Alex Mench

A thread of playlists👇🏻✌🏻

I genuinely think the term 'Design' is damaging/limiting to individuals. I’'ve long thought what it might mean to use the principles without the title to side-step the negative associations and preconceptions. Design Founders are often special, for good reason.

One interesting observation in this chart is the claim that demand has flipped from designers to PMs. It frames this as if orgs suddenly want fewer designers and more PMs, but that feels rooted in legacy titles, not how the work is actually getting done. On most product teams today, designers are already owning big chunks of “PM work” — discovery, framing, prioritization, and strategy — and strong PMs are expected to bring real product taste and design sensibility too. Some orgs hire designers with strong product instincts, some hire PMs with strong design instincts, but in both cases they’re really looking for the same hybrid profile. I think it’s way easier to route that through a PM headcount and PM job listing than through Design, especially if there is still a desire to hire strong crafters at bigger orgs that might not be able to ship a product on their own. So what this graph is really measuring isn’t a clean shift from Design → PM, but more like.. the lag between how we label roles and the blended product + design work that’s already happening.

@lennysan Although to be honest, i’m not even sure what Design means any more. I think the term is potentially quite damaging/limiting, even outside of AI. As a Product Designer, I’m beginning to wonder how to deploy the principles without the title

@lennysan I wonder if (unfortunately) it’s about how PM’s have been labelled ‘thinkers’ & designers as ‘do’ers’. And because now the so called ‘doing’ is easy, PM’s are easier to label as valuable. But so many of the critical skills are what Design was before the PM role was clarified.

STATE OF THE PRODUCT JOB MARKET IN EARLY 2026 In spite of the headlines about layoffs and AI taking jobs, we’re actually seeing a lot of promising signs in tech hiring, and some interesting new trends: 1. PM openings are at the highest levels we’ve seen in over three years 2. AI hasn’t slowed the demand for software engineers (at least not yet) 3. AI roles in general are absolutely exploding 4. Design roles have plateaued 5. The Bay Area is increasing in importance 6. Remote work opportunities continue to decline 7. Despite ongoing layoffs, the overall number of tech jobs continues to grow More in 🧵

@DwidenR24 As per your wish for a canvas for agents to design/dump back into... figma.com/blog/the-figma…

@Alex_Mench Haven't written anything up yet, but it's what I find myself doing more and more. Just a well-planned prompt with lots of context and an idea of what components exist, then I keep designing in code until it feels right. More and more folks in the team are doing this now.

@DwidenR24 Hey man. Enjoyed a recent video of your Figma/Claude workflow. Have you covered what it looks like to start with a prompt in Claude, not a figma file?

@DwidenR24 Thanks. And yes, absolutely. I guess my question was more about the setup, and whether or not there's anything you're specifically doing to enable it outside of what is shown in the video.

@Ankaman616 He's cooked. Over saturation will be the end of him. Death by 1000 marketing cuts. Ballet was the straw that broke his back. Or mine.

They tried to finish my boy Tim Charles for making a perfectly valid, albeit poorly articulated point about opera and ballet, and now they going to get all excited about his return in Dune 3???

I reference this in a design/technology context so much. Product 'marketing', education and collaboration is 99% ensuring that what we consistently obsess over as practitioners is not just externalised, or acknowledged, but properly absorbed. Otherwise we're screwed.

@benblumenrose 100%. The current inclination is for designers is to use AI to be more like engineers, not be better designers. It's about immersion in the problem/opportunity space, and the need to protect it, rather than vibe-coding the first idea. Which is simply a race to the bottom.

Companies are scrambling to get their design teams to move as fast as their now blazing fast engineering teams. But lots of design doesn't lend itself to this type of compression. It’s the insight you get on a walk. The connection from another field. The aha when using a product you love. It could be that for some design work the answer isn't to speed up... but actually to slow it way down.

@AndyMitten The houses along my street all have 'park' related names as well as number, and a lot of the neighbours have them just above the door. My wife won't let me call ours Ji Sung Park.

They’ve changed the name of Deansgate to Olivia Deansgate for the first Brit awards in Manchester. Could change some stations for footballers. Bobby Chorlton, Ji Sung Parkway, Tom Heaton Park, Remi Moses Gate, Paul Ince, Amad Etihad Campus etc

If we're all just becoming writers (shaping and refining prompts), could it be that the people who studied English Literature and Journalism are the real winners? Or is it simply that the ability to create a good design brief is relevant again?

