Product designers are liars

AI didn't come to take our jobs. It came to prove a lot of us stopped doing them years ago.

And I don’t mean we set out to con companies on purpose. It’s worse than that: I think we ended up believing our own story. Little by little we redefined what designing even means, to the point where today there are designers who go weeks, sometimes months, without doing the one thing they were, in theory, hired to do.

We convinced ourselves that designing was running workshops, facilitating sessions, aligning stakeholders, doing discovery, building frameworks, drawing experience maps, defining processes, prepping strategy decks. And look, I’m not saying none of that matters. I’ve done it hundreds of times, and plenty of those tools make total sense when they help you build a better product. The problem is they stopped being a means and became the end.

At some point we started admiring the designer who no longer opened Figma. The further you got from the product and the closer you got to “strategy”, the more senior you seemed. And craft became almost a junior thing: as if obsessing over an interaction, an animation, a visual hierarchy, over building an interface people actually remember, was somehow second-tier work.

It’s always struck me as bizarre that this happens in no other discipline. I can’t picture an architect proud of not designing buildings anymore because now he just coordinates meetings. Or a chef bragging that he hasn’t cooked in years because he’s all-in on the restaurant’s culinary strategy. Sounds absurd. Well, in product design we made peace with it.

And meanwhile the products were being built badly. Interfaces that felt more and more impersonal, design systems so huge they cost more to maintain than the product itself, abstract components nobody understood day to day, endless debates about which token to use, drawn-out processes to decide things we’d have settled in an afternoon a few years back. We put up these enormous structures around design that, half the time, only existed to justify us still being there.

And companies bought it. We told them they needed more process, more governance, more discovery, more rituals, more layers of validation to make better products. It sounded reasonable. There were books defending it, Medium posts repeating it into the ground, entire conferences devoted to it, a whole industry feeding off the narrative. And companies, in the end, just wanted to look like Apple.

The problem is that, after pouring millions into design teams, a lot of them started asking a very simple question: are our products actually any better? Not a nice one to sit with, because the honest answer was usually somewhere between meh and no. You’re burning millions and your product is still garbage.

And then AI showed up.

The funny thing is that, instead of seeing it as the opportunity we’d been asking for all along, a lot of designers panicked. Suddenly the line was that the designer’s real value lived in strategy, that AI could never replace critical thinking, that what mattered wasn’t making interfaces but making decisions. And some of that is true, but I suspect we just ducked back behind the same old story, assuming AI would at best be good for pushing pixels. Any designer worth their salt knows the interface Claude spits out is garbage. It points you in a direction, sure, but it’s garbage. Although with every passing day I notice not everyone feels that way.

AI isn’t here to prove that strategy doesn’t matter. It’s here to prove that strategy, on its own, was never enough.

Because if Claude gives you a decent interface, writes working code and builds you a prototype in minutes, the question stops being how much you know about discovery methodologies. It becomes something a lot more uncomfortable: can you make something Claude wouldn’t have made?

And that, to me, is where real design comes back.

I’m not talking about making “pretty” screens. I’m talking about having the nose to spot opportunities nobody else saw, obsessing over the detail, making something work so well the user never stops to think about it, finding the way out where everyone else only sees a correct interface. I’m talking about craft. About the trade.

And the paradox is that AI is handing value straight back to the very thing so many designers spent years setting aside, if not looking down on. Building isn’t the excuse anymore. We depend on engineering less than ever, iterating costs a fraction of what it did two years ago, exploring ideas that used to be impossible is almost instant. We’ve never had this many tools to make incredible products.

And still, half the profession is out there frantically hunting for the next methodology to justify the job. As if we needed to invent another layer of process to prove we’re still indispensable.

I think we’re looking in the wrong place. Maybe AI didn’t come to replace the product designer. It came to force us to actually design again.

Because in the end, nobody remembers a product for the framework it was built with, or the workshops that happened before launch, or the sticky notes that ended up on a wall. They remember it for how it made them feel to use it. And that part, building something worth remembering, is the part we should never have stopped doing.

Maybe some designers’ biggest fear isn’t that AI will design better than them. It’s finding out they don’t know how to design.