In high school and through college, I worked at a desktop publishing service bureau in San Francisco. We had Macintosh computers and Linotronic imagesetters (super hi-res laser printers), not Linotype machines. Down the street, those traditional type shops still existed, but their business was already thinning out. Occasionally a graphic designer would send us type to set, and we’d do it in QuarkXPress. The fact that the job landed on our desk at all told you everything about where the industry was headed. The shop’s real business was pre-press and color separations, and eventually direct-to-plate eliminated even that.

Erika Flowers has been building out her Zero-Vector Design framework, and two of her pieces read as a pair. “Zero Stage to Orbit“ on UX Magazine uses the rocket equation as a structural lens for the design-to-development pipeline. “The Last Typesetter“ on her Substack uses the death of the typesetting profession to make the same argument from a different direction. Together they make the case that the design role, not the skill, is dissolving.

In “The Last Typesetter,” Flowers draws on Sennett:

When suddenly everyone could set type, the difference between good typography and bad typography went from an industry concern to a public epidemic. Bad kerning everywhere. Rivers running through justified text. Orphaned words dangling at the tops of columns like socks left on a clothesline. The people who understood typography were needed more than ever.

But not as typesetters.

Richard Sennett wrote about this in The Craftsman: the difference between a skill and the institutional container built around that skill. Containers look permanent until they are not. The skill outlives every container it has ever occupied.

That’s what happened at the service bureau. The skill—color, typography, print production—survived. The container—the shop, the role, the apprenticeship—did not.

In “Zero Stage to Orbit,” Flowers maps the pipeline onto rocket science:

Each stage in the traditional pipeline is designed to compensate for the limitations of the previous one. Research to inform design. Design to spec for developers. Specs to survive handoff. QA to catch what handoff broke. Retros to discuss why QA caught so much. Process to manage process.

Fuel to carry fuel. The modern development pipeline is not a solution. It is a multi-stage rocket. And most of the energy is going to overhead.

The overhead diagnosis is sharp, and the launch pad economy—consultancies, workflow tools, Agile coaching certifications—has a financial interest in keeping the rocket grounded.

Flowers addresses why the “unicorn” solution failed:

The design technologist did not fail because no one person can possess all the skills. The design technologist failed because no one can hold all the skills while still fighting gravity. They were still launching from the ground, still hauling the translation overhead, just with one person doing all the hauling instead of a team.

The problem was never the number of stages. It was the gravity well.

A product manager I work with recently told me he could think of a solution to a user need, but not a creative solution the way the designer on his team could. Specialization produces real expertise. The design technologist wasn’t wrong about the vision. They were wrong about the physics. AI changes the gravity, not the skills.

What separates both pieces from the standard “AI changes everything” take:

I am also uncertain here, also mid-journey, also discovering orbit’s real constraints in real time. My career, work, and livelihood are just as much at risk as everyone else’s. But that doesn’t discount the facts about the transition to new capabilities.

She’s out on a limb, reflecting a shift the entire industry can feel, without pretending she has the map. In “The Last Typesetter,” she puts it more bluntly: “Defend the role, or follow the skill.”

The skill will survive. It always has. But the transition is real, and not everyone can afford to be mid-journey. Truthfully, I am uncertain either. The thing I’ve loved to do since the 7th grade, the thing that has been my identity for most of my life is changing, possibly dissolving into something else.

Designers have been saying this for years. Cameras don’t take pictures, photographers do. Tools don’t make you a better designer. Now the PM world is arriving at the same conclusion.

Shreyas Doshi argues that AI tools will commoditize across companies—any effective tool becomes common knowledge—and the only durable career moat is the human judgment applied on top of AI outputs. He calls it “Product Sense.”

Tools have never been a significant source of alpha in product success and that is not changing with AI tools. What this means for you personally is that - while you can and should use all the AI tools you can - you cannot bank on your use of those AI tools today to provide you a long-term advantage in your product career.

Replace “product people” with “designers” and this could be a post on my blog. The five skills Shreyas decomposes Product Sense into—empathy, simulation, strategic thinking, taste, creative execution—are skills good designers have cultivated under different names for decades.

The piece includes an appended Claude conversation that stress-tests the argument. The sharpest exchange challenges the Silicon Valley orthodoxy that fast B+ beats slow A+:

In practice, the B+ decision made quickly tends to create a cascade of follow-on decisions, each of which is also slightly off, and you end up significantly off-course in ways that are expensive to correct. Whereas the A+ decision, even if it takes longer, tends to set you on a trajectory where subsequent decisions are easier and more obvious. The compounding effect favors quality of judgment, not speed of judgment.

Good judgment compounds. Bad judgment compounds too, just in the wrong direction.

Eugene O’Neill had a line: “Critics? I love every bone in their heads.” I think about it whenever someone proposes that what design really needs is more people who understand it without doing it.

