#139 Are designers best positioned for the age of AI?
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Right now, I feel that one of the advantages that designers have when it comes to the future of building product is that designers have been operating with ambiguity since day one, right? So this is what we're equipped, trained to do. We understand that there is a problem out there somewhere

and we start to disambiguate it, figure out what questions to ask, figure out who to talk to, figure out what we have confidence in as an insight, what needs more research. So we're operating with a lot of ambiguity in our careers for a long time, and this is what the future will be mostly about. Hello, designers, and welcome to a new episode of Honest UX Talks. As

As always, I'm joined by Anfisa, and for the past couple of months we did have some separate episodes, some of them I was by myself, others we had guests separately, and I miss talking to her, I'm very excited for this episode because she was also on a whole

the day. I don't know if she wants to talk about it. Maybe she will. I was out to Canada to deliver my talk at Interface Quebec, so I just missed her and I'm very excited for this conversation, especially since the topic is one that I'm very fond of or very curious about or very intrigued about. If you want, like all of us, the best title for our conversation would be our designer's best position for the age of AI.

Tricky question, very interesting, a lot of things to unpack and yeah, as all of you probably know or if you're a new listener maybe you don't know but I am very deep into the AI space so I'm very happy to unpack this conversation with my dear Anfisa. Before we do that I want to take a moment to

thank our sponsor WEEK Studio for being an amazing sponsor and I'm very proud to be working with them. I'm also working with them on building my own website for the consultancy studio that I run. If some of you don't know, earlier this year in January I launched my design studio, my consultancy agency. It's called AR.

because it stands for my name's initials, like Adriana Ivana, but also AI, of course, AI revolution. So I launched AI Studio and now I'm building my website and it has to be very forward-thinking, futuristic, modern, and...

And I realized by doing a lot of design experiments that what gives this vibe of modern futurism, just sexiness, is motion. And now I'm experimenting with a lot of effects and Week Studio offers a bunch of possibilities to implement motion and give this kind of dynamic experience, very fluid, immersive, and not boring, not static, right? So I'm combining WebGL effects with...

with other experiments just like scroll effects that they've been having for a while now and I'm also playing around with custom cursors I feel like it's it's in a way retro nostalgic but it gives me retro future vibes and so I'm experimenting a lot building my website and so far Wix Studio has been a great partner in supporting me in building this very professional and uh

client-facing interface that I'm proud of. So thank you, Wix Studio, for helping me build a very nice website, but also for supporting this conversation. And so now back to the conversation. Anfisa, I've missed you. I've missed you very much. How were your last couple of weeks?

Oh, thank you. I missed you too. I definitely miss our conversations. I was jealous that you were talking to all the great people. So we have to catch up. I had a great time off. I was away for three weeks and practically I didn't do much. I was just literally trying to enjoy a seaside. I was in Sardinia. Some of you might have seen that I also stumbled upon Patricia Reines, who's running another great podcast about the future of AI. So it was really interesting coincidence because not always you see people going to Sardinia in Italy, but

But yes, it's a really great place with fantastic beaches. I would recommend to go there. We had a lot of fun there, except for the fact that I stepped on a nail, so I really couldn't swim. But still, the views, that you don't work, the relaxing times really helped me to unwind and read books and just, I don't know, have finally some rest and reflect on my future. And I'm happy we're picking up this topic.

the future of design, where do we go and what does it mean for us? I'll probably stop here, I guess, besides the fact that I was relaxing and making few events on community. There was nothing much to add here. You were also traveling for a conference in Canada. So all ears to learn how it went.

Yeah, it's been a pretty intense month. I started May by traveling to Amsterdam to attend an AI design conference and it was very artsy, like the intersection of art and technology. And then I ended this month by traveling to Canada where I attended Interface Quebec. Also as a speaker, I couldn't really go to talks because most of them were in French, but the community there was incredible and very welcoming and lovely.

people and I'm super excited to discover local design scenes around the world. Plus Canada was just gorgeous so I'm very grateful for the trip. We rented a car and we went explore the nature, small villages. It was just a gorgeous experience. And yeah, between these two trips I've been doing a lot of other interesting

things that I'm very, very excited about that gave me a lot of energy and enthusiasm towards the future and my solopreneur adventure. I gave a workshop to the government of UK, to the research team within the government digital service. And it was a workshop about how to add AI in your research process in a mindful and secure way. And it was really interesting and the feedback was great. So that kind of gave me more energy to do things. And so then I delivered a lightning-sized

on Maven. Full course, my follow-up in the autumn. But this lightning session was also very well received and the focus there was more around how our roles are transforming, speaking about our conversation, and what defines an AI designer and if the AI designer is really a thing. Is it a transient thing? Is it just a temporary label? Is it going to be here for a while or not? Do we need to become one or not?

