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Hey Reader,
Quick note before we get into things.
I'm looking for more designers to add to my talent network. We match you with AI-forward companies that are hiring top talent – companies like Lovable and Granola. You must have high craft and exceptional visual design skills. AI thinking and design engineering a plus.
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A theme that’s been coming up in my mentoring calls lately: designers are feeling stretched, but not just because there’s more work.
It’s because the shape of the role is changing, and most teams haven’t named that clearly yet.
In today's email:
- The role of designers just got bigger: Why the PM/designer boundary is dissolving (especially with AI), what job postings are signalling, and the specific behaviours I see in designers who are adapting fastest.
- Signals from hiring & portfolios: A hiring leader’s POV on what makes portfolios stand out, plus a few sharp takes on why “output” isn’t the job anymore.
- Practical AI help (without fluff): Tools and resources for researchers and designers using Claude (skills + context engineering), plus a couple events/workshops for designers leaning into build fluency.
Join Julia Ysabela Fernandez (Meta) and Elizabeth Alli (DesignerUp) for a practical walkthrough of where Al actually helps across the design process, from faster research and clearer insights to smarter decisions, stronger documentation, and storytelling that builds trust.
🎟️ Get your ticket
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Design gems of the week
- UX Hiring Insights (Career Strategy Lab) feat. Alexander Zeh (ManyChat): A great listen if you’re job searching or refining your portfolio: how Alexander thinks about building diverse UX teams, what changes as design orgs scale, and the signals that make a portfolio stand out beyond.
- Output isn't Design (Linear): A reminder that AI can generate “polished” UI fast, but that isn’t the hard part. The real work is understanding context, tradeoffs, and what should exist in the first place, otherwise you get nice-looking output with a bad fit.
- The UXR Claude Skills Bundle (Nikki Anderson): A pack of 52 Claude Skills for user researchers, so Claude can use your real frameworks (interview guides, synthesis, insight writing, reporting) without you re-explaining them every session. Are you a Level up Club member? Check the perks library for 15% off.
- AI Made Junior Designers Look Like Most Seniors (Tommy Geoco): This conversation with Hannah Ahn (Head of Design at Superpower) digs into: designing trust around health data, rolling out Claude Code to the design team, how she thinks about hiring, and why love of the craft still matters.
- Context Engineering for Prototyping Workbook: A practical workbook for designing better AI prototypes by getting the inputs right: what context to include, how to structure constraints, and how to iterate systematically instead of prompt-flailing.
Open Roles
Can AI actually read your website?
As part of my website rebuild, I ran the site through Framer’s FREE AEO Scanner to see how AI tools understand it. It scans any URL in a few seconds, gives you a score, and shows what might be hurting your visibility in AI search. If you have a personal site, portfolio, or company website, it’s worth running the scan just to see what’s currently invisible.
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The role of designers just got bigger. Here's how to grow with it.
Something kept coming up in my mentoring calls this month.
A designer at a fast-growing startup, two months into a new role, juggling five projects across three PMs — coordinating timelines, chasing decisions, writing briefs that should have already existed.
Another designer, five years at the same company, running design reviews that had quietly become planning sessions. A third, a solo designer at a fintech, watching features ship without her because the PM didn't think to loop her in.
The question each of them was really asking wasn't why is this happening — it was how do I keep up? How do I stay on top of all of this without drowning?
That question is worth taking seriously. Because I don't think it's a workload problem. I think it's a signal that the role itself is changing — and nobody handed anyone a new job description.
The role is blurring — and that's not a bug
For a long time, product design had relatively clean edges. You owned the experience. Product owned the problem space and the roadmap. Engineering owned the build. Everyone had a lane.
AI is dissolving those lanes — not just for designers, but across the whole product org. PMs are generating wireframes in Figma Make.
Engineers are prototyping with code generation tools. And designers are increasingly being pulled into decisions that used to sit upstream of them: what should we build, why, for whom, by when.
The instinct is to feel overwhelmed by that. But I think the more useful question is: what if this expansion is actually the opportunity?
This isn't about taking on more work for the same recognition. It's about understanding that the designers who thrive in the next few years won't be the ones who defended their craft lane the hardest. They'll be the ones who expanded their surface area — who got fluent in the conversations happening before and after the design work.
The job postings are already telling you this
This isn't speculation. Companies are writing the new job description in real time. Here's what's in active postings right now:
LearnLux titled their recent role "Senior Product Designer and Builder" — and described the ideal candidate as someone who "bridges the gap between thinking and doing, using AI as leverage to move from idea to validated, shippable solution." Worth noting: the role reports into the Head of Engineering, not a CPO.
PatientPoint was even more direct: "Some days you are a designer, some days a builder, some days an analyst. You shift between modes comfortably and do not see rigid role boundaries."
Ocrolus framed it as a design expectation, not a bonus: they want someone "as comfortable shaping what gets worked on as you are executing it." That's PM-adjacent thinking described as table stakes for designers.
And Anthropic — perhaps the most watched company in tech right now — asks designers to "collaborate with product managers, engineers, and AI researchers to define product vision, strategy and roadmaps" and to "rapidly prototype ideas using code." Strategy. Roadmaps. Code. These aren't stretch goals. They're in the job description.
The new job description is already being written. The question is whether you're ready to step into it.
The "produce faster" pressure is real — but it's pointing at something
There's a version of this moment that feels overwhelming. AI raises speed expectations. Leadership assumes output should double. You're already stretched.
I heard this directly from a designer this month who was managing inherited projects, emergency fixes, and a leadership presentation — all while being graded against designers on projects twice the size of hers.
But what she was actually navigating wasn't just a workload problem. It was a scope problem. The role had expanded without anyone making that explicit.
That's the gap most designers are sitting in right now. The expectations have shifted but no one officially announced it. And the designers who find their footing fastest are the ones who stop waiting for permission and start actively growing into the broader version of the role.
What adapting actually looks like
It doesn't mean becoming a PM. It means developing the skills that make you valuable in the conversations PMs are having.
It means being able to frame a design problem as a business problem — connecting your work to adoption rates, retention, revenue impact. It means having a point of view on prioritisation, not just execution. It means being in the room when the roadmap gets decided, not just when the specs get handed over.
The designers I see navigating this well are doing a few things consistently:
They name trade-offs out loud. Instead of absorbing ambiguity quietly, they make the cost of decisions visible — to their manager, to their PM, to leadership. "If we skip this research phase, here's what we're risking." That's not complaining. That's strategic communication.
They show up earlier in the process. Not waiting to be handed a brief, but inserting themselves into discovery. Asking: what problem are we actually solving? What does success look like? These are questions designers are often better positioned to ask than anyone else — because they're closest to the user.
They build fluency in product language. Roadmaps, OKRs, effort/impact frameworks. Not to do the PM's job, but to speak the language that gets design taken seriously at the table where priorities are set.
The role is expanding. So should you.
The blurring of the PM/designer boundary isn't something happening to you. It's an opening. Companies are hiring fewer designers and expecting more — but that also means the designers who've developed this range are increasingly irreplaceable. The execution-only designer is the one at risk. The designer who can hold both the user experience and the business rationale in the same hand? That person is hard to replace.
This is exactly the shift I built my group coaching program around. Not how to do more design work faster, but how to develop the strategic range that makes your impact visible — and your role secure — in an environment that keeps rewriting the rules.
If this is the gap you're sitting in right now, I'd love to talk. → Learn more about the coaching program
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What's your experience with this shift? Are you finding the PM/designer lines blurring at your company? Hit reply — I read every response.
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