@benblumenrose @gokulr I’ll take the opposite position and say the number of jobs will increase not decrease.
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Johnnie Manzari
248 posts
I've seen the TrueUp data also and so lets even take it at face value (even though it has issues and they know and are looking into it... literally asked me for help with it)
BUT I agree listings for product design roles in general aren't growing as fast as AI eng/AI pm... that doesn't = “product design is dead”.
It means the ROLE AS DEFINED is not growing as fast and is evolving. Every company would die for their PMs and Engineers to have more design skills (e.g. ask instagram who is run by a designer turned PM)
So yeah it could be they'll hire more design engineers, PMs (with design skills preferred!), whatever. The role title will change, the demands of the job will include more PM/eng fine.
But design isn't dead and stating that in your headline is simply wrong. In fact as engineering output per engineer becomes 100x or 500x or !?! the bottleneck is figuring out what to build and how it should work not the building and that's basically where designers thrive...
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1. This definition of product design is so sadly thin given where Gokul worked. Product designers do help with UI design systems but that's a fraction of what they do which also includes what product to build, how it should work, how to ensure people understand how to use it, how to create a brand people love and rally around, how the system should work together, etc etc etc but yes they'll need to do visual design of UI design systems less so I'll concede on that.
2. Design is not the "first casualty" and we have the data on design hiring - will release it here in a few weeks - stateofaidesign.com but at least the top tech companies continue to hire top designers AND pay top dollar for those folks.
3. If you're a designer you don't have these “two choices” - you can also become a founder of a startup (not just a design agency) - in fact this is an incredible time to be a designer founder. You can become incredible at storytelling and help with brand/marketing. You can freelance as a product designer (not just a systems UI specialist)... and many more...
AND any product designer worth their weight already does/did PM/Eng type work... so sure if you're one of the few software designers that somehow didn't touch code or help with product strategy yeah pick that up it's 2026... you don't need a PM/Eng to tell you that.
/end rant
Gokul Rajaram@gokulr
DESIGN: THE FIRST AI CASUALTY I'm increasingly sure that 2026 signals the end of product design as a full-fledged stand-alone function within companies. If so, it will be the first role / function to be eliminated by AI on a go-forward basis. Instead of hiring FT designers, startups are hiring / will hire design consultants to create a design system that the founder likes (this takes a few weeks max). Once the design system is finalized, PM/Eng feed it into their AI tool of choice to generate prototypes. The design system is refreshed annually by the same consultant. Larger companies will likely not backfill design roles and will do some targeted attrition to reduce the design department to 20% the size it is today. If you're a designer, I think you have two choices: 1. Become an entrepreneur: Start a design agency and become the go-to resource for design systems for startups and even larger companies. This can be a good recurring revenue business. 2. Become a builder: Add PM/Eng responsibilities to become a product builder. Would suggest you embrace this proactively vs waiting for the other shoe to drop. I'm really sorry about this - some of my best friends and the people I admire most and have learnt the most from are designers - but it seems inevitable.
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I’ve joined the Google DeepMind design team. I’ve spent my professional career working as a toolmaker, and while I’ve been lucky to have contributed to some incredible products in the past, I may well look back on the work here as the most important when it comes to building tools that are helpful, delightful, and genuinely enriching to people’s lives.
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I haven’t worked at Apple in 6 months and the multi lens switching to hit focus on this still gives me anxiety. (It starts Macro on the Super Wide lens because the bottom of the window is in focus then realizes it needs to hop to the Tele.)
Reid Wiseman@astro_reid
Only one chance in this lifetime… Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him. I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.
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@WestsideLAGuy I was in this class but only had a Stanford water bottle.
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The prestige mogging in SF is on another level.
Just did a workout at Barry’s in Marina. 2 wore Stanford shirts, 1 guy wore OpenAI shirt, 1 girl wore Founders Fund shirt.
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A student asked me to help her with an interview question. She asked for a good reply to: “What do you do if you’re given a project you don’t like?” I said this isn’t even a hypothetical, it will for sure happen. My answer was that, counterintuitively, you need to do the best work of your life on those projects. If you do bad work you doomloop your career— they will become worried about giving a more important project, you get stuck, you do more bad work, repeat. If they ask you to design a “blow dryer for a fish”, you need to design the best damn fish blow dryer the world has ever seen. Yes it will fail commercially, but then when you ask to help the “blow dryer for barbers” team, you have leverage to move over, and that team will be pulling you in.
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Today is my last day at OpenAI, as OpenAI for Science is being decentralized into other research teams. It’s been a mind-expanding two years, from Chief Product Officer to joining the research team and starting OpenAI for Science. Accelerating science will be one of the most stunningly positive outcomes of our push to AGI, and I’m rooting for @sama @markchen90 @fidjissimo @gdb @merettm and the whole team!
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I was there today and can confirm.
Soleio@soleio
The @noondesign team showed me Canvas 6 on Tuesday and my brain has been spinning since.
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@frederic_ooo @SGuergachi @ddynmcs I’m no longer at Apple, but during the beta period for iOS 26 there were iterations to this design, and the final design was based on the learnings from that process.
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I remember Portrait mode was running behind, and it risked not being in the keynote for iPhone 7 Plus. The quality wasn’t there. So the story of the second lens would have just been about zoom quality, rather than unlocking something profoundly new. It was Joz who, upon hearing this, sent an email to a few of us: “If I can give you until December what can you do?” With that additional time we were able to bring in a
machine learning block, and that was the big unlock for the quality improvements. The feature made the keynote and was released in October as a Beta. He fought every day for the purity of the ideas.
Tony Fadell@tfadell
Most tech companies break out product management and product marketing into two separate roles: Product management defines the product and gets it built. Product marketing wires the messaging- the facts you want to communicate to customers- and gets the product sold. But from my experience that's a grievous mistake. Those are, and should aways be, one job. There should be no separation between what the product will be and how it will be explained- the story has to be utterly cohesive from the beginning. Your messaging is your product. The story you're telling shapes the thing you're making. I learned story telling from Steve Jobs. I learned product management from Greg Joswiak. Joz, a fellow Wolverine, Michigander, and overall great person, has been at Apple since he left Ann Arbor in 1986 and has run product marketing for decades. And his superpower- the superpower of every truly great product manager- is empathy. He doesn't just understand the customer. He becomes the customer. So when Joz stepped into the world with his next-gen iPod to test it out, he fiddled with it like a beginner. He set aside all the tech specs- except one: battery life. The numbers were empty without customers, the facts meaningless without context. And, that's why product management has to own the messaging. The spec shows the features, the details of how a product will work, but the messaging predicts people's concerns and finds way to mitigate them. - #BUILD Chapter 5.5 The Point of PMs
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I got introduced to the Noon team through Soleio last year and decided to invest alongside him and a host of other great designers (@rsg @joulee).
The future of design is not about the ability to round trip into code and back; these are now one unified entity. We aren’t just stringing together static pages with transitions. That is done. In the future designs can’t be described without an interactive environment backed by code.
I’ve been doing software design for a long time and couldn’t be happier with where it’s going.
Soleio@soleio
There is a longstanding idea in software: WYSIWYG @noondesign is a canvas environment where humans and agents can create, edit, and ship product design. Its substrate is code. WYSIWYG. The canvas affords us selection-based workflows and structure that text alone can’t match.
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It wasn’t just Pixar, he did this for everything. All the software ideas/features were presented in prototype form, many times with numerous variations prepared in case he didn’t like some aspect of it. Apple Park had numerous full size experience prototypes built…
hinