In the 2011 documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, then 85 year-old sushi master Jiro Ono says this about craft:

Once you decide on your occupation… you must immerse yourself in your work. You have to fall in love with your work. Never complain about your job. You must dedicate your life to mastering your skill. That’s the secret of success and is the key to being regarded honorably.

Craft is typically thought of as the formal aspects of any field such as design, woodworking, writing, or cooking. In design, we think about composition, spacing, and typography—being pixel-perfect. But one’s craft is much more than that. Ono’s sushi craft is not solely about slicing fish and pressing it against a bit of rice. It is also about picking the right fish, toasting the nori just so, cooking the rice perfectly, and running a restaurant. It’s the whole thing.

Therefore, mastering design—or any occupation—takes time, experience, or reps as the kids say. So it’s to my dismay that Suff Syed’s essay “Why I’m Giving Up My Design Title — And What That Says About the Future of Design” got so much play in recent weeks. Syed is Head of Product Design at Microsoft—er, was. I guess his title is now Member of the Technical Staff. In a perfectly well-argued and well-written essay, he concludes:

That’s why I’m switching careers. From Head of Product Design to Member of Technical Staff.

This isn’t a farewell to experience, clarity, or elegance. It’s a return to first principles. I want to get closer to the metal—to shape the primitives, models, and agents that will define how tomorrow’s software is built.

We need more people at the intersection. Builders who understand agentic flows and elevated experiences. Designers who can reason about trust boundaries and token windows. Researchers who can make complex systems usable—without dumbing them down to a chat interface.

In the 2,800 words preceding the above quote, Syed lays out a five-point argument: the paradigm for software is changing to agentic AI, design doesn’t drive innovation, fewer design leaders will be needed in the future, the commoditization of design, and the pay gap. The tl;dr being that design as a profession is dead and building with AI is where it’s at. 

With respect to Mr. Syed, I call bullshit. 

Let’s discuss each of his arguments.

The Paradigm Argument

Suff Syed:

The entire traditional role of product designers, creating static UI in Silicon Valley offices that work for billions of users, is becoming increasingly irrelevant; when the Agent can simply generate the UI it needs for every single user.

That’s a very narrow view of what user experience designers do. In this diagram by Dan Saffer from 2008, UX encircles a large swath of disciplines. It’s a little older so it doesn’t cover newer disciplines like service design or AI design.

Originally made by envis pricisely GmBH - www.envis-precisely.com, based on “The Disciplines of UX” by Dan Saffer (2008). (PDF)

I went to design school a long time ago, graduating 1995. But even back then, in Graphic Design 2 class, graphic design wasn’t just print design. Our final project for that semester was to design an exhibit, something that humans could walk through. I’ve long lost the physical model, but my solution was inspired by the Golden Gate Bridge and how I had this impression of the main cables as welcome arms as you drove across the bridge. My exhibit was a 20-foot tall open structure made of copper beams and a glass roof. Etched onto the roof was a poem—by whom I can’t recall—that would cast the shadows of its letters onto the ground, creating an experience for anyone walking through the structure.

Similarly, thoughtful product designers consider the full experience, not just what’s rendered on the screen. How is onboarding? What’s their interaction with customer service? And with techniques like contextual inquiry, we care about the environments users are in. Understanding that nurses in a hospital are in a very busy setting and share computers are important insights that can’t be gleaned from desk research or general knowledge. Designers are students of life and observers of human behavior.

Syed again:

Agents offer a radical alternative by placing control directly into users’ hands. Instead of navigating through endless interfaces, finding a good Airbnb could be as simple as having a conversation with an AI agent. The UI could be generated on the fly, tailored specifically to your preferences; an N:1 model. No more clicking around, no endless tabs, no frustration.

I don’t know. I have my doubts that this is actually going to be the future. While I agree that agentic workflows will be game-changing, I disagree that the chat UI is the only one for all use cases or even most scenarios. I’ve previously discussed the disadvantages of prompting-only workflows and how professionals need more control. 

I also disagree that users will want UIs generated on the fly. Think about the avalanche of support calls and how insane those will be if every user’s interface is different!

In my experience, users—including myself—like to spend the time to set up their software for efficiency. For example, in a dual-monitor setup, I used to expose all of Photoshop’s palettes and put them in the smaller display, and the main canvas on the larger one. Every time I got a new computer or new monitor, I would import that workspace so I could work efficiently. 

Habit and muscle memory are underrated. Once a user has invested the time to arrange panels, tools, and shortcuts the way they like, changing it frequently adds friction. For productivity and work software, consistency often outweighs optimization. Even if a specialized AI-made-for-you workspace could be more “optimal” for a task, switching disrupts the user’s mental model and motor memory.

I want to provide one more example because it’s in the news: consider the backlash that OpenAI has faced in the past week with their rollout of GPT-5. OpenAI assumed people would simply welcome “the next model up,” but what they underestimated was the depth of attachment to existing workflows, and in some cases, to the personas of the models themselves. As Casey Newton put it, “it feels different and stronger than the kinds of attachment people have had to previous kinds of technology.” It’s evidence of how much emotional and cognitive investment users pour into the tools they depend on. You can’t just rip that foundation away without warning. 

