What comes next
The shift in product design
Product design is changing as a profession.
I've been writing about this for the last year, but just this month it feels like things are accelerating.
I'm not the only one thinking this.
It's crazy how some changes take years—like our near universal adoption of Figma over all the competitors after several years of debate—but others can happen much faster.
I'm talking about AI tools, of course.
So many of us who are in the trenches, building things every day. For some of us, who are having the time of our lives right now, we can see the change coming.1
The careers we came into, helped shape (if you've been here long enough) are shifting to something that's not quite what we walked into.
Companies will have to pivot
I'll give you an example.
Recently I was talking to someone in the industry about the practices they run at their organization. They have UI and UX designers performing distinct jobs, and working alongside each other to hand deliverables to engineering teams.
It's a robust organization, working to solve some incredibly important design challenges.
But they can see the change coming. They're considering collapsing the roles down into a singular role. I tried to nudge them even further, but that's the first step for now.
I think they will be forced to do it sooner than they think.
Product design isn't the same as it was even a few months ago.
Faster idea cycles
Where before we'd take an idea, work through it with stakeholders and users, gather definition from product managers, and then run it through our design process—which involved sketching, prototyping, tweaking, handoff to engineers—now those cycles are happening faster, and with much shorter time spans.
Some days I still go through the traditional design process. I work through requirements, open Figma and build out the screens, do a proper annotation for engineers, and then followup through the pull requests. There's some specific situations where that needs to happen.
But the majority of my time I'm now taking an idea, working through the details of it with a stakeholder (in this case my product manager), and taking the idea straight into development with Claude Code. From there we either jump into user interviews to get live feedback, or ship the feature and learn from the data.
Moving away from Figma
I'm not showing off Figma screens. Sometimes, it's still necessary because I need to make sure the UI elements are set a specific way. But mostly I'm making changes on my computer, building out a local, internal, build, and sharing the coded version for the team to review.
The difference is night and day.
Where I've given up small amounts of control over the fidelity of the output, I've gained the ability to explore and iterate through the entire user experience. I'm testing what happens when a button gets clicked. I'm looking at screens animate across app experiences. I'm watching how a user feels when they move from one affordance to another.
I'm not spending time with static screens in Figma.
Creating prototypes in code
I'm clicking through and interacting with a live prototyped coded design. I'm having discussions with the team about how elements work together, and we're debating and arguing (in a great way) over interactions that are real, that include mock data, that are as close to a staging environment as possible.
And this is all without actually being connected to infrastructure. This is without having access to our design system. I'm manually replicating all those pieces through prompts and instructions and sharing designs.
And the crazy thing? It's working.
It feels like we're just at the beginning of something new. It's only going to get better. Technology will improve. Integrations with internal systems will get easier.
Existential dread
Where last year I was nervous every day about the future of myself and others as product designers—now I'm excited. Yes, I still have my worries, but I see a path forward for people who are interested in remixing their existing skills into shorter feedback loops.
It's scary if you haven't done this yet.
It was for me, and I haven't even come close to figuring it all out. But one thing is for sure, I've been having fun following my curiosity, failing along the way, and seeing really cool things come to life in front of my eyes.
Where critical thinking fits in
There's one more piece of this that you're probably wondering about. Have I given up my critical thinking and ability to process how all the information comes together? No. In fact, I'm spending more time thinking about how pieces fit together, how the original requirements matter against the work we're building. I have more time to talk to users, iterate through their feedback, and test coded ideas before wasting engineering resources on unvetted concepts.
I still hold to the idea I read from Cal Newport years ago—that we only have a limited amount of deep work time available to us in a given day. Beyond that we wear out. I'm reserving that time for higher level thinking on my projects, and spending less time on more easily solved UX decisions.
If you're debating whether to approach product design from this angle, I'd suggest giving it a try.
It's not perfect. I run into problems every day with it. But I feel freed up to try more, and to fail faster.
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- You might think I'm being a little bit hyperbolic here, but I mean it. A decade ago I saw product design as a profession, and bent all my energy toward getting into this line of work. I knew I loved it, I'd gotten a taste of it in several roles, and wanted more. Looking back, my thirties have been so rich and vibrant—and, the countless folks I've worked with along the way, I'm so grateful for getting to be part of this amazing industry.