Jon Kolko, writing for Interactions Magazine, argues that design is experiencing a disciplinary “turn”—away from making and toward literacy. Drawing on Richard Buchanan’s 1992 framework of design as a “liberal art of technological culture,” he proposes a future with fewer practitioners and more people who can read, critique, and discuss designed artifacts without designing them.

Rather than viewing design as an applied craft, a liberal art of technological culture recasts design as a way of understanding our role in the designed world around us. It’s difficult for many practitioners to imagine this, because making things is so integral to the idea of design, and embedding design in the humanities is very different from viewing it as an organizing principle like the humanities. But if design is not about making things, but instead about understanding the things that are made, vocation is no longer a goal of design education.

Kolko’s diagnosis is sharp—the layoffs, the AI anxiety, the assembly-line feeling of modern product design. And he sits with the discomfort rather than cheerleading:

As a craftsperson and a maker, I don’t like the way this turn feels, because it appears threatening to the fundamentals of the profession. Understanding design without making things seems impossible. I don’t like this development as an educator either, because it means my students, trained to be practitioners, may find no design jobs, despite getting a very expensive education. But as someone observing the various trends chipping away at what is actually meaningful about being a designer—our ability to humanize the dysfunction of technological change—I am drawn to this turn.

I respect the honesty. But I have a love/hate relationship with critics. It’s easy to throw stones from a perch. When you’re in it—fighting organizational politics, staring at data, listening to customers, compromising with engineering—the outcomes are never as clean as you’d hoped. Design literacy matters. But literacy divorced from practice produces critics, not designers. The world doesn’t need more critics. It needs more people who understand why the compromises were made via lived experience.

The design process isn’t dead. It’s changing. My belief is that the high-level steps are exactly the same, but where designers spend their time is being redistributed.

Jenny Wen, head of design for Claude at Anthropic (formerly at Figma), on Lenny’s Podcast:

This design process that designers have been taught, we sort of treat it as gospel. That’s basically dead. I think it was sort of dying before the age of AI, but given now that engineers can go off and spin off their seven Claudes, I think as designers, we really have to let go of that process.

It’s a strong headline. But Wen then describes her actual day-to-day, and it sounds familiar:

We are still prototyping stuff. I’m still mocking stuff up. I think it’s just I have a wider set of tools now, and I think the proportion of time I spend doing each thing just has changed.

So the process isn’t dead. The proportions shifted. Wen breaks it down:

A few years ago, 60 to 70% of it was mocking and prototyping, but now I feel the mocking up part of it is 30 to 40%. And then there’s that other 30 to 40% there that is now jamming and pairing directly with engineers. And then there’s a slice of it that is now implementation as well.

What’s missing from that breakdown is user research and discovery. Wen mentions having a researcher on the team, mentions reading studies and feedback, but those activities don’t factor into the breakdown at all. For a team building products where, by Wen’s own admission, “you can’t mock up all the states” and “you actually discover use cases as you see people using them,” you’d think research would be eating a larger share of the pie, not disappearing from the conversation entirely. In my day-to-day, the designers on my team spend 30–40% on discovery and flows. Maybe 40–50% on mockups and prototypes. We’re basically already at her breakdown.

There’s also a context problem. Wen’s “ship fast, iterate publicly, build trust through speed” approach makes sense for Anthropic. They’re building greenfield AI products where nobody knows the right interaction patterns yet. The models are non-deterministic. Labeling something a “research preview” and iterating in public is the right call when the design space is that undefined.

That approach gets harder with a product that has an established install base. When you’re updating features that millions of people depend on, “ship it and iterate” has real costs. Sonos learned this. Or if your product is mission-critical as Figma learned when it shipped its UI3 and designers revolted. Or worse, an essential service like a CRM or operational software. The slow, unglamorous work of discovery and user testing exists because breaking what already works is expensive. Wen has the advantage of building greenfield — there’s no install base to protect. Not every team has that luxury.

The interview gets more interesting when Wen turns to hiring. She describes three archetypes: the “block-shaped” strong generalist who’s 80th percentile across multiple skills, the deep T-shaped specialist who’s in the top 10% of their area, and then a third she says the industry is overlooking:

My last one is probably the one that I think we’re all overlooking, which is what I call the crack new grad. It’s just somebody who’s early career and feels, like, wise and experienced beyond their years, but is also just very humble and very eager to learn. I think this person is really interesting right now because I think most companies are just hiring senior talent, folks that have done things before, are super experienced, but given how much the roles are changing and what we’re expected to do is changing, I think having somebody who almost has a blank slate, and is just a really quick learner and is really eager to learn new tactics and stuff like that, and doesn’t have all these baked in processes and rituals in their mind, that’s super valuable.

Wen’s “crack new grad” maps closely to the strategies I wrote for entry-level designers: build things, get comfortable with AI tools, be what Josh Silverman calls the “dangerous generalist.” Someone without baked-in rituals who learns fast and ships. That a design leader at a frontier lab is actively looking for this profile matters, because most of the industry is still filtering for ten years of experience.

Figma’s State of the Designer 2026 is subtitled “Designers Are Leaning Into the Messy Middle.” I read “messy middle” less as emotional uncertainty and more as positional—designers occupy the space between product management and engineering, stretched in both directions. Their own Shifting Roles report backs this up: 64% of product builders now identify with two or more roles.

Madeline Stafford, writing for Figma:

And while designers crave the space for creative independence, they still benefit from clarity. Nearly all (91%) of designers say that clear goals and expectations help them do their best work. Structure is reassuring as AI changes the product design process. You’ve maybe seen this happening in real time: Armed with new tools, non-designers are increasingly able to participate in the design process. And while designers welcome collaboration—90% agree that it’s key to producing good work—these fluid boundaries can be scary.

“Fluid boundaries can be scary” is the key line. When everyone can prototype and has opinions about the UI, a designer’s value stops being about output and becomes about judgment.

Stafford again:

Designers want a seat at the table: They’re most content in their jobs when they have creative freedom, ranking it the number one contributor to overall satisfaction at work. Eighty-seven percent of designers say that decision-making power also boosts their performance, which many can connect directly to stronger business outcomes.

Designers want clear jurisdiction. When your role expands toward product strategy on one side and engineering on the other, knowing what you own matters. A Brazil-based designer in the survey:

AI tools make things much faster, but the precise designer’s vision is what makes the difference.

That “precise vision” is what separates a designer from a PM who happens to use Figma. The full report is worth a read.

Every profession, when it feels the ground shifting, reaches for whatever feels most solid. For designers, that’s been “craft” and “taste” (which I’ve used too in my writing). I get the instinct. When the tools you’ve mastered get commoditized, you want to assert that the real value was never in the tools. It was in you always: your eye, your sensibility.

But I’ve watched this play out for over a year now, and I think it’s less strategic positioning than grief response. Nicole Alexandra Michaelis makes the case that designers should be thriving, not panicking, and that much of the panic is self-inflicted. The whiplash:

Seniors are telling juniors to count themselves lucky if they’ll ever find a job. Design leaders are jumping from one AI-tool hypetrain to the next in mere weeks.

Monday, it’s all about prototypes. Thursday, it’s vibe coding. Friday, we’re preaching that output no longer matters (everyone can design now!) and that we should be brilliant strategists instead. By next Monday, we’ll be half-heartedly debating which soft skills are absolutely vital to survive.

Survive. As designers.

A profession trying on new identities in a dressing room. Nothing fits so we keep grabbing the next thing. “Craft” is the one people keep coming back to because it feels the most like home.

Michaelis is blunt about why that doesn’t work:

And listen, I’m not knocking craft. I love writing poetry, painting, throwing pots at the wheel. All that takes craft and skill, just as my designs at work do. But craft should be so obvious to us as designers that we should not make it our main selling point. Obviously, we develop incredible craft as our experience builds. Obviously, individual designers have different styles. Obviously, we put thought and care into what we make.

Craft is the baseline. That’s what we want the executives to know. By debating it and what it even means, we’re again undermining our authority.

She’s right, and I’d push it further. The fixation on craft is a tell. When a profession retreats to arguing about what makes it special instead of demonstrating it, that’s a group reaching for identity because it’s lost agency. The creative class version of quiet quitting.

The junior designer hiring crisis is a subject that’s near and dear to my heart, and Figma’s new hiring study puts hard numbers to it. The headline is encouraging—82% of organizations say their need for designers has increased or stayed steady. But the breakdown by seniority tells a different story.

Andrew Hogan, Head of Insights at Figma:

More than half of hiring managers (56%) say there’s increasing demand for senior design hires, compared to just 25% who are hiring for more junior roles. For many leaders, it’s less of a hiring philosophy and more a matter of bringing on designers who can tackle the problems they’re facing.

56% versus 25%. That gap keeps widening.

Daniel Wert, CEO of executive search firm Wert&Co, calls it out:

It just boggles my mind how few internship programs there are these days. I think it seems shortsighted. The best teams, the best organizations, have a lot of diversity…in terms of years of experience and where people are in their career. You want to have a nice cross-section of junior and mid-senior designers.

Every strong design team I’ve built or been part of had that cross-section. Seniors set the bar. Juniors challenge assumptions and bring energy. Mid-levels hold the whole thing together. Remove any layer and it gets brittle.

Wert again:

Hiring managers are looking for unicorns because they misunderstand how multidisciplinary design is. They want [top-tier] design, but are only willing to hire one person. Great design teams [have] multiple people with complementary strengths—not a single superhero.

This is the real problem. Companies want one person who can do visual design, product strategy, systems thinking, AI integration, and user research. That person doesn’t exist. Great design is a team sport, and the vanishing bottom rung of the career ladder is only making it harder to build those teams.

The fallacy that CEOs and CFOs keep telling themselves is that AI will make this unicorn “product builder” possible. I have my doubts.