will we organically move into the space? So definitely topics we will unpack today as well. And yeah, apart for the talks and workshops I'm giving in companies, I'm discussing with a lot of teams to help them improve the AI literacy in their team, upskill designers in AI. So this is the focus of my consultancy business right now. It's mostly focused on educational, so infusing AI literacy in design teams.

And also I recorded a podcast I love with Michael Rittering. You might know him as Ridd. I collaborated with Anthropic as a creator. So I don't know. A lot of amazing things happened in May. That's why you probably feel it in my voice that I have a lot of energy.

And I'm looking forward to the summer where I will be focusing on my artistic projects, but we will be talking about that in the next episode. Now, let's come back to the topic of the day, which was very well introduced by our conversation about what we've been up to. A lot of reflection on both sides. So we've been seeing a lot of design teams starting to expand.

with AI tools, our responsibilities seem to start to transform and so on. And we now have instruments to do more. Nothing was simple before. But then our previous role and the limits that craft or lack of skills, technical skills, were preventing us from doing many other things. But now the possibilities have opened up. And I just want to start by asking you, what has been your experience

so far with the role change? Did your role change in any way? Do you feel it might? Do you feel excited about any new possibility? So how do you personally resonate with this change? And then maybe we can also discuss a bit about predictions on what we feel will become the design role and what will happen to

product managers or collaboration with product managers with developers and so on but I'm going to shut up now and just give you the stage all righty I think many of the companies me including we speculate a lot but fundamentally at the moment I haven't noticed radical changes at work I think most of us are still doing business as usual doing whatever we are responsible for I

think while we are all excited about the future of work, how things are shifting and moving, we're all speculating about how roles will be emerging, designers should start vibe coding, building prototypes, building tests and whatever, and how designers might become PMs or PMs might become designers and how there is possibility of marriage of roles and who will essentially become an ultimate product builder.

And so there is a lot of talk about it. And right, we have social media so active as never, ever probably before, maybe only during COVID times. However, the point is that I personally haven't felt day to day massive change. I still do my usual work. I still think with product people. I think with development. I do a strategy. I do tactical work. I do bugs. I do go to market. All those things we do as product people.

We go through the process step by step and there is no radical change beyond the fact that we all use JGPT or AI on a day-to-day basis. In the nearest future, I am looking for ways to automate my work, for example, building some sort of agentic templates, agentic ways to save time, because I think the time is a

essence today. And there's so many things we all have to do. I don't know how about other people and how other designers are dealing with it. Maybe because I'm a mom or something, or I have many projects on my plate. But I constantly feel pressure of lack of timing and constant ambition that we need to do more. We need to push for more. There are so many things going on and there's just not enough hours in a day to cover everything. So for me, the biggest shift in my mindset is more about how might I save time on repetitive tasks

tasks? And how might I automate my work to become more strategic rather than necessarily manual and like replying to messages and everything? That's the biggest effect I have seen so far with AI, at least in my day-to-day job. However, I think not only me thinking this way, and many of us are reviewing our work subconsciously as we are trying to sort of automate some of the mundane work that hopefully in the

to start experimenting more and focusing on really matters. So for me, I know that as a designer, my archetype is some sort of this strategic designer. And I do see myself like experimenting with product role and exploring what it means. And where do we draw the line basically, right? Where does the product role stops and design work starts? I mean, there's obviously a big overlap in discovery and then how we design the shapes while the product goes and orchestrates and manages everything. But

Where does it stop? Can the designer do the PM work and make it all the way through the project development cycle and also go to market and do the communication? I'm very curious because I feel like subconsciously designers are capable of doing this and designers are probably very well positioned. But I would love to discuss with you more details and maybe see if we can challenge each other with like arguments, whether this possible direction might sound naive. Because I'm pretty sure if I will bring here PM, they would say like, maybe not.

Maybe there's a lot of conflict in what we do. I'm possibly naively thinking that designers theoretically could do the PM job. With PM, I think many PMs are exploring AI right now, trying to learn whether they could design and use AI to generate concepts and test concepts. So I think there's a lot of interesting sort of looking forward going on here.