Which brings us back to the heart of design: respect for the user. Not just their immediate preferences, but the habits, muscle memory, and yes, relationships that accumulate over time. Agents may generate UIs on the fly, but if they ignore the human need for continuity and control, they’ll stumble into the same backlash OpenAI faced.

The Innovation Argument

Syed’s second argument is that design supports innovation rather than drive it. I half agree with this. If we’re talking about patents or inventions, sure. Technology will always win the day. But design can certainly drive innovation.

He cites Airbnb, Figma, Notion, and Linear as being “incredible companies with design founders,” but only Airbnb is a Fortune 500 company. 

While not having been founded by designers, I don’t think anyone would argue that Apple, Nike, Tesla, and Disney are not design-led and aren’t innovative. All are in the Fortune 500. Disney treats experience design, which includes its parks, media, and consumer products, as a core capability. Imagineering is a literal design R&D division that shapes the company’s most profitable experiences. Look up Lanny Smoot.

Early prototypes of the iPhone featuring the first multitouch screens were actually tablet-sized. But Apple’s industrial design team led by Jony Ive, along with the hardware engineering team got the form factor to fit nicely in one hand. And it was Bas Ording, the UI designer behind Mac OS X’s Aqua design language that prototyped inertial effects. Farhad Manjoo, writing in Slate in 2012:

Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief designer, had been investigating a technology that he thought could do wonderful things someday—a touch display that could understand taps from multiple fingers at once. (Note that Apple did not invent multitouch interfaces; it was one of several companies investigating the technology at the time.) According to Isaacson’s biography, the company’s initial plan was to the use the new touch system to build a tablet computer. Apple’s tablet project began in 2003—seven years before the iPad went on sale—but as it progressed, it dawned on executives that multitouch might work on phones. At one meeting in 2004, Jobs and his team looked a prototype tablet that displayed a list of contacts. “You could tap on the contact and it would slide over and show you the information,” Forstall testified. “It was just amazing.”

Jobs himself was particularly taken by two features that Bas Ording, a talented user-interface designer, had built into the tablet prototype. One was “inertial scrolling”—when you flick at a list of items on the screen, the list moves as a function of how fast you swipe, and then it comes to rest slowly, as if being affected by real-world inertia. Another was the “rubber-band effect,” which causes a list to bounce against the edge of the screen when there were no more items to display. When Jobs saw the prototype, he thought, “My god, we can build a phone out of this,” he told the D Conference in 2010.

The Leadership Argument

Suff Syed’s third argument is about what it means to be a design leader. He says, “scaling your impact as a designer meant scaling the surfaces you influence.” As you rose up through the ranks, “your craft was increasingly displaced by coordination. You became a negotiator, a timeline manager, a translator of ambition through Product and Engineering partnerships.”

Instead, he argues, because AI can build with fewer people—well, you only need one person: “You need two people: one who understands systems and one who understands the user. Better if they’re the same person.”

That doesn’t scale. Don’t tell me that Microsoft, a company with $281 billion in revenue and 228,000 employees—will shrink like a stellar collapse into a single person with an army of AIs. That’s magical thinking.

Leaders are still needed. Influence and coordination are still needed. Humans will still be needed.

He ends this argument with:

This new world despises a calendar full of reviews, design crits, review meetings, and 1:1s. It emphasizes a repo with commits that matter. And promises the joy of shipping to return to your work. That joy unmediated by PowerPoint, politics, or process. That’s not a demotion. That’s liberation.

So he wants us all to sit in our home offices and not collaborate with others? Innovation no longer comes from lone geniuses. They’re born from bouncing ideas off of your coworkers and everyone building on each other’s ideas.

Friction in the process can actually make things better. Pixar famously has a council known as the Braintrust—a small, rotating group of the studio’s best storytellers who meet regularly to tear down and rebuild works-in-progress. The rules are simple: no mandatory fixes, no sugarcoating, and no egos. The point is to push the director to see the story’s problems more clearly—and to own the solution. One of the most famous saves came with Toy Story 2. Originally destined for direct-to-video release, early cuts were so flat that the Braintrust urged the team to start from scratch. Nine frantic months later, the film emerged as one of Pixar’s most beloved works, proof that constructive creative friction can turn a near-disaster into a classic.

The Distribution Argument

Design taste has been democratized and is table stakes, says Syed in his next argument.

There was a time when every new Y Combinator startup looked like someone tortured an intern into generating a logo using Clipart. Today, thanks to a generation of exposure to good design—and better tools—most founders have internalized the basics of aesthetic judgment. First impressions matter, and now, they’re trivial to get right.

And that templates, libraries, and frameworks make it super easy and quick to spin up something tasteful in minutes:

Component libraries like Tailwind, shadcn/ui, and Radix have collapsed the design stack. What once required a full design team handcrafting a system in Figma, exporting specs to Storybook, and obsessively QA-ing the front-end… now takes a few lines of code. Spin up a repo. Drop in some components. Tweak the palette. Ship something that looks eerily close to Linear or Notion in a weekend.

I’m starting to think that Suff Syed believes that designers are just painters or something. Wow. This whole argument is reductive, flattening our role to be only about aesthetics. See above for how much design actually entails.

The Wealth Argument

“Nobody is paying Designers $10M, let alone $100M anytime soon.” Ah, I think this is him saying the quiet part out loud. Mr. Syed is dropping his design title and becoming a “member of the technical staff” because he’s chasing the money.