I wrote recently about what Wall Street gets wrong about SaaS—how the $285 billion selloff confuses capability with full-throated DIY. Mission-critical enterprise software isn’t going anywhere. But I also argued that micro-apps are a different story. Small, personal utilities that solve one person’s problem? Those are absolutely getting built by non-developers now.

Anton Sten is a good example. Like me, he’s a designer, not a developer, who rebuilt his website with Cursor and Claude last year and then turned his attention to replacing the $11/month invoicing tool he’d been paying for. The initial version followed familiar SaaS patterns. Then something clicked:

I was building software that lived by old rules. Rules designed for generic tools that serve thousands of users. But this tool serves exactly one user. Me.

So I changed it. Now, instead of manually entering client details, I upload a signed contract and let AI parse it — mapping it to an existing client or creating a new one, extracting the scope, payment terms, duration, everything. It creates my own vault of documents. I added an AI chat where I can ask things like “draft an invoice for unbilled time on Project X” or “what’s the total amount invoiced to Client Y this year?”

That’s the micro-apps argument in practice. A tool shaped entirely around one person’s workflow, built in under two days. Jonny Burch stated that the source of truth for design is moving from Figma to code. Sten is further along that path—a designer who stopped hiring developers entirely.

Sten on the broader shift in thinking:

For decades, the default response to any problem was “what software should I subscribe to?” We browsed Product Hunt. We compared pricing pages. We squeezed our workflows into someone else’s idea of how things should work.

The point isn’t the tool. The point is the muscle. Once you’ve built one thing, you start seeing opportunities everywhere. You stop asking “is there an app for that?” and start asking “what if I just made it?”

I’ve been watching the design community fracture over the past year. Not over tools or methodologies—over what it means to be a designer at all. One camp is excited about AI-assisted workflows, shipping working UI from terminals. The other is doubling down on pixel-craft in Figma, treating the shift as a threat to everything they’ve built their careers on. Dave Gauer published a piece that puts words to this feeling better than anything I’ve read from the design side:

It’s weird to say I’ve lost it when I’m still every bit the computer programmer (in both the professional and hobby sense) I ever was. My love for computers and programming them hasn’t diminished at all. But a social identity isn’t about typing on a keyboard, It’s about belonging to a group, a community, a culture.

He hasn’t lost the skill. He’s lost the tribe. I recognize that grief. When I wrote about these same changes hitting design, a former colleague responded: “I didn’t sign up for this.” None of us did. And I think UX and product designers are less than twelve months behind programmers in feeling this exact thing.

He describes what drove the wedge:

When I identified with the programmer culture, it was about programming. Now programming is a means to an end (“let’s see how fast we can build a surveillance state!”) or simply an unwanted chore to be avoided.

Swap “programming” for “design” and you’re looking at the trajectory I wrote about in “Product Design Is Changing.” When the craft becomes something an AI agent can approximate, the culture around it shifts. The conversation moves from “how do we make this great?” to “how fast can we ship this?” The designers who cared about the craft are watching their community become unrecognizable. I get it.

And then there’s this, on what the programming community actually lost:

We should have been chopping the cruft away and replacing it with deterministic abstractions like we’ve always done. That’s what that Larry Wall quote about good programmers being lazy was about. It did not mean that we would be okay with pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate.

That “slot machine lever” is the programmer’s version of the vibe coding critique. The craft people—in programming and in design—wanted better tools. What they got was a culture that treats the craft itself as an obstacle to speed.

The identity split I described in my essay is already visible: designers who orchestrate AI and ship working software versus designers who push pixels in Figma. The deeper question Gauer is circling is whether the craft was ever the point for you, or just the bottleneck.

Earlier this week I published an essay on how product design is changing, and one of the sources I referenced was Jan Tegze’s piece on job shrinkage. I quoted him on the orchestrator model—using agents to create new capabilities rather than speeding up old tasks. But there’s another section of his article that deserves its own post. It’s the part nobody wants to talk about.

Jan Tegze, writing for his Thinking Out Loud newsletter:

Many people currently doing “strategic” knowledge work aren’t actually that strategic.

When agents started handling the execution layer, everyone assumed humans would naturally move up to higher-order thinking. Strategy, judgment, and vision.

But a different reality is emerging—many senior people with years of experience can’t actually operate at that level. Their expertise was mostly pattern matching and process execution dressed up in strategic language.

That’s a hard paragraph to read if you’re a senior IC or a manager who’s built a career on being thorough and diligent. Tegze isn’t being cruel—he’s describing a structural problem. We built evaluation systems that rewarded execution and called it strategy.

He shares a quote from a CEO of a mid-sized Canadian company:

“We’re discovering that our senior people and our junior people are equally lost when we ask them what we should do, not just how to do it. The seniors are just more articulate about their uncertainty.”

Tegze illustrates the pattern with a story about a friend he calls Jane—a senior research analyst billing at $250/hour at a consulting firm where they deployed an AI research agent:

The agent could do Jane’s initial research in 90 minutes—it would scan thousands of sources, identify patterns, generate a first-draft report.