We don't know where it will bring us, but I think every designer, depending on their archetype, and we always talk about those, like, what are your strengths? How does it prepare you for the future? So depending on what your archetype of design persona is, how do you think you should be evolving? I personally see myself more as this product person, hopefully building, but I definitely overthink things. I feel myself more as a

product thinker rather than doer. But if you're more of a doer and tactical person and like to build and you see yourself as somebody who can build things proactively, maybe you are more of this person who can merge roles or become more universal designer engineer, UX engineer. I think there's this role existing already. These are my thoughts.

How about your work? I know you're not working necessarily with a product product right now, but still you see a lot of things going on. You work with different companies right now and you might have seen some patterns as well. What are you thinking? I've seen some patterns and they're very interesting and I have a lot of thoughts that are a bit all over the place. So I will try to structure them into something easy to follow. My first note, speaking about how teams are transforming.

on post I just saw yesterday from one of the VPs of design at Intercom and he shared a screenshot from their internal Slack channel and it was just a long line of designers celebrating their first published code. They shipped solutions directly in the product so they fixed things in UI they were building with

cursor. And so they were all empowered by this internal effort to give designers new powers. They were educated on how to use cursor to build solutions or solve some of the problems they noticed. And so now people were just chipping code. And that was, for me, a sign of where the industry is going. So we are now becoming empowered on

layers that, again, as I was kind of hinting at the beginning, felt limiting for us. And there was the never-ending conversation, should designers know how to code? And then the answer was, you don't have to know how to code, but it's good if you do. Now this question will disappear. It's already mostly, I mean, it's not irrelevant. I don't want to minimize complex products or the complexity of code. Or if you're in a company that has a big infrastructure or has just a complex

complex product and of course there won't be a designer coming up and writing code for that complex product engineers still need to be there it's still a convoluted sophisticated problem to solve that cursor or I don't know what code builder will not be able to solve Claude or whatever you choose to use both lovable right so these are mostly small projects small problems launching a cute app over the weekend at best

or fixing some things in prod like the Intercom design team is recently experimenting with. At the same time, to solve complex problems, you need complex code, and so designers won't be the ones really building those solutions. We might build prototypes faster. That's something that's totally possible today and

a reality of where we're heading towards. So we will be building our prototypes and probably not in Figma, but a real working thing that people can really interact with and have a better feedback experience and so on, especially as testing AI interactions is more difficult. So we will just have more instruments involved

in our toolbox and in a way we will be expected to use them but to your point if we can do the product job and then we will do the engineering job so we can do all these jobs now because the technology presents us with new powers when will we have hours in the day like isn't this AI revolution supposed to help us work less work smarter work better do more meaningful work so if we're now doing everything like three jobs in one is it really an improvement so

So where do you draw the line between this is really helping me become stronger, a better designer. Now I can build my own stuff and just more work to do and more things to be responsible for. This is an important conversation to have. I think we're overly optimistic when it comes to designers can now do everything. Sure, but just the responsibility of articulating a product strategy, replacing the product manager, and then going to talk with all the stakeholders in the company.

aligning business goals transforming the vision of the company into actual objectives for design and then running around trying to make sure it's implemented correctly like if a designer is supposed to do all these roles even if they can it's just unreasonable in a way and the same for product like the product managers i know like lenny just published this burnout report

And most people in tech, especially designers, are in burnout. So if AI is just giving us new things to be responsible for and be expected to deliver, and this is an important note, like it's one thing if you're doing this as a fun weekend project or you're fixing one thing in prod because you like it and now you feel powerful and you feel like you're playing around with these new technologies. But it's a completely different thing if this becomes your job description.

It's a completely different thing if your manager says, can you please build a solution that we have agreed aligned on, right? It's different when it becomes a responsibility or a chore, right? So creative experiments are great, but I don't think yet they should become a part of our role because we already have a lot of responsibility. Product managers have a lot of responsibility and solutions.

Same for software engineers. Most of the times they support pillars for very complex products. And it's this ongoing thing on the internet that all the products that are currently being built with Bolt, Lovable, V0 and so on will require fixing with the real engineers in the future. So they're producing more work for engineers that have to come in and really work

make it proper, right? Not just this first layer, the first version, a draft, if you want, of what that product is supposed to be and how do you make it sustainable? How do you fix the things that can be fixed through a conversation with an AI system and so on? So the conversation is very complex. And at this point, I used to say, oh, we're all

worlds will merge. I was the first one, I think, who said, we're all becoming builders, we're all becoming architects, we're all the thinkers, where we have an idea and then we bring it to life. But it was too much enthusiasm in that thinking. And it was just too fast. I was too fast to celebrate this transition because I revisited my thinking. And I don't think for once it's sustainable. It's just more work and responsibility. Second, it's not even...

supported by these technologies yet. And then third, we still need people who shine in one area of their craft and let them focus on their craft. The ideal is to work less, not more. So yeah, I'm going to shut up now. I think you might have some things to unpack on what I just said. And yeah, I'll come back as I have many other ideas I want to talk about. No, no, all good. I do have a lot of follow-up thoughts that you were sharing. That's why I was feeling the same. Like,

while I think we still are very enthusiastic in the social media, it creates this bubble of, yeah, the roles will emerge. Everybody can do everything now. Theoretically, yes, we might get there, but we're not there yet. And I think many of us are not experiencing it in our lives yet. Again, it might get there, but at the moment, particularly in June of 2025, it's still a speculation. And I think we all,

might want sometimes to experiment and test waters and give ourselves a chance to try out different things. For example, we talked here a lot about, you know, opening those web coding tools and trying things out and build custom GPTs and create new UX writing guides that we can reuse, for example, right? Or rebuild portfolios using Coursera or

posting our interviews into chat GPTs and ask to validate if our researchers plan, whatever. Like we talk a lot about experimenting with AIs to improve our craft, our work. But at the end of the day, we always come back to our thinking. And at the end of the day, we still have this much time in the day and we cannot do everything. At the end of the day, we will come back to what we are really good at doing naturally and how we can make it so polished so well. So nobody can even compare to how great you're doing something.

But the time is at the essence, and I totally agree with you here. I also feel like, was everything moving so quick today? Is it just me? Is it AI that accelerates the perception of time? I feel like we're overwhelmed. There's just too many things going on. And even right now in my community, for those of you who aren't familiar, I'm running the Job Hunters community. But while people are looking for a job, I'm also helping people to build jobs.

better portfolios, better skills. So we are also experimenting with AI. Right now, we have formed two teams to participate in the global hackathon. Some of you might have seen that Bolt.new are kind of launching this campaign of biggest hackathon in the world. At the moment, they have something like 90,000 people signed up to it. And so it's a really crazy, huge, vibe-coding hackathon right now. And we have formed two teams to kind of

wipe code it and see what we can build in one month as a community. But that's just to say that we are all experimenting with the tools we are playing out. But even one of the projects in this hackathon that we're picking up is that people suggested the topic, overwhelm. We are so overwhelmed. We cannot be everywhere at the same time. We cannot catch up with everything. How might we stop it? How might we help ourselves mentally? Because mental overwhelm is insane. It's so good that you brought up Lenny Substack statistics.

And I actually had it even open for this episode. And I do see that design is the most... I mean, we have seen all social media. It's been everywhere now in LinkedIn or Instagram. Designers are most burned out right now. Designers have probably the biggest expectations or something. I don't know. There's too many things on our plates.

While product, I could see they have 21%. So design has 24% of people reported feeling very or completely burnt out. Product, 21%. Engineering, 16%. Founders are the happiest. They have 15%. And while designers are trying to be everywhere and doing everything, founders are those people who used to be doing everything and being everywhere. Now it's somehow flipped that designers are in the seat. So I think it's a big topic right now. And I think while we are talking about

The possibilities, the possibilities is there, but we'll have to be very pragmatic and we'll have to think really deeply about which pillars we want to pitch, which pillars do we want to be really good at? Yeah, we can do, but should we? That's always the question. Just like I think we always challenge back, right? We have AI now, should we actually use it, right? And when should we use it and how do we use it for our sake to optimize our times?