He’s right. No one is going to pay a designer $100 million total comp package. Unless you’re Jony Ive and part of io, which OpenAI acquired for $6.5 billion back in May. Which is a rare and likely once-ever occurrence.

In a recent episode of Hard Fork, The New Times tech columnist Kevin Roose said:

The scale of money and investment going into these AI systems is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before in the tech industry. …I heard a rumor there was a big company that wasted a billion dollars or more on a failed training run. And then you start to think, oh, I understand why, to a company like Meta, the right AI talent is worth a hundred million dollars, because that level of expertise doesn’t exist that widely outside of this very small group of people. And if this person does their job well, they can save your company something more like a billion dollars. And maybe that means that you should pay them a hundred million dollars.

“Very small group of people” is likely just a couple dozen people in the world who have this expertise and worth tens of millions of dollars.

Syed again:

People are getting generationally wealthy inventing new agentic abstractions, compressing inference cycles, and scaling frontier models safely. That’s where the gravity is. That’s where anybody should aspire to be. With AI enabling and augmenting you as an individual, there’s a far more compelling reason to chase this frontier. No reason not to.

People also get generationally wealthy by hitting the startup lottery. But it’s a hard road and there’s a lot of luck involved.

The current AI frenzy feels a lot like 1849 in California. Back then, roughly 300,000 people flooded the Sierra Nevada mountains hoping to strike gold, but the math was brutal: maybe 10% made any profit at all, the top 4% earned enough to brag a little, and only about 1% became truly rich. The rest? They left with sore backs, empty pockets, and I guess some good stories. 

Back to Reality

AI is already changing the software industry. As designers and builders of software, we are going to be using AI as material. This is as obvious as when the App Store on iPhone debuted and everyone needed to build apps.

Suff Syed wrote his piece as part personal journey and decision-making and part rallying cry to other designers. He is essentially switching careers and says that it won’t be easy.

This transition isn’t about abandoning one identity for another. It’s about evolving—unlearning what no longer serves us and embracing the disciplines that will shape the future. There’s a new skill tree ahead: model internals, agent architectures, memory hierarchies, prompt flows, evaluation loops, and infrastructure that determines how products think, behave, and scale.

Best of luck to Suff Syed on his journey. I hope he strikes AI gold. 

As for me, I aim to continue on my journey of being a shokunin, or craftsman, like Jiro Ono. For over 30 years—if you count my amateur days in front of the Mac in middle school—I’ve been designing. Not just pushing pixels in Photoshop or Figma, but doing the work of understanding audiences and users, solving business problems, inventing new interaction patterns, and advocating for usability. All in the service of the user, and all while honing my craft.

That craft isn’t tied to a technology stack or a job title. It’s a discipline, a mindset, and a lifetime’s work. Being a designer is my life. 

So no, I’m not giving up my design title. It’s not a relic—it’s a commitment. And in a world chasing the next gold rush, I’d rather keep making work worth coming back to, knowing that in the end, gold fades but mastery endures. Besides, if I ever do get rich, it’ll be because I designed something great, not because I happened to be standing near a gold mine.

Product design is going to change profoundly within the next 24 months. If the AI 2027 report is any indication, the capabilities of the foundational models will grow exponentially, and with them—I believe—will the abilities of design tools.

The AI foundational model capabilities will grow exponentially and AI-enabled design tools will benefit from the algorithmic advances. Sources: AI 2027 scenario & Roger Wong

The TL;DR of the report is this: companies like OpenAI have more advanced AI agent models that are building the next-generation models. Once those are built, the previous generation is tested for safety and released to the public. And the cycle continues. Currently, and for the next year or two, these companies are focusing their advanced models on creating superhuman coders. This compounds and will result in artificial general intelligence, or AGI, within the next five years. 

Non-AI companies will benefit from new model releases. We already see how much the performance of coding assistants like Cursor has improved with recent releases of Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and this week, GPT-4.1, OpenAI’s latest.

Tools like v0, Lovable, Replit, and Bolt are leading the charge in AI-assisted design. Creating new landing pages and simple apps is literally as easy as typing English into a chat box. You can whip up a very nice-looking dashboard in single-digit minutes.

However, I will argue they are only serving a small portion of the market. These tools are great for zero-to-one digital products or websites. While new sites and software need to be designed and built, the vast majority of the market is in extending and editing current products. There are hordes more designers who work at corporations such as Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Shopify, and Uber than there are designers at agencies. They all need to adhere to their company’s design system and can’t use what Lovable produces from scratch. The generated components can’t be used even if they were styled to look correct. They must be components from their design system code repositories.

The Design-to-Code Gap

But first, a quick detour…

For any designer who has ever handed off a Figma file to a developer, they have felt the stinging disappointment days or weeks later when it’s finally coded. The spacing is never quite right. The type sizes are off. And the back and forth seems endless. The developer handoff experience has been a well-trodden path full of now-defunct or dying companies like InVision, Abstract, and Zeplin. Figma tries to solve this issue with Dev Mode, but even then, there’s a translation that has to happen from pixels and vectors in a proprietary program to code. 

