led to even more smiles. It was a beautiful feedback loop.

That is a good leadership lesson you probably won’t find in Harvard Business Review.

Exactly. But if you really want to justify it, there’s research to back it up. I’ve been reading Dr. Ellen Langer from Harvard, who studies how perception can change biology.

In one study, she recreated a 1950s-style environment for people in their 70s: lighting, furniture, music. Their biomarkers improved, just from vibe alignment.

In another study, she told people they'd slept longer than they had. They felt more rested. It was placebo sleep.

So I wondered: Maybe making someone smile is my way of editing their environment. A little emotional UX tweak. And when they reflect it back, I feel it too. It’s like open-source serotonin.

You’ve led design teams at Google, Dropbox, and now Amazon. When you join a team, what cultural pillars guide the team you build?

If you ask my team, they’ll say I run on "LFG" energy — let’s f*cking go. Not in the grind-for-the-sake-of-it way, but in the let’s-be-curious-and-build-stuff-now way.

I assume I don’t know what I’m doing. The fastest way to learn is to make a move, read the room, and adjust. That’s why I emphasize showing over telling. Not for speed, but for useful iteration.

Iteration isn’t running in circles. It’s rerunning with new insight.

And I lean on something I learned from my old boss, Bobby: if you're aligned on aspiration (WHAT you want to build) and values (HOW you want to build it), you can improvise the rest.

Where does business acumen fit into design leadership?

Plenty of people can tell you what's viable or feasible. Designers are here to show what's desirable.

Yes, we should understand impact. But we don’t have to fake a financial persona. If that’s not your lane, partner up. Our lane is clarity, empathy, and creative judgment.

Design leadership should spotlight the human edge. What can’t be automated. What doesn’t show up in a spreadsheet. If you lose that thread, you’re just making interfaces for machines to talk to other machines.

Design leadership should lean into the harder path: self-awareness. It’s not easy to look inward. But if you can understand yourself and express it in a way others can actually feel, that becomes the foundation for working with people and with these powerful tools we're building.

So designers don’t really need that seat at the table?

Honestly? I’m less interested in getting a seat at the table than in changing what the table is for.

Design framed as a "function" will always be boxed in by budget. You’ll never have as many designers as engineers. You can’t win that ratio game.

So instead of chasing titles, I focus on infusing values across the org. Let design thinking ripple through people, not just next to them. That sticks longer than headcount ever will.

And the whole "seat at the table" trope feels like we’re auditioning for approval. I’d rather get everyone playing a better game.

How do you reflect on the success of your team?

I ask: Are you proud of what you did today?

Not "did it increase conversion rates?" Not "did it move the needle on engagement?" Just: are you proud?

If the answer is “no”, it’s worth asking why. That one question surfaces misalignment faster than any dashboard.

Hector’s sketch (above) transformed into the digital postcard (below).

What’s the last, best thing you’ve made outside of work?

I was recently listening to a presentation at a conference when I started to sketch in my notebook. I was happy about the designs I made and how they made me feel. Then I had the idea to build something called “Thought of You Today” based on my sketches, so in 25 minutes I made this digital version that takes my initial sketch and can start sketching by itself. You can tap it to alter the sketch, and then put someone’s name on it and send it to them like a postcard. I have no idea what the coding language is or how it deploys at scale. And I’m so proud of it because of the speed from idea to what it became.

At the conference, one participant said kids today don’t sketch with pencil in the old way like this. I thought, if you’re a maker, you’re a maker, whether you’re using a rock and charcoal, a pencil and paper, or AI. Whatever tool you use, you can get the same satisfaction from the process of making something.

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