Month one: Jane was relieved and thought she could focus on high-value synthesis work. She’d take the agent’s output and refine it, add strategic insights, make it client-ready.

Month three: A partner asked her, “Why does this take you a week now? The AI gives us 80% of what we need in an hour. What’s the other 20% worth?”

Jane couldn’t answer clearly. Because sometimes the agent’s output only needed light editing. Sometimes her “strategic insights” were things the agent had already identified, just worded differently.

The firm restructured Jane into a “Quality Reviewer” role at $150/hour. Six months later she left. They replaced her with two junior analysts at $65K each who, with the AI, were 85% as effective.

And then the kicker:

You often hear from AI vendors that, thanks to their AI tools, people can focus on higher-value work. But when pressed on what that meant specifically, they’d go vague. Strategic thinking, client relationships, creative problem solving.

Nobody could define what higher-value work actually looked like in practice. Nobody could describe the new role. So they defaulted to the only thing they could measure: cost reduction.

Tegze again:

We promoted people for the wrong reasons. We confused “does the work well” with “thinks strategically about the work.”

Tegze’s framing of the orchestrator model is the most useful I’ve seen—stop defending your current role and start building one that didn’t exist six months ago. But this section on the strategy gap is worth sitting with on its own. The automation isn’t just changing what we do. It’s revealing what we were actually good at all along.

I sent this article to both of my kids this week. My daughter is in college studying publishing. My son is a high school senior planning to go into real estate. Neither of them works in tech. That’s exactly why they need to read it.

Matt Shumer has spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. He wrote this piece for the people in his life who keep asking “so what’s the deal with AI?”—and getting the sanitized answer:

I keep giving them the polite version. The cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I’ve lost my mind. And for a while, I told myself that was a good enough reason to keep what’s truly happening to myself. But the gap between what I’ve been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.

I know this feeling. I wrote yesterday about how AI is collapsing the gap between design and code and shifting the designer’s value toward taste and orchestration. That essay was for the software design industry. Shumer is writing for everyone else.

His core argument: tech workers have already lived through the disruption that’s coming for every other knowledge-work profession. He explains why tech got hit first:

The AI labs made a deliberate choice. They focused on making AI great at writing code first… because building AI requires a lot of code. If AI can write that code, it can help build the next version of itself. A smarter version, which writes better code, which builds an even smarter version. Making AI great at coding was the strategy that unlocks everything else. That’s why they did it first.

Christina Wodtke agrees something big is happening but thinks Shumer’s timeline for everyone else is off. Programming, she argues, is a near-ideal use case for AI—there’s an ocean of public training data, and code has a built-in quality check: it runs or it doesn’t. Hallucinations get caught by the compiler. Other fields aren’t so clean-cut.

Shumer makes the classic tech-insider mistake: assuming his experience generalizes to everyone else’s. It doesn’t. Ethan Mollick’s “jagged frontier” of AI capability is as jagged as ever. AI is spectacular at some tasks and embarrassingly bad at others, and the pattern doesn’t map to human intuitions about difficulty.

She makes another point that matters for anyone in a creative field:

A nuance Shumer completely misses: industries where there isn’t one right answer but there are better and worse answers may actually fare better with AI. When you’re writing strategy, designing an experience, or crafting a narrative, a “hallucination” isn’t necessarily a bug. It might be an interesting idea.

That maps to what I know is true in design. A wrong answer in code crashes the app. A wrong answer in a design brainstorm might be the seed of something good.

This is why I sent Shumer’s piece to my kids but didn’t tell them to panic. Publishing runs on editorial judgment, taste, and relationships with authors. Real estate depends on physical presence, local knowledge, and trust built over handshakes. Neither field has the clean training data and binary pass/fail that made coding so vulnerable so fast. But that doesn’t mean nothing changes. Wodtke again:

Your job probably won’t disappear. But parts of it will shift, and the timeline depends on your field’s specific relationship to data, verification, and ambiguity. Prepare thoughtfully instead of panicking.

Shumer’s practical advice is modest: use AI one hour a day, experiment with it. Not reading about it, but really using it. I’d add Wodtke’s framing to that: spend the hour figuring out which parts of your work sit on the easy side of the jagged frontier, and which parts don’t. That’s more useful than assuming the whole thing collapses overnight.

I said yesterday that the gap between “designer who orchestrates AI” and “designer who pushes pixels” will be enormous within 12 months. Shumer is making that same argument for every knowledge-work profession. The whole piece is worth your time and maybe worth sharing with someone who’s been resistant to AI. Just keep in mind Wodtke’s nuance.

Every team I’ve ever led has had one of these people. The person who writes the doc that gives the project its shape, who closes context gaps in one-on-ones before they turn into conflicts, who somehow keeps six workstreams from drifting apart. They rarely get the credit they deserve because the work, when it’s done well, looks like it just happened on its own.