Yes, no- and low-code platforms like Webflow, Framer, and Builder.io exist. But the former two are proprietary platforms—you can’t take the code with you—and the latter is primarily a CMS (no-code editing for content editors).

The dream is for a design app similar to Figma that uses components from your team’s GitHub design system repository.1 I’m not talking about a Figma-only component library. No. Real components with controllable props in an inspector. You can’t break them apart and any modifications have to be made at the repo level. But you can visually put pages together. For new components, well, if they’re made of atomic parts, then yes, that should be possible too.

UXPin Merge comes close. Everything I mentioned above is theoretically possible. But if I’m being honest, I did a trial and the product is buggy and wasn’t great to use. 

A Glimpse of What’s Coming

Enter Tempo, Polymet, and Subframe. These are very new entrants to the design tool space. Tempo and Polymet are backed by Y Combinator and Subframe is pre-seed.

For Subframe, they are working on a beta feature that will allow you to connect your GitHub repository, append a little snippet of code to each component, and then the library of components will appear in their app. Great! This is the dream. The app seems fairly easy to use and wasn’t sluggish and buggy like UXPin.

But the kicker—the Holy Grail—is their AI. 

I quickly put together a hideous form screen based on one of the oldest pages in BuildOps that is long overdue for a redesign. Then, I went into Subframe’s Ask AI tab and prompted, “Make this design more user friendly.” Similar to Midjourney, four blurry tiles appeared and slowly came into focus. This diffuser model effect was a moment of delight for me. I don’t know if they’re actually using a diffuser model—think Stable Diffusion and Midjourney—or if they spent the time building a kick-ass loading state. Anyway, four completely built alternate layouts were generated. I clicked into each one to see it larger and noticed they each used components from our styled design library. (I’m on a trial, so it’s not exactly components from our repo, but it demonstrates the promise.) And I felt like I just witnessed the future.

Subframe’s Ask AI mode drafted four options in under a minute, turning an outdated form into something much more user-friendly.

What Product Design in 2027 Might Look Like

From the AI 2027 scenario report, in the chapter, “March 2027: Algorithmic Breakthroughs”:

Three huge datacenters full of Agent-2 copies work day and night, churning out synthetic training data. Another two are used to update the weights. Agent-2 is getting smarter every day.

With the help of thousands of Agent-2 automated researchers, OpenBrain is making major algorithmic advances.

…

Aided by the new capabilities breakthroughs, Agent-3 is a fast and cheap superhuman coder. OpenBrain runs 200,000 Agent-3 copies in parallel, creating a workforce equivalent to 50,000 copies of the best human coder sped up by 30x. OpenBrain still keeps its human engineers on staff, because they have complementary skills needed to manage the teams of Agent-3 copies.

As I said at the top of this essay, AI is making AI and the innovations are compounding. With UX design, there will be a day when design is completely automated.

Imagine this. A product manager at a large-scale e-commerce site wants to decrease shopping cart abandonment by 10%. They task an AI agent to optimize a shopping cart flow with that metric as the goal. A week later, the agent returns the results:

• It ran 25 experiments, with each experiment being a design variation of multiple pages.
• Each experiment was with 1,000 visitors, totaling about 10% of their average weekly traffic.
• Experiment #18 was the winner, resulting in an 11.3% decrease in cart abandonment.

The above will be possible. A few things have to fall in place first, though, and the building blocks are being made right now.

The Foundation Layer : Integrate Design Systems

The design industry has been promoting the benefits of design systems for many years now. What was once a Sisyphean uphill battle is now mostly easier. Development teams understand the benefits of using a shared and standardized component library.

To capture the larger piece of the design market that is not producing greenfield work, AI design tools like Subframe will have to depend on well-built component libraries. Their AI must be able to ingest and internalize design system documentation that govern how components should be used. 

Then we’ll be able to prompt new screens with working code into existence. 

**Forecast: **Within six months.

Professionals Still Need Control

Cursor—the AI-assisted development tool that’s captured the market—is VS Code enhanced with AI features. In other words, it is a professional-grade programming tool that allows developers to write and edit code, *and *generate it via AI chat. It gives the pros control. Contrast that with something like Lovable, which is aimed at designers and the code is accessible, but you have to look for it. The canvas and chat are prioritized.

For AI-assisted design tools to work, they need to give us designers control. That control comes in the form of curation and visual editing. Give us choices when generating alternates and let us tweak elements to our heart’s content—within the confines of the design system, of course. 

The product design workflow in the future will look something like this: prompt the AI, view choices and select one, then use fine-grained controls to tweak.

Automating Design with Design Agents

Agent mode in Cursor is pretty astounding. You’ll see it plan its actions based on the prompt, then execute them one by one. If it encounters an error, it’ll diagnose and fix it. If it needs to install a package or launch the development server to test the app, it will do that. Sometimes, it can go for many minutes without needing intervention. It’s literally like watching a robot assemble a thingamajig. 

We will need this same level of agentic AI automation in design tools. If I could write in a chat box “Create a checkout flow for my site” and the AI design tool can generate a working cart page, payment page, and thank-you page from that one prompt using components from the design system, that would be incredible.

Yes, zero-to-one tools are starting to add this feature. Here’s a shopping cart flow from v0…

Building a shopping cart checkout flow in v0 was incredibly fast. Two minutes flat. This video is sped up 400%.