Yes, yes and yes.

@AndyMitten @TheAthleticFC Good lad

On Sir Jim Ratcliffe For @TheAthleticFC nytimes.com/athletic/70411…

@lennysan @cursor_ai @clairevo Have you had anyone experiencing this error message: Error handling deep link: URLs are not allowed in prompts

Too busy to read the post? Just install @cursor_ai and then click this magical link: …or-product-sense.lennysan.workers.dev This will automatically open Cursor with the prompt pre-loaded. Then simply submit the prompt, follow the instructions, and you're off and running. h/t to @clairevo for this kiler trick.

software is still about thinking software has always been about taking ambiguous human needs and crystallizing them into precise, interlocking systems. the craft is in the breakdown: which abstractions to create, where boundaries should live, how pieces communicate. coding with ai today creates a new trap: the illusion of speed without structure. you can generate code fast, but without clear system architecture – the real boundaries, the actual invariants, the core abstractions – you end up with a pile that works until it doesn't. it's slop because there's no coherent mental model underneath. ai doesn't replace systems thinking – it amplifies the cost of not doing it. if you don't know what you want structurally, ai fills gaps with whatever pattern it's seen most. you get generic solutions to specific problems. coupled code where you needed clean boundaries. three different ways of doing the same thing because you never specified the one way. as Cursor handles longer tasks, the gap between "vaguely right direction" and "precisely understood system" compounds exponentially. when agents execute 100 steps instead of 10, your role becomes more important, not less. the skill shifts from "writing every line" to "holding the system in your head and communicating its essence": - define boundaries – what are the core abstractions? what should this component know? where does state live? - specify invariants – what must always be true? what are the constants and defaults that make the system work? - guide decomposition – how should this break down? what's the natural structure? what's stable vs likely to change? - maintain coherence – as ai generates more code, you ensure it fits the mental model, follows patterns, respects boundaries. this is what great architects and designers do: they don't write every line, but they hold the system design and guide toward coherence. agents are just very fast, very literal team members. the danger is skipping the thinking because ai makes it feel optional. people prompt their way into codebases they don't understand. can't debug because they never designed it. can't extend because there's no structure, just accumulated features. people who think deeply about systems can now move 100x faster. you spend time on the hard problem – understanding what you're building and why – and ai handles mechanical translation. you're not bogged down in syntax, so you stay in the architectural layer longer. the future isn't "ai replaces programmers" or "everyone can code now." it's "people who think clearly about systems build incredibly fast, and people who don't generate slop at scale." the skill becomes: holding complexity, breaking it down cleanly, communicating structure precisely. less syntax, more systems. less implementation, more architecture. less writing code, more designing coherence. humans are great at seeing patterns, understanding tradeoffs, making judgment calls about how things should fit together. ai can't save you from unclear thinking – it just makes unclear thinking run faster.

@Ankaman616 @AdamCrafton_ @TheAthleticFC Surely. Surely. Gary Oldman as Fergie. For so many reasons.

@AdamCrafton_ @TheAthleticFC Eager to find out who they cast for Ferguson and Beckham when the time comes.

Exclusive @TheAthleticFC Manchester United agree multi-million deal with production company Lionsgate to explore dramatized retelling of club’s storied history, similar in concept to The Crown. Line of Duty creator Jed Mercurio involved in talks Story: nytimes.com/athletic/69877…

Live (well, prerecorded) on @LWSTDFM for the next 2 with my big brother @adammench standing in for @AndyTheakstone. lovewillsavetheday.fm

@AndyMitten Your ability to remain pragmatic even in the most volatile of moments never ceases to amaze me. I can only dream of these levels of level-headedness.

MUFC 4 Bournemouth 4. Wild, entertaining, frustrating. Roller coaster game in a roller coaster season.

@HarryStebbings Encountered this last week with (a) sports podcaster(s). Found myself fading out on the second, and ignoring the third. The content will inevitably be too similar, or too incremental, to be worth it.

When you hear someone on a podcast and the following week they do another 2-3. Does anyone ever listen to the subsequent 2-3?