Hardik Pandya writes about this on his blog. He shares a quote from a founder friend describing his most valuable employee:

“She’s the reason things actually work around here. She just… makes sure everything happens. She writes the docs. She runs the meetings that matter. She talks to people. Somehow everything she touches stays on track. I don’t know how I’d even describe what she does to a person outside the company. But if she left, we’d fall apart in a month. Maybe less.”

I’ve known people like this at every company I’ve worked at. And I’ve watched them get passed over because the performance system couldn’t see them. Pandya nails why:

When a project succeeds, credit flows to the people whose contributions are easy to describe. The person who presented to the board. The person whose name is on the launch email. The person who shipped the final feature. These contributions are real, I’m not diminishing them. But they’re not more real than the work that made them possible. They’re just easier to point at.

Most organizations try to fix this by telling the invisible workers to “be more visible”—present more, build your personal brand internally. Pandya’s advice goes the other direction, and I think he’s right:

If you’re good at the invisible work, the first move isn’t to get better at visibility. It’s to find the leader who doesn’t need you to be visible.

As a leader, I take this as a challenge. If someone on my team is doing the work that holds everything together, it’s my job to make sure the organization sees it too—especially when it doesn’t announce itself.

I became an associate creative director (ACD) in 2005, ten years after I started working professionally. I was hired by the digital agency Organic into that role. I remembered struggling mightily with trusting my team to do the work. In my previous job as an art director, I hated it when my ACD or CD would go into my files after I’d gone home and just redo stuff. I didn’t do that, but it was very difficult to fight the urge or to avoid designing my own direction. (I failed on the latter.) That’s an intrinsic problem.

Sometimes, the issue is extrinsic, especially when you’re promoted into a leadership role from being an individual contributor (IC). The transition is a struggle. You get promoted because you were great at the work, and then the organization keeps pulling you back to do the work instead of leading at the level your new role demands.

Sabina Nawaz, writing for Harvard Business Review, explains why promotions grant potential but not always permission:

Research shows many midlevel and senior leaders still spend a disproportionate amount of time on tactical work rather than enterprise leadership. In my coaching work with senior leaders, I’ve found that while promotions provide the potential to lead strategically, they don’t always grant permission to do so. To gain that, you must do the hidden (and harder) work of redefining how you think, behave, and interact within the system.

That phrase, “potential but not permission,” is the whole problem in four words. You have the title, but the org’s muscle memory keeps treating you like your old self.

Nawaz identifies a common culprit: bosses who can’t let go of their former role:

Because the SVP had personally run my client’s division for years, he struggled to let go of intervening in the VP’s work. Six months into the transition, the SVP was still reviewing every decision, overriding calls, and re-engaging in tactical discussions he no longer needed to oversee. While he explained his involvement as giving feedback and advice, he was “overhelping,” a seemingly benign act that research suggests can ultimately erode trust, autonomy, and performance.

I’ve watched this pattern derail design organizations. A new creative director gets promoted, but the VP who used to hold that role keeps jumping into design reviews, redlining layouts, second-guessing type choices. The CD never develops their own judgment because their boss never leaves the room.

Nawaz’s advice for breaking the cycle is direct:

Take a quick glance at your calendar and ask yourself if it still reflects the activities, information flow, and ownership items of your prior role. Just as you need your boss to step back to empower you, you must redesign where you spend your time and which decisions to let your team fully own.

Your calendar doesn’t lie. If it’s packed with the same meetings you attended before your promotion, you haven’t actually made the transition. You’ve just added a new title to your old job.

Echoing my series on the design talent crisis and other articles warning against the practice of cutting back on junior talent, Vaughn Tan offers yet another dimension: subjective decision-making skills are only honed through practice. But the opportunities given to junior staff for this type of decision-making are slim.

But to back up, here’s Tan explaining what subjective decision-making is:

These are decisions where there’s no one “correct” answer and the answers that work can’t be known in advance. Subjective decisionmaking requires critical thinking skills to make strongly reasoned arguments, identify appropriate evidence, understand the tradeoffs of different arguments, make decisions that may (or may not) be correct, and develop compelling narratives for those decisions.

While his article isn’t about AI nor is it about companies not hiring juniors, it is about companies not developing juniors and allowing them to practice this type of decision-making in low-stakes situations.

Critical thinking and judgment require practice. Practice needs to be frequent, and needs to begin at a low level with very few consequences that are important. This small-scale training in subjective decisionmaking and critical thinking is the best way to learn how to do it properly in more consequential situations.

If you wait until someone is senior to teach judgment, their first practice attempts have serious consequences. High-stakes decisionmaking pressure cannot be simulated realistically; learning how to deal with it requires actual practice with real consequences that progressively increases in scope and consequentiality.

And why is this all important? Not developing junior staff means there will be a bottleneck issue—only seniors can make these judgement calls—and one day, there will be a succession problem, i.e., who takes over when the seniors leave or retire.