Polymet and Lovable were both able to create decent flows. There is also promise with Tempo, although the service was bugging out when I tested it earlier today. Tempo will first plan by writing a PRD, then it draws a flow diagram, then wireframes the flow, and then generates code for each screen. If I were to create a professional tool, this is how I would do it. I truly hope they can resolve their tech issues. 

**Forecast: **Within one year.

Tempo’s workflow seems ideal. It generates a PRD, draws a flow diagram, creates wireframes, and finally codes the UI.

The Final Pieces: Integration and Deployment Agents

The final pieces to realizing our imaginary scenario are coding agents that integrate the frontend from AI design tools to the backend application, and then deploy the code to a server for public consumption. I’m not an expert here, so I’ll just hand-wave past this part. The AI-assisted design tooling mentioned above is frontend-only. For the data to flow and the business logic to work, the UI must be integrated with the backend.

CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment) platforms like GitHub Actions and Vercel already exist today, so it’s not difficult to imagine deploys being initiated by AI agents.

**Forecast: **Within 18–24 months.

Where Is Figma?

The elephant in the room is Figma’s position in all this. Since their rocky debut of AI features last year, Figma has been trickling out small AI features like more powerful search, layer renaming, mock data generation, and image generation. The biggest AI feature they have is called First Draft, which is a relaunch of design generation. They seem to be stuck placating to designers and developers (Dev Mode), instead of considering how they can bring value to the entire organization. Maybe they will make a big announcement at Config, their upcoming user conference in May. But if they don’t compete with one of these aforementioned tools, they will be left behind.

To be clear, Figma is still going to be a necessary part of the design process. A canvas free from the confines of code allows for easy *manual *exploration. But the dream of closing the gap between design and code needs to come true sooner than later if we’re to take advantage of AI’s promise.

The Two-Year Horizon

As I said at the top of this essay, product design is going to change profoundly within the next two years. The trajectory is clear: AI is making AI, and the innovations are compounding rapidly. Design systems provide the structured foundation that AI needs, while tools like Subframe are developing the crucial integration with these systems.

For designers, this isn’t the end—if anything, it’s a transformation. We’ll shift from pixel-pushers to directors, from creators to curators. Our value will lie in knowing what to ask for and making the subtle refinements that require human taste and judgment.

The holy grail of seamless design-to-code is finally within reach. In 24 months, we won’t be debating if AI will transform product design—we’ll be reflecting on how quickly it happened.

1 I know Figma has the feature called Code Connect. I haven’t used it, but from what I can tell, you match your Figma component library to the code component library. Then in Dev Mode, it makes it easier for engineers to discern which component from the repo to use.

This is the third article in a three-part series offering tips on how to get a job as a product or UX designer. Part 1 covers your resume and LinkedIn profile. Part 2 advises on your portfolio website.

Part 3: Interviewing

If you have stood out enough from the hundreds of resumes and portfolios a hiring manager has looked at, you’ll start the interview process.

From my point of view, as a design hiring manager, it’s all about mitigating risk. How do I know if you will do great work with us? How do I know that you’ll fit in with the team and positively change our dynamic? How do I know that your contributions will help get us to where we need to be?

Ultimately the interview process is very much like dating: we’re figuring out if we’re right for each other, slowly engendering trust, and showing interest—without overdoing it.

The interview process will vary for each company, but in general, it’ll be:

• An introductory screening call
• An interview with the hiring manager
• Interviews with other team members

Intro Call

The first step in the interview process will be the introductory call. From the hiring side, this is known as the screening call. Usually, it’s a recruiter, and their job is to screen out applicants who don’t have the right qualifications and then gather a few essential pieces of information.

After the call is scheduled, have a couple of things ready beforehand before getting on the phone. The most important thing to do ahead is to research the company. Use Google, LinkedIn, and all the modern tools at your disposal to learn the basics of the company: what they do, what they sell, who their target users are, who their clients are (if an agency).

Also, have your salary expectations in mind. Most employers will pay market rate salaries similar to other companies of their size. A seed-stage startup will not be able to compensate you as much as Google. Do your research on Glassdoor, Payscale, or other sites first. Shoot for maybe a little above average, but certainly, have a minimum in mind depending on your personal circumstance.

During the call, be prepared and be professional. A good recruiter will ask you about your salary expectations and your timeline (in case you’re interviewing elsewhere as well). If you pass the screen, you’ll probably talk to your future boss next.

Follow up with a thank-you email within an hour.

Hiring Manager Interview

Hopefully, your recruiter prepped you well for your first interview with the hiring manager. These interviews can take many forms, but in general, you’ll introduce yourself, talk about your work, and then there will be more of a Q and A.

In these interviews, as a design hiring manager, I’m trying to understand the following:

• What is your relevant experience to the role I’m hiring for?
• What is your process?
• How do you collaborate with others?
• What’s your communication style?
• Are you a good presenter?
• Can I see you as part of the team?
• Will you be a positive addition to the team?

The biggest mistake I’ve seen candidates make in interviews is not being specific enough. I will usually ask a question like, “Can you walk me through a recent project, focusing on your process and how you worked with others?” The answers I usually get are very high level. As an interviewer, I want to hear details because details demonstrate an excellent grasp of a subject. So if you rattle off the typical design process without going into details, it doesn’t give me confidence that you can do the job.