Again, coming back to the reality, bigger companies will take longer as per usual, because we have more people, more complex systems, more legacy processes. The bigger the company, the more likely the change will be happening, while the smaller companies is where those AI revolution sort of changes might be seen and felt more. Because indeed, now, if you are one designer in a team, you can sort of become a PM, you can sort of become sometimes engineer if you want to build some quick prototype with a code. And so, you know,

In the smaller companies, I can see this very much blossoming. In the bigger companies, even in the company of my size, we have about 1,000, maybe like 200, 300 people. I don't even know scale up size. It's impossible right now. It's impossible to fully merge roles. I cannot jump into the code of our engineers. They have their system. It will take me forever to get into that system and understand how it works. I can only prototype things with vibe coding, but I cannot contribute to the code.

maybe not yet. And so, yeah, we have to be realistic about how do we use those skills and where does it really apply. In the smaller companies, I can see them applying, but in the bigger companies, it becomes more, yeah, more challenging, more risky, more hard to implement it, basically. Anyways, I'll stop here. And if you have any thoughts. Yeah, I have a follow-up question. I want to continue this conversation in a direction that we set out intentionally in the beginning, which is if a role will succeed and thrives,

in the age of AI and we believe that role is the role of a designer, why would this role be better positioned or best positioned then? I want you to just share your thoughts on this question, but before that, I want to share a quick thinking piece so it doesn't slip between my fingers. There are many reasons for which we are very well positioned to thrive because in a way,

We sit at the intersection of understanding what's technologically possible, understanding what the product vision is, understanding what resources. So we are in a way operators, orchestrators, governors of the solution. So we will go deeper into that. But I just want to make a quick note. I think it's a side note, but I still want to make it.

We have these new instruments as designers to generate code, to write PRDs, to whatever, whatnot, and do all these things that we weren't able or didn't have the knowledge before. Similarly, of course, front-end engineers can generate design solutions with AI and then build it with AI and so on. So engineers can now design things.

And also product managers, this is where I want to spend one minute. Product managers can now prototype their vision and prototype their solution quickly. And I think this is something that we will be seeing. I've noticed in all the workplaces I've had in my life, like product managers were sort of waiting for the designer to finalize the mock-up so they can present it to larger audiences and moonshots.

run around with it and challenge it and have conversations. And so the artifact was dependent on the designer, the visual artifact. You had to have the designer give you the flow so you can have conversations around it. I think this is a thing of the past already. And product managers will be producing this kind of drafty, initial, rough artifact that's much better than a sketch. It sits somewhere between a sketch and the final solution. Finally, why?

but they will be able to run around with the solution and get feedback and then start conversations where they feel needed. So I think in a way, product managers will become more independent in producing visual solutions. So the note I'm making here is that as designers, as product people, all of us,

we will be less expected to produce design. So our roles will not be valued or distinguished or distinct by producing pixels because this is something that AI can do and you can train it on your design system and it can produce something that's in your exact language. So it doesn't have to be off like UI generators have been for a while. But in this new world,

As designers, we should forget about this kind of dependency on producing UI, which is not a problem. I think we shouldn't worry about that because the design role was misunderstood as the UI producing role. We were misunderstood for so many years. Thank God people are now probably not going to associate UI necessarily with the designer in the future. And that's a good thing because that's not where the value of design sits. That's maybe 10% of our roles to give the

final visualization to a solution, right? So that's fine. But I really want to make this note. We will be curators of design. We will get different AI variations of a solution and then maybe we will refine it, maybe make it better. We can inform the AI.

on what types of direction we want, on what the context is, on what the mood board is, what other things we like and things should be factored in so we can feed proper things into AI systems and then get the visual result out. Product managers can do something a bit less sophisticated, but they can still get UI output.

But the thing here is that it's not going to be so much about producing UI and that's fine. It's a good thing, but just to prepare everyone, I'm going to shut up now. Why do you think we would be best positioned or better positioned to thrive in the AI age? This is a provocative question, right? It's a loaded question. It leads with us assuming we're best positioned.

And while of course we're using this title, I think we have to be a little bit more humble because I don't think necessarily the designers are 100% best positioned. There are process and cons that we have, and we still have to fill a lot of gaps, I think, if we want to be best positioned. So I don't want to say that designers are best and best and they have the only chance. No, I don't think so. I think many PMs as well as engineers

with product thinking. They're understanding where they need to tap. And we also need to tap into certain areas to be actually well positioned. So if I start from the positive now, I think...

Indeed, we could be very well positioned if we think about what we do. And you already started talking about the fact that we are in between all the disciplines. And we typically take a role of communication because design is visual and everybody has opinion about visual. And because it used to be backfiring to us, we used to feel like overwhelmed because everybody has opinion. Now, suddenly, we are the center of it and we can take advantage of it because we have been listening to those voices for so long.

