Designer

“And kind of surprisingly, designers and user researchers are just the most unhappy on every dimension, like every actual dimension. They're the most overwhelmed, the most anxious, the most, the least optimistic, the most worried the most tired, also the least …”

“And as designers, I think that, you know, you come here, we look for people that are, don't have a background in AI, but are, like, really curious about the tools and how it can work.”

“I do still think that, and maybe this is thinking about it from like a slightly larger company perspective, but I think you do still need people that have certain responsibilities, right? Because if you have one person that's expected to design, to rally a tea…”

“There are people who understand customer problems, People who have taste and people who understand the jagged edge of AI capabilities and are curious about it. And like, those are the three things. If you've got those three, if you're going to be, if you don't…”

“There's still a huge delta between like, you know, a smart designer who knows what they're doing, making an improvement in a quick turn in about, you know, 30 minutes and exploring a few different options that accounts for the technical requirements of the pro…”

“If you talk to most engineers or even designers, they will remember the great PMs that they've worked with mostly because they've worked with so many bad ones.”

“Hiring so many PMs infantilizers The engineers and the designers who are perfectly capable of making good decisions, but just never had to, because there was always a PM to babysit them.”

“I have found that PMs, designers, data scientists are able to get farther in the product development life cycle before engineering really needs to be front of the line in unlocking things than was true a couple years ago.”

“What you're seeing here. Is that no one is a promoter of their role in tech right now. Not even founders who are by far the happiest, happy-go-lucky people in, in tech right now. Founders would not recommend their roles. Neither would people in sales or go to …”

“We are seeing that designers and researchers are the most negative. And just to clarify what I mean by that, what you can see in the slide is that when it comes to AI identity shifts, designers and researchers are the highest in feeling either destabilized or …”

“A lot of designers right now are very anxious about their roles. You know, I've got this other generalists doing design. You've got engineers doing design, product staff doing design, but I'm actually pretty long on design or designers because they tend to hav…”

“Designers are giving us the feedback that we used to get from developers now.”

“Like now, not only engineers with, we also have designers, PMs, everybody on the Clark code team checks in code.”

“I think if designers sit out, what you're going to see is engineers and product managers designing for them.”

“There's no product managers in industrial design. Like, you are the PM. There's industrial designers, and there's engineers. And there's program managers. So the designer is the product manager. So a design product is one function.”

“In a previous life, I led design and product at GitHub and GitHub designers before LLMs contributed to GitHub. I think in the top contributors to GitHub itself, like, 10% were designers.”

“I think people who have true agency and they understand that the world around them is malleable will do great. And the folks who stick to what, tell me really, what does it mean to be a PM? What does it mean to be a designer? And like, what's my job as an engi…”

“Increasingly our designers are shipping code, which is really wild.”

“If you look at the traditional tech org, org structure, you know, designers really are producing visuals. They're not really producing the product direction or the strategy or the vision or, you know, net new That new innovation, right? They're really responsi…”

“In the early days, my view was not that we don't need PMs. My view is that designers should do that work. So that's essentially you know, what we would say to our designers, which was like, you know Hey, if you need PM support, why don't you just do it yoursel…”

“And I think today, you know, a lot of our designers are now shipping code, which is extraordinary, right? And that's a really big and really meaningful change in terms of the way that the design works here at Snap and the way the creative process works.”

“We don't allow designers to get stuck on specific products or verticals. For very long. We like to make sure people are rotating through different parts of the product to bring new ideas and fresh perspectives and also to avoid getting bored.”

“And what we've noticed is that people that are getting the most value out of our product, Tend to be the more tech-adjacent ones. Maybe people, product managers have written code many years ago, but don't worry about the development environment setup. Don't wa…”

“I think all of the roles are merging. PMs are doing some engineering work, engineers are doing PM work, designers are PMing and also landing code.”

“Whether you talk about someone who used to be a PM or someone who used to be a designer or called an engineer, the skill is more like being a CEO now, which is what are we building and why? And to be a successful engineer, that trait's critical to be a success…”

“As a designer, you kind of need to learn how to vibe code. Otherwise, you're going to, like, if you want to know how to do Figma, like, you're probably going to be, like, out of date in a couple of years.”

“Like now with AI, it's like hopefully going to get like, it's just getting more and more easier for people to do that without all that technical expertise.”

“Both engineers and PMs, 70% of people said they are enjoying their job more. And about 10% said they're enjoying their job less. Designers, interestingly, Only 55% said they're enjoying their job more, and 20% said they're enjoying their job less.”

“If I was a betting man, as they say, I'd bet that the next class that wins are designers, because We're training these tools to be more clear, to be better, to make better technical decisions. I don't think we will train them just yet to be, make better emoti…”

“The number of designers and product managers related to the number of engineers, when I was growing up in product, it used to be, one to three or one to 10. It's going to one to 20 now.”

“We said every designer is now shipping code to production. It is now part of your job. If you don't like that, We had a great run, but we should part ways and you should go somewhere where designers don't have to ship code.”