Be very, very familiar with your case studies. And lean on them as detailed examples. You might be asked to walk through a case study or two. Be able to do talk through each project in about five minutes. Tell stories!

Art Kilinski, Group Creative Director at NVIDIA, says, “Be ready to show your portfolio and be on camera if it’s a remote interview.”

The hiring manager may or may not have looked at your portfolio beforehand. Personally, I would, but sometimes we run out of time. So don’t assume.

After the interview, follow up with a thank-you email within an hour.

Helpful Tips

• Refresh yourself on the company.
• Read up on your hiring manager.
• Have a 30- to-60-second summary of your career so far. Don’t spend 10 minutes recalling every line item in your resume.
• As a bonus, put your case studies into a slide deck format (Keynote FTW!). I would rather not have you scroll through your website because I’ve looked at your work before.
• Have stories at the ready about how you collaborate with others and about how you resolve conflicts.
• Every company has a different video conferencing system. Give yourself enough time before the interview to download and install the software. Test it out and get familiar with it. And know how to share your screen.
• Have a list of non-generic questions to ask the interviewer. A good designer is also curious, so I expect to be asked questions about the company, the team, and the role.
• Be professional and take it seriously. The job market may be hot right now, but employers are looking for professionals. Don’t look like and behave as if you just rolled out of bed.

Panel Interviews

It’s rare these days that you’ll only speak to the hiring manager and get hired. However, if you pass the previous gauntlet of interviews, you will likely meet and be interviewed by your future teammates. The same advice from the section above applies here. Be kind and professional to everyone you meet. They could be your future colleagues, and how you treat them will reflect well or poorly on you.

Remember they are testing to see if you will be a great addition to the team. Do you have the skills to help? Or will you be a drag?

Follow up with thank-you emails within an hour. If you don’t have their emails, ask the recruiter for them.

Design Challenges

I am opposed to speculative work. Even if you’re just out of school, you should not perform work for free. With that said, coding challenges are the norm in the tech industry, and, increasingly, so are design challenges.

A fair design challenge should not take an excessive amount of your time, nor should it be directly related to the company or product itself. In other words, if the company you’re interviewing for wants you to redesign their product’s dashboard over the weekend, that’s not kosher. Run the other way.

Employers will say that the amount of time you put into a take-home assignment like this signals how enthusiastic you are about the position. So, my advice here is to do enough where it’s a reasonable effort and demonstrates your skills. But don’t spend so much time that you are resentful if you aren’t hired.

I’m more of a fan of the live whiteboard challenge. This time-boxed exercise helps me experience what it’s like to collaborate with you. You can show off your strategic thinking skills in a limited time setting. You will need to prep for whiteboard challenges if you have never done them. Have a plan of attack before going in. Maybe even practice a couple of times with a friend first.

• Be familiar with the tool you’ll be using. If your interview is in person, it’ll be—obviously—on a whiteboard. But if it’s over Zoom, then you may be asked to use Miro, FigJam, or something else. Inquire beforehand about what you’ll use and make sure to know how to use it.
• Ask clarifying questions.
• Break down the problem and define it into something you can solve within the allotted time.
• Talk through everything you’re doing.
• Sketch!
• Collaborate with the interviewer and make decisions with them.
• Keep track of time.

I will admit that the interviewing process is probably the most nerve-wracking. It isn’t easy talking to people you’ve never met and giving them a sense of who you are and how you would work with them as a colleague. It is scary to be vulnerable and put yourself out there to be judged. This process is an artificial construct.

Communicate clearly and genuinely. Be professional, yet yourself. If your work is good and you present yourself well, that should be enough to make a lasting impression with your interviewers so they can see a possible future with you on their team.

Good luck!

This is the second article in a three-part series offering tips on how to get a job as a product or UX designer. Part 1 covers your resume and LinkedIn profile. Part 3 is about the interviewing process.

Part 2: Your Portfolio

As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, portfolios used to be physical cases filled with your work, and you only had one of them. But now that portfolios are online, it’s much easier to get your work out there.

Much like resumes, many designers make the mistake of over-designing their portfolio website, trying to use it as a canvas to show their visual design or interaction chops. Don’t do it.

Keep It Simple

Remember your user, the design hiring manager, is trying to sift through hundreds of portfolios. Each time we open a portfolio site, we need to orient ourselves, find the work section, click into a project and view it. If your site has any friction at all, if it tries to be cute with something or tries to reinvent the wheel in any way, we can get frustrated quickly and move on to the next one. Your site should be about your work first and about you second.

Keep It Focused

A portfolio is not supposed to be an archive. So don’t dump everything you’ve ever designed into it. Instead, curate four to six best case studies you have. Yes, case studies. In the past, showing beautiful images of the final output was sufficient, but because websites can accommodate a lot of content, the case study format tells us hiring managers much more.