And now we can actually take her into our side, basically. If I think about why we're well positioned, I think we wear a lot of hats and that's kind of this versatility is our superpower that maybe not every other role have had. So designers, we are still wearing a lot of hats. We do research, we do system thinking. Storytelling is one and a very important one, I believe. Prototyping, facilitation. I think that adaptability makes us very valuable in shifting in environments. So that's what makes us very well

positioned. I think the human-centered design needs to be in demand. I don't know if it will be with the world. That's on fire. But I think it should be, and I hope that it will be in demand. So while AI could automate more processes, I do hope that other values shift more to the human insight and understanding needs, behaviors, emotions. So empathy, really, which is very core to design, right? And so I think that this human aspect is

is something that we pretty well positioned and we have been working with, you know, understanding a lot and that implies a lot of empathy. And so I think that makes us quite well positioned for the future. And I think the design has been historically what I think Ioana has started mentioning better and better and better sort of

positioned on the market. I mean, still, there is like kind of back and forth. If I have to be honest, I'm thinking right now about different scenarios. But there was a little bit of this swing between designers of pixel pushers now swing back to designers of strategic thinkers back again. And so it's like a swing between

But I think as design is now becoming a bit more automated in certain areas, we are now have a bit more time to be more strategic and that gives us a leverage. So if we are not pixel pushers, and especially with AI, we might not become pixel pushers anymore. Okay, well, now companies will start realizing that there is a business value to design and that our roles could bridge UX product strategy and business goals. And finally, we will be perceived as

and have the seat at the table, right? So it's kind of something that we've been constantly like fighting for and constantly trying to advocate for. And suddenly we will be in this place because pixel pushing will not be our biggest tool. However, if I think about what makes us not so well positioned is that obviously design tools will become commodized.

right? And so now everybody suddenly can use AI to produce design. Anyone can give a prompt, right? The engineer can give you a prompt and build some decent enough product. You could say, use the design principles of Airbnb or other tools, products you like. And suddenly you have a similar UI quality, UI interesting sort of outputs that are decent enough. They're not like poorly designed, basically, right? So you could

have decent enough products that look kind of okay. They will not be most crafted products. They will be quite okay, good enough for people to start using, especially for the MVP products. Taste is tricky because I feel like taste takes time to build. So not every other discipline will be able to tap on it, but it takes time and maybe at some point it will become a little bit more available to everyone. But at the same time, right now, taste is something that we still feel like we probably have better leverage at this.

while the tools are making that pixel pushing sort of commodized. And I think ultimately where we still need to do extra work moving forward is I think we just need to start working a little bit more on business thinking, facilitation, storytelling, AI literacy to really position ourselves well on the market for the future. We already tap on those areas, but we really need to become much more expert.

in these areas. My biggest bet would be on specifically design impact, storytelling, and business thinking. But maybe it's because I'm biased. I'm a bit more strategic as a designer. I usually position myself like as a thinker. I overthink things. I constantly think about the impact of this, what will happen to the system of it, blah, blah, blah. So I kind of always think about, okay, how do I double down on the strategy and business impact and use the storytelling as the sort of magic sauce of designers to actually impact the

the culture, the people, whatever. But my personal biggest bad, the designers have storytelling that not many other people in the product have. If they have, it's fantastic. But I think designers are really good at storytelling. Visually, with empathy, with putting through the listeners and viewers in the shoes of the users or in the shoes of the business. So we are quite well positioned. And if we were to be able to be good storytellers, we could be quite impactful in all of those areas I just mentioned.

So these are where my thoughts are. Things are good for us, but we have to be still working on those gaps that I think on the market, not everyone still have been able to capture, to nail, to build essentially. What do you think about it?

I have a lot of thoughts about it, obviously. I think we're all in the process of crystallizing our thoughts. And like I was mentioning earlier, I changed my mind from one month ago. So it's a very rapidly transforming space in my mind as well. But right now, I feel that one of the advantages that designers have when it comes to the future of design work, product work, building products and so on, is that designers have been operating with ambiguity since the

they want, right? So this is what we're equipped, trained to do. We understand that there is a problem out there somewhere and we start to disambiguate it, ask questions, figure out what questions to ask, figure out who to talk to, figure out what we have confidence in as an insight, what needs more research. So we're operating with a lot of ambiguity in our careers for a long time and this is what the future will be mostly about, right? So what technology can do? How do we use this?

How do we surface it? What should be the patterns? What should be the interaction? There will be a lot of ambiguity in the next 10 years, maybe even more, right? No clarity, no standards, no best practices, just exploration. And I think designers have that mentality baked in their craft.