This short article could easily fall under the motivational category, but I couldn’t help but draw parallels to what we do as designers when working as part of a product team.

Hazel Weakly says that people who see systems also tend to become in charge of them, sooner or later. And to be a leader is to “understand that you’ll find yourself stranded in the middle of the ocean one day.”

Not just you, but everyone you lead. And you’ll need to chart a course. In the ever-changing winds, the ever-shifting tides, the unknown weather, and with an inability to see up or down or basically anywhere except a few minutes away. You won’t have the time to find your bearings even if you could. Yet, somehow, in this sea of swirling and infinite complexities and probabilities, in the midst of incalculable odds, you will find yourself needing to have simultaneously several different things…

The first thing is that you will fail. I equate this to knowing that design is about trial and error, testing and measuring, and then adjusting.

The second thing is unshakable conviction that “you will succeed.” I see success as solving the problem, coming up with a solution that helps users do what they need. And you know what? Designers will succeed when they follow the design process.

Finally, the third thing is to “prepare and make ready everyone around you.” Which means influencing your product and engineering counterparts and other stakeholders that the solution your advocating for is the right one.

On the heels of OpenAI’s report “The state of enterprise AI,” Anthropic published a blog post detailing research about how AI is being used by the employees building AI. The researchers surveyed 132 engineers and researchers, conducted 53 interviews, and looked at Claude usage data.

Our research reveals a workplace facing significant transformations: Engineers are getting a lot more done, becoming more “full-stack” (able to succeed at tasks beyond their normal expertise), accelerating their learning and iteration speed, and tackling previously-neglected tasks. This expansion in breadth also has people wondering about the trade-offs—some worry that this could mean losing deeper technical competence, or becoming less able to effectively supervise Claude’s outputs, while others embrace the opportunity to think more expansively and at a higher level. Some found that more AI collaboration meant they collaborated less with colleagues; some wondered if they might eventually automate themselves out of a job.

The post highlights several interesting patterns.

• Employees say Claude now touches about 60% of their work and boosts output by roughly 50%.
• Employees say that 27% of AI‑assisted tasks is work that wouldn’t have happened otherwise—like papercut fixes, tooling, and exploratory prototypes.
• Engineers increasingly use it for new feature implementation and even design/planning.

Perhaps most provocative is career trajectory. Many engineers describe becoming managers of AI agents, taking accountability for fleets of instances and spending more time reviewing than writing net‑new code. Short‑term optimism meets long‑term uncertainty: productivity is up, ambition expands, but the profession’s future shape—levels of abstraction, required skills, and pathways for growth—remains unsettled. See also my series on the design talent crisis.

Alrighty, here’s one more “lens” thing to throw at you today.

In UX Collective, Daleen Rabe says that a “designer’s true value lies not in the polish of their pixels, but in the clarity of their lens.” She means our point-of-view, how we process the world:

1. The method for creating truth
2. The discipline of asking questions
3. The mindset for enacting change
4. The compass for navigating our ethics

The spec, as she calls it, is the designer’s way for creating truth. Others might call it a mockup or wireframe. Either way, it’s a visual representation of what we intend to build:

The spec is a democratic tool, while a text-based document can be ambiguous. It relies on a shared interpretation of language that often doesn’t exist. A visual, however, is a common language. It allows people with vastly different perspectives to align on something we can all agree exists in this reality. It’s a two-dimensional representation that is close enough to the truth to allow us to debate realistic scenarios and identify issues before they become code.

As designers, our role is to find the balance between the theoretical concept of what the business needs and what is tangibly feasible. The design spec is the tool we use to achieve this.

T-shaped, M-shaped, and now Σ-shaped designers?! Feels like a personality quiz or something. Or maybe designers are overanalyzing as usual.

Here’s Darren Yeo telling us what it means:

The Σ-shape defines the new standard for AI expertise: not deep skills, but deep synthesis. This integrator manages the sum of complex systems (Σ) by orchestrating the continuous, iterative feedback loops (σ), ensuring system outputs align with product outcomes and ethical constraints.

Whether you subscribe to the Three Lens framework as proposed by Oliver West, or this sigma-shaped one being proposed by Darren Yeo, just be yourself and don’t bring it up in interviews.

Oliver West argues in UX Magazine that UX designers aren’t monolithic—meaning we’re not all the same and see the world in the same way.

West:

UX is often described as a mix of art and science, but that definition is too simple. The truth is, UX is a spectrum made up of three distinct but interlinked lenses:

• Creativity: Bringing clarity, emotion, and imagination to how we solve problems.
• Science: Applying evidence, psychology, and rigor to understand behavior.
• Business: Focusing on relevance, outcomes, and measurable value.

Every UX professional looks through these lenses differently. And that’s exactly how it should be.

He then outlines how those who are more focused on certain parts of the spectrum may be more apt for more specialized roles. For example, if you’re more focused on creativity, you might be more of a UI designer:

UI Designers lead with the creative lens. Their strength lies in turning complex ideas into interfaces that feel intuitive, elegant, and emotionally engaging. But the best UI Designers also understand the science of usability and the business context behind what they’re designing.