Tell Stories

Think of a case study as the story of how you made something. Tell that story, and tell it to someone who’s not familiar with the client, product or service, and you. There are a few templates out there that are good starting points. I like this one by Calvin Pedzai:

1. Project Title & Subtitle (A headline and subtitle that indicates the name and goal of the project)
2. Client/Company/Project type
3. Project date (When did you work on the project)
4. Your role (What you were responsible for on the project)
5. Project Summary/About this Project (An overview that summarizes the project, goal and results)
6. The challenge (What specific problem, user needs, business requirements and/or pain points that the project solves. Were there any technical constraints or business KPIs you had to keep in mind? Who are you users and what are their specific needs)
7. Solution (What method/process were used to solve specific problem, user needs, business requirements and/or pain points? How did features address the objectives?)
8. Results (Project success metrics, awards, reflections, project next steps and/or lessons learnt)

While this format was originally intended for UX projects, I think this should also apply to non-product design. Michael Sequiera, as Global Creative Director at Visa, says, “I like to see 2-3 case studies on how they solved the design problem.”

As you write your case study, remember to write it like a story, a narrative, rather than plain and factually. Also, keep in mind the length. Strive to keep the case study short enough to be consumed in about three to five minutes of skimming and reading.

NDAs

Sometimes designers do not show their work on their portfolio websites because of non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs, they’ve signed with companies and clients. First of all, we all have signed NDAs, and nearly everything we do for a company is work-for-hire, meaning the other companies own the work. But portfolios are how designers get hired. Design hiring managers will never hire a designer without evaluating past work first. So if you’ve signed an NDA and don’t think you can show these samples on your portfolio site, here are some things to consider:

• Name the client or company, but password-protect the case study. Send this password in your job application.
• Name the client or company, but say that you can only share the work in a meeting. That’s fine too.
• Unless you’re applying for a job at a direct competitor, no design hiring manager is going to steal the work you show. We look at work to assess what you’ve done and how that experience could be helpful to us.

I have also come across a handful of portfolio websites that do not show any work at all. When I interviewed one of these designers, she said her reason was that the work would be outdated as soon as she posted it. I bought her reasoning mainly because she had worked at a couple of big-name brands and had established herself enough to get away with that. Of course, I would still go through her work as part of the interview process.

(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and do not take what I wrote above as legal advice. I’m not advising you to break your non-disclosure agreements. If you have any legal doubts, please consult an actual lawyer.)

Other Useful Tips

• Seriously consider hosting your portfolio on your own domain. Doing so shows digital fluency.
• You do not need to code your site from scratch. It’s OK to use Squarespace or any other website builder. Behance is acceptable, too, as a last resort.
• Keep it up to date. Design work has expiration dates. Pieces greater than three or four years should probably be replaced with something fresher.
• Make your images big enough, or allow the user to click and enlarge them.
• Put all your personal stuff in an about page.
• Many designers are also visual artists, but fine art is not design. If you must have a section showing your art, make sure it is good and keep it separate from your design work.
• If you’re early in your career and only have student projects to show, that’s OK. Show them, but be upfront and clear that these are school projects.
• Check for typos! Have someone else proofread all the text in your portfolio.

—

Having a well-crafted resume, robust LinkedIn profile, and compelling portfolio website are the bare minimum requirements before you start applying for jobs. But once you have those three basics, start applying for positions you qualify for.

In Part 3 of this series—I promise, it’s the last—I’ll provide some handy tips about the interviewing process.

This is the first article in a three-part series offering tips on how to get a job as a product or UX designer. Part 2 advises on your portfolio website. Part 3 covers the interviewing process.

Part 1: Your Resume & LinkedIn Profile

(With apologies to Maxine Paetro, whose seminal 1979 book  How to Put Your Book Together and Get a Job in Advertising was highly influential in my early job search process in the mid-1990s.)

I graduated from design school in the spring of 1995. Yahoo! was incorporated just a couple of months before. AOL was still the dominant way everyone connected to the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web was still a baby, with just a tiny fraction of websites available. In other words, my design education was about graphic design—layout, typography, logos, print. Neither digital design nor UX design was taught or barely practiced yet. (The closest thing would be human-computer interaction, more computer science than design.)

The San Francisco graphic design scene back in the early- to mid-1990s was pretty close-knit. Most of the established practitioners in The City taught at the California College of Arts & Crafts (CCAC, but now shortened to California College of the Arts (CCA)), fertile ground for finding interns and junior designers. Regardless, all of us graduating seniors needed to have portfolios. Physical portfolios. Some books—another name for portfolio—were basic: a leather folio with plastic slip pages filled with mocked-up posters, booklets, or photos of projects. Or some designers would custom bind books with special hardware and print their work on fine paper, spending hundreds of dollars. But you had one book. So when applying for jobs, you had to leave your book with the design studio for a few days to a week! Which meant that job hunting was very slow going.

If the creative director at the design studio liked your portfolio—which was very likely passed around the whole studio for the grubby hands of other designers to peruse—you’d go back in for an interview. In the interview, you’d walk through your work and get drilled on the choices you made. Back in my day, that’s how you could land a design job.

Fast-forward to today, and I’m on the hiring side of the table. Of course, I’ve hired designers and built teams before in other positions, but with my near-constant focus on recruiting at the moment—as Convex is scaling—I decided to put down some thoughts about what I think prospective designers should do when applying for jobs.

The basic building blocks are obvious. You will need:

• A resume
• A LinkedIn profile
• A portfolio website

In Part 1 of this three-part series, I’ll cover some foundational ideas, including the resume and LinkedIn profile. In Part 2, I’ll discuss the portfolio website. Finally, in Part 3, I will talk about the product design interview.

Your User

The mistake most people commit is foundational—they write and design their resume, LinkedIn, and portfolio for themselves. In other words, they’re not approaching these as designers because they’ve forgotten their primary user—the hiring manager.

First of all, design hiring managers are designers. We started as designers and have chosen the path of becoming creative directors, design managers, etc. But we are designers at our core. Which means we’ll look at everything you do through that lens. Do an applicant’s materials solve the core user need? Do those materials look good?

Hiring managers are busy people. As a design leader, I’m balancing brand and marketing projects, working on new product features, participating in 25 meetings per week, managing the people on my team, and looking for new designers to join our endeavor. So my time is valuable to me.

When there’s a job opening, I will need to sift through hundreds of resumes and portfolios. I will glance at a resume or LinkedIn profile for about 5 seconds and check out a portfolio for about 10 seconds before moving on. Unless something catches my attention.

As a hiring manager, I’m looking for a few key things first:

• Where have they worked before?
• How many years of experience do they have?
• Do they do good work?

If the answers to those questions match the specific role I have open, I’ll spend more time with the candidate’s resume, profile, and portfolio.

Your Resume

If you’re on the job hunt, you’ll need a resume. Applications will ask you to upload them. Your resume is often a hiring manager’s first impression of your design work. Remember your user: they’re busy and need to sort through dozens, if not hundreds, of resumes. Hiring managers need to be able to scan the information quickly. Your resume is a chance to demonstrate your skills in layout, typography, and, most of all, restraint. Do not fall into the trap of designing a crazy, branded, “memorable” resume. It will have the opposite effect.

Peter Markatos, former Global Design Director at Uber and now Chief Design Officer at Quoori, says, “I think resumes for design jobs are critical. I’ve hired a lot of folks and I’ve NEVER seen a well-designed resume lead to a poor folio. I always see the opposite however. There’s nowhere to hide in a resume. Ground zero for design fluency.”

There are plenty of great resources out there on how to write your resume, so I won’t attempt to sum them up here. But for a design job, this is what matters.

Relevant Sections

• Statement: One to three sentences about you and the position you’re looking for
• Experience: List your current and past positions and use bullets to describe your duties and impact in those roles
• Education: List where you went to school and the degree or certification. List any boot camps or intensives that are relevant.
• Certifications: If you have industry certifications, list them
• Technical Skills: List the skills and applications that you’re proficient in

Freelancing

Nearly all designers have freelanced at some point or another. There are two ways to show this on your resume. If you worked as a contractor at a company or studio, list that as a position in your Experience section, but indicate you were a contractor. Put freelance projects as bullets under a general freelance role in the Experience section.

Other Tips

Joe Stitzlein, who built design teams at Google and Nike and now is ECD at Stitzlein Studio, says, “No one wants your personal photo on a resume. No logos or monograms on a resume. Beautiful typesetting is a must. No typos. Keep it to one page.”

So here are some other quick tips:

• Include your online portfolio link!
• Your years of experience are equal to the number of years you’ve been out of school. If you worked part-time as a designer while going to school full-time, I’m sorry, but you can’t count that towards years of professional experience.
• While writing about your accomplishments, put your best foot forward, but do not exaggerate. A website design alone will not account for a massive jump in revenue for the client. Hiring managers will be able to smell bullshit.
• Keep your resume to one page, especially if you’re earlier in your career.
• Avoid putting your photo on your resume. To me, it’s cheesy. Your experience and work should define you, not an artsy portrait.
• No need to design a monogram or logo for yourself. Again, it’s a bit cheesy. Set your name in a nice font and be done with it.
• Don’t use too much color on your resume. It can get in the way of scannability.
• Don’t use sliders to indicate skill level. They take up unnecessary space and don’t provide useful information.
• Check for typos! Have someone else proofread all the text in your resume.

Your LinkedIn Profile

Make sure your LinkedIn profile is up to date and matches your resume. When I’m reviewing applications, I skip the resume and go straight to the candidate’s LinkedIn profile about half the time. I find it more up-to-date, easier to scan, and just has richer information about the applicant.

Recommendations

Personally, I find recommendations to be powerful. Always be getting recommendations from your teachers, colleagues, and current and former bosses. This is the additional color hiring managers can get from reviewing your LinkedIn profile as opposed to your resume.

Other Essentials

• Make sure you use a good photo of yourself. This is also a signal for how much you care, as a designer, about the details. You don’t need to hire a photographer, but get someone to shoot you with your iPhone. Make sure the lighting is good, and it’s nice and sharp. Don’t use a Memoji or South Park character.
• Pick a nice background image for the header section. Don’t put type in it. Again, over-branding yourself will have the opposite effect on design hiring managers.
• Add your portfolio link to the Contact section.
• Write a good two- to three-sentence bio in the About section.
• Fill out your skills, and your network will endorse you.
• Check for typos! Have someone else proofread all the text in your profile.

To borrow a culinary term, your resume and LinkedIn profile are the appetizers for the main course—the work. Your work experience, education, and list of skills is a brief introduction to who you are and the type of work you might do. These appetizers should lead into and set up the entree: your portfolio. We will tackle that in Part 2: Your Portfolio.