And so that's a very strong advantage. I really feel that we have been collaborating and aligning and informing our solutions across disciplines. Our work is already infused with psychology, research, ethics, just totally caring for the user, right? Human-centered design. But then as well, understanding how to bake business goals into this solution. How do we help the company grow?

We have been very versatile, very cross-functional, very multidisciplinary. And so the future belongs to people who are in a way generalists or can wear multiple hats, right? And so we are very trained in that direction as well. And this also kind of formed us as systems

Like we think in systems, we have systems, we have processes, we have our own way of working. We have places where we gather information, we make sense of it, we explore design, we evolve it. So we are people of systems and the future needs this kind of clarity and balance.

Just systems thinking, critical thinking, right? Just systematically mapping unknowns and then trying to bring clarity to those questions. And speaking of questions, we're also very good at asking questions. We've been exercising this skill for a long time. And now that the answers are very easily available, right? So with LLMs and with the knowledge being made more accessible to everyone and so on.

Of course, with the caveat that or disclaimer that it might be unreliable, made up, whatever, it's getting better. The thing that will differentiate good product teams from not so good product teams is the quality of the questions that are being asked. And so designers are good at asking questions. We understand what to ask from these systems. We understand what we need to find out for our solution or for the problem space to become clearer. So

As designers, I think we have a lot of exercise already to survive in the AI age and to thrive and to lead in a way. So I'm pretty positive about the impact we can make, even though for the past couple of years we didn't make a lot of impact or the design industry is not in its best moment in history. I think we can definitely make a comeback, especially because we're dealing with having to ask the right questions

all this complexity, all this ambiguity, different mediums having to come together in a single solution and so on. So yeah, those are my thoughts. You want to add anything to that? I actually have a question to you that is maybe hard question to answer because we are not our partners. But I think

Okay, we know very well what makes us well-positioned. Provocative questions. What do you think makes PMs or possibly engineers well-positioned for the future? If you think about us, okay, we have versatility, good questions at hand, empathy, storytelling, et cetera. What makes PMs well-positioned and what makes engineers well-positioned for the future? If you have any thoughts, of course. Well, people know that you're married to a software engineer and I'm dating product managers. That's a life rule, right?

So we do have personal insights from that. What I've observed, noticing how their careers, the product managers around me, how their careers are progressing, I've noticed that they're leaning into more technical approaches. So I think that for product managers, the key is to not just kind of tap into design, which they were already doing in a way, right? I've never seen a product manager who hasn't sketched or done

draw on some very basic balsamic level of their idea right so that was happening already but now i think they're tapping more into the technical understanding technical potential understanding what models are how they work the machine learning is how to build a model the

What kind of technologies can we embed in the product? And so I think for product managers, the key to being better positioned is this capacity to grasp different technical aspects into their thinking, which for a designer might be a bit harder. Like we could be good front end people.

but it could be difficult for us to really understand the depth of technology. And I think a product manager typically has that kind of also technical thinking. And so that's why I think product managers can kind of bridge these two worlds continuing, which is their current role also. And for software engineers from, again, my friends and so on, I feel that the best software engineers I've worked with are the ones who think as designers in a very weird way. So I've seen software engineers who just wait for instructions and expectations

execute. And I see software engineers who work actively to improve the product. So they contribute to the product. They have design ideas. They have this user-first mindset. And so I think that with these new instruments that they have available, they can lean more into that. I have the technical capacity to build this, but I am also able to

argue for the user, learn about the user, be there, like maybe learn from the telemetry in my product and do something about it, build a solution that directly links to how many clicks something is getting. And then maybe I can create an agent that improves that on the go. So they can come up with very creative technologies, right? I think this kind of in this pinpoints.

Software engineers can move into the role of creative technologists and be these kinds of very technical people that also add creative aspects. And again, this all comes back to a quote that I saw recently that said that AI is from Josh Paton, I think, who's the VP of design at Wise. And he said that AI will make good designers better.

bad designers faster. It's the same for product managers. It's the same for software engineers. Software engineers who gave up and cared about a user in the past and really had that design thinking mindset will be able to shine. And so it's also down to who you are as a person now that we always talk about your individuality and what you care about. I think the

there are these two kind of categories of software engineers and product managers, right? The ones who really care about understanding the whole ecosystem and the ones who operate in their little space very well boxed and limited. Yeah, I like it. I think overall, I agree with you. I do agree that PMs typically, of course, it depends

depends a lot because I work with different PMs. Some PMs are a little bit more go-to-market communicators. Some PMs are more strategic. Some PMs are more technical and kind of more in sort of between engineering manager and PM product manager. So I do see there are also different archetypes

in different roles. I have no so much insight into archetypes in the engineering world, but definitely in the PM world, at least that's closer to us. We work with them hand to hand pretty much every day. And so I do see a little bit more insight in the PM world. However, I think at the end of the day, I like your silver lining idea around the fact that

Yeah, it's most likely going to come down to who is more user-centered, human-centered. Like, who do you design your products for? How do you make it with your skills and strengths? That way, it's your archetype, PM, engineer, or even designer. How do you use your strengths to become more human-centered and deliver really good experiences in the least amount of time and resources, of course, which every business wants. But anyways...

Point is, I do think like we need to at the end of the day still come back to those personal skills and it's very different. But in my opinion, good PMs are also very strategic and thoughtful and they understand the bird's eye view very well. They're very strategic and they know where to put your effort into more.

that sometimes we as designers not have the full perspective into. And I think we as designers have to start doing this more. That's why I mentioned this is like as a gap, we need to start bridging that gap. While PMs, of course, don't have a very good idea about the craft. They could do the prompt, like make it Airbnb sort of, but they will not be able to generate it fully. They will not be able to quote it qualitatively and like critically think through the product visuals very well. So we all have to learn from each other. I like that we are all doing this. Yeah.

And when it comes to engineering, it's interesting because, yeah, you mentioned that my husband is an engineer and he's now an engineering manager. And I don't know if he's a good insight to me because he's very skeptical. He thinks like we designers do nothing. We're just like poof, poof. Like what are we doing? He still believes that we don't need to exist. So it's funny.

But I think at the end of the day, they are definitely understanding how things are built very critically. They understand what keeps everything work together. And we don't always have like a depth. We sometimes have naive outlook on how things are built. And we have some ideas. We can ask about, yeah, how do you connect to this? Can we get this data? How does that mean? What does it mean for us? We can have some basic questions.

principal ideas about engineering, what it takes to build. We have kind of structural understanding, but we really have no clue what it means for the code and for the system in the tech. And of course, I would love us to do this more, but I don't know. In my company right now, I cannot imagine doing this. So if anybody has good insight on, or if you have ever seen designers transition into engineers and learning that system, I would love to hear a deeper

how we can do this better, how we can learn from engineers better and become a bit more engineering oriented as well, not just wipe coding. Because I think wipe coding is nice, but I mean, let's be honest, it's not integrated with systems near time, I guess, soon. Not yet. Maybe we'll get there. But

Still, I would like to wrap this conversation by saying that I think we align on a lot of core ideas and we still have a lot to learn from each other. I think the fact that we have been in between all those disciplines for so long and that we are so versatile and everything, which makes, of course, us well enough prepared for the future. I think that also this statistic that we have mentioned today by Lenny's podcast and Burnt Out Factory,

The fact that we are so burnt out is a testimony to the fact that we are well positioned to succeed in the future because we have been overwhelmed for real, for real, basically. And it's a maybe wake up call. And we have been talking a lot in this podcast with you and with everyone, actually, that many of us are burnt out and we all want to go gardening and playing things and just do manual craft, but definitely not like an overwhelming design craft.

So we will see how this all plays out. But I think, I hope this conversation gives people hope that AI will not take our job at least. It'll enhance it, like you said with your quote from Wiseguy, yeah. Yeah, exactly. We'll make good designers better. So I really love this conversation. I feel that I want to make a part two. So if anybody has suggestions for what are the unanswered questions from this exploration? What are the parts that worry you?

What are the parts that you feel would be interesting to discuss further? Send us your ideas. I have an idea of what could be a follow-up conversation, which is how can a designer prepare? Like, what are the skills that they need to hone, focus on? Micro experiments, routines, rituals. How do we set up ourselves for success in the age of AI? Like, how can we actively, intentionally educate ourselves in a way that is...

noise-free, unambiguous, and intentional and meaningful, and then will eventually lead us somewhere. So that's a thing that I think is on the collective design mind, and maybe we should talk about it in the next episode. But if you feel that there are other unanswered questions, do submit them. So thanks everyone for tuning in. Submit questions and just be nice. Bye everyone!