I think for product designers working in the startup world, you actually do need all three lenses, as it were. But with a bias towards Science and Business.

Hey designer, how are you? What is distracting you? Who are you having trouble working with?

Those are a couple of the questions designer Nikita Samutin and UX researcher Elizaveta Demchenko asked 340 product designers in a survey and in 10 interviews. They published their findings in a report called “State of Product Design: An Honest Conversation About the Profession.”

When I look at the calendars of the designers on my team, I see loads of meetings scheduled. So it’s no surprise to me that 64% of respondents said that switching between tasks distracted them. “Multitasking and unpredictable communication are among the main causes of distraction and stress for product designers,” the researchers wrote.

The most interesting to me, are the results in the section, “How Designers See Their Role.” Sixty-percent of respondents want to develop leadership skills and 47% want to improve presenting ideas.

For many, “leadership” doesn’t mean managing people—it means scaling influence: shaping strategy, persuading stakeholders, and leading high-impact projects. In other words, having a stronger voice in what gets built and why.

It’s telling because I don’t see pixel-pushing in the responses. And that’s a good thing in the age of AI.

Speaking of which, 77% of designers aren’t afraid that AI may replace them. “Nearly half of respondents (49%) say AI has already influenced their work, and many are actively integrating new tools into their processes. This reflects the state of things in early 2025.”

I’m sure that number would be bigger if the survey were conducted today.

Scott Berkun enumerates five habits of the worst designers in a Substack post. The most obvious is “pretentious attitude.” It’s the stereotype, right? But in my opinion, the most damaging and potentially fatal habit is a designer’s “lack of curiosity.” Berkun explains:

Design dogma is dangerous and if the only books and resources you read are made by and for designers, you will tend to repeat the same career mistakes past designers have made. We are a historically frustrated bunch of people but have largely blamed everyone else for this for decades. The worst designers are ignorant, and refuse to ask new questions about their profession. They repeat the same flawed complaints and excuses, fueling their own burnout and depression. They resist admitting to their own blindspots and refuse to change and grow.

I’ve worked with designers who have exhibited one or more of these habits at one time or another. Heck, I probably have as well.

Good reminders all around.

As regular readers will know, the design talent crisis is a subject I’m very passionate about. Of course, this talent crisis is really about how companies who are opting for AI instead of junior-level humans, are robbing themselves of a human expertise to control the AI agents of the future, and neglecting a generation of talented and enthusiastic young people.

Also obviously, this goes beyond the design discipline. Annie Hedgpeth, writing for the People Work blog, says that “AI is replacing the training ground not replacing expertise.”

We used to have a training ground for junior engineers, but now AI is increasingly automating away that work. Both studies I referenced above cited the same thing - AI is getting good at automating junior work while only augmenting senior work. So the evidence doesn’t show that AI is going to replace everyone; it’s just removing the apprenticeship ladder.

From the Sep 2025 Harvard University paper, “Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change: Evidence from U.S. Résumé and Job Posting Data.” (link)

And then she echoes my worry:

So what happens in 10-20 years when the current senior engineers retire? Where do the next batch of seniors come from? The ones who can architect complex systems and make good judgment calls when faced with uncertain situations? Those are skills that are developed through years of work that starts simple and grows in complexity, through human mentorship.

We’re setting ourselves up for a timing mismatch, at best. We’re eliminating junior jobs in hopes that AI will get good enough in the next 10-20 years to handle even complex, human judgment calls. And if we’re wrong about that, then we have far fewer people in the pipeline of senior engineers to solve those problems.

Like it or not, as a designer, you have to be able to present your work proficiently. I remember I had always hated presenting. I was nervous and would get tongue-tied. Eventually, the more I did it, the more I got used to it. …But that’s public speaking, just half of what a presentation is. The other half is how to structure and tell your story. What story? The story of your design.

There’s a lot to be learned from master storytellers like Pixar. Laia Tremosa writing for the Interaction Design Foundation walks us through some storytelling techniques that we can pick up from Pixar.

Most professionals stay unseen not because their work lacks value, but because their message lacks resonance. They talk in facts when their audience needs meaning.

Storytelling is how you change that. It turns explanation into connection, and connection into influence. When you frame your ideas through story, people don’t just understand your work, they believe in it.

And out of the five that she mentions, the second one is my favorite, “Know Where You’re Going: Start with the End.”

Pixar designs for the final feeling. You should too. As a presenter, your version of that is a clear takeaway, a shift in perspective, or a call to action. You’re guiding your audience to a moment of clarity.

Maybe it’s a relief that a problem can be solved. Maybe it’s excitement about a new idea. Maybe it’s conviction that your proposal matters. Whatever the feeling, it’s your north star.

Don’t just prepare what to say; decide where you want to land. Start with the end, and build every word, visual, and story toward that moment of understanding and meaning.