Take my job, AI!

The idea of AI replacing product designers isn’t scaring me. It’s actually having the opposite effect: I’m embracing it.

Take my job AI! I’m done with it!

What follows is a mix of thoughts of where I’m at personally in my career, and observations on industry trends.

On the personal side, I’ve become more and more disillusioned with product design. It can be a shit role where you’re stuck between product managers on one side, engineers on the other, “the business” above you, and your actual users below you. What remains is an increasingly cramped space for decisions we actually “own”, which is basically which color lip stick to put on the pig.

The overall UX is dictated far more by decisions made upstream of you (by product and business value), and decisions that come after you (what can actually be built? In what time frame? How much do the engineers care about going beyond the bare minimum of getting something working?).

When the UX comes out sub-par the designer or design team are to blame.

Design as a profession is regularly devalued. Our viewpoint and input ignored. We’re the middle children of product development: PMs are the eldest children who call the shots, engineers are the youngest child who can hide behind the code, and design is caught in the middle with no real power while trying to play peacemaker between the other two.

So I’m at a point in my career where I’m ready for a change. I want my career to change. But there’s nothing obvious to change to. Neither product management (which many designers switch into as a way of getting around the problems above) nor engineering (which I’ve done previously) are appealing.

I don’t see “design” as a profession as it’s currently defined changing. The structural problems are too entrenched.

I’m also ready to evolve beyond a “product designer”. I’ve never liked titles or being boxed in by roles dictating what you can and can’t do. I want a new world where I can embrace more of my skills and be a multi-hyphenate and stretch my wings creatively.

And at the end of the day I love building products. Problem solving. Making creative decisions. Understanding people. Coding. I love the web. So I don’t really want to leave the industry or stop the actual work I enjoy doing.

And this is why I’ve come to see AI as a potential savior. Something that will break down how we build product into its constituent parts so we can build it back up again. Better.

What will that look like? What will the new roles be? Why do we even need engineers or PMs or designers when AI can spit out everything those roles create faster and cheaper and (in many cases, and increasingly often) better?

We don’t.

And yet we’re still going to need people guiding the AI and making decisions with it.

I don’t know what that will look like. But I’m excited for a change. And if I’m lucky I’ll get to have a hand in shaping what that future is.