“So if you're a stage one in design and you hire a really good designer, you might need to get out of their way and put your opinion aside.”

“I see vibe coding As a skill being added to a lot of job descriptions for designers, for product managers for marketers, which I think is a really interesting shift.”

“We S we changed the organization. So all engineers report into one single team. Now all designers report in one single team and their single head of engineering, single head of design, et cetera.”

“In fact, I think the AI tools will allow more people to be designers because you won't need to be a craftsperson. You just need taste. And I think more people can learn taste than can get through the craft, and this allows engineers, designers, and everyone to…”

“It really changes the process once you have the ability to explore this option space in a bigger way, and PMs are no longer saying to the designer, hey, can you draw this thing out for me? That frees up designer time to go explore more deeply the stuff they ne…”

“The trend that we've been seeing for the past five years is a trend that it's gonna accelerate the next five years. And that's a shift to emergent of roles. I just think that we're seeing more designers, engineers, product managers, researchers, kind of all th…”

“I think in this world where software can be created more easily, design matters so much, and designers matter so much. I think designers are going to be the leaders of the future, and I think that more designers need to step into that leadership role”

“Designers need to push us forward. And that's going to mean a exploration and explosion of creativity in so many different Visual styles that will be explored so much more dynamism in interfaces and new patterns emerging, especially as you start thinking about…”

“In a world where design is the way you win, it's only natural that we need to get more people involved in the design process. That is not going to diminish, diminish the role of designers. In fact, I think it expands the role of designers because then you have…”

“Embedding designers into our research teams, because obviously we're doing a lot of work on how do we make better AI tools for designers has been critical because researchers need that intuition of how designers think, and without actually having that close co…”

“I think what is likely to happen is there is clear work definitions of what an engineer does today, what a product manager does, and what a designer does. I think these are going to converge way more than what's happening today in technology organizations.”

“The thing that I will say about to keep in mind for PMs is there's always a tendency on PMs to want to draw something and then try to give a sketch to a designer. And I would caution them against that. Sometimes they have to draw themselves so they can think i…”

“People need to understand that they're advocating for ideas and not for themselves. And when I talk to a lot of designers, it may be true for PMs. I hear a lot of people say that they're reluctant to post on social media or on LinkedIn or something. Cause like…”

“So there's a little more like clear, like quicker bath to some kind of validation, I would say, versus like designers, you might have this idea of something could be better. But so you design it, but you still just have designs. You don't actually have the pro…”

“There's maybe that a lot of designers are too focused on their, like a little bit too narrow looking at things or narrow minded and not maybe interested enough, like what happens like around them or like around there or they're more just looking at the design …”

“Designers, they're very rarely pushing pixels anymore. They're compositing things that Already exist in their design systems and putting it together.”

“I would say it's primarily bugged today. Perhaps at times masquerading as a feature because I think designers are always designing ahead, right? So they're always thinking about v one, v two, v next. And so as a result of that, it is natural for the designs to…”

“We also had a designer on that team, which, you know, some people wonder like, okay, why would you have a designer show early on? But it makes a lot of sense. I think if you're developing an app that you can really invest, not only in the design of your app it…”

“Every designer codes. Imagine if every designer codes and not, and I don't just mean HTML. I mean, like running the app locally, going into the place where that view is rendered to make that thing look the way that they want it to look or whatever. Right. I me…”

“That is really changing now where designers can essentially through software, through code can actually be really close To building the object. Right. Versus kind of like, you know, back in the day, maybe it's furniture or like other objects. And so I think th…”

“And the way to cut down on time, and I think this is a mistake people make a lot of the time, is when time is being pressured downward, a lot of times engineers, PMs, designers, they will cut on quality rather than cutting on scope.”

“I think people that call themselves developers today, and they call themselves designers, you know, in the near future. That doesn't mean they're not writing code. It just means that they're gonna be thinking more holistically about the product experience alon…”

“I think tomorrow you're going to, as a designer, type effectively the same specification as a product manager and you have, you know, an AI to render the code for the wireframes and then apply, you know, grounding out of your design system to make it look like…”

“And I think AI completely collapses that cycle and accelerates a lot of the upfront up funnel work where, where again, you can just do, you can build a prototype and you can show that to customers and like the PM and the designer might just work collaborativel…”

“I think the biggest problem is that kind of, like, kind of gap between what's, you know, what's designed in their mock and what's actually built.”

“In my limited experience and working with designers myself, I think designers do not want AI to design things for them. But there's a lot of things that aren't in the traditional designer toolkit that AI can solve. And I think the biggest one is generating cod…”

“So the fashion business today is becoming very diverse. Well, the fashion statement itself is becoming very diversified. It's no longer just listen to a few designers say, okay, this is what You should wear it. They wanted to have their own say in it.”

“And in five to 10 years, I think the lines between product managers and engineers and designers are going to blur because AI will enable product managers to build prototypes, to build designs, designers to build a pro like Figma already has their Figma AI.”

“Like what Snapchat has done And I think Apple to the same extent is that designers run the show. And I think that's led to some very novel products coming out from both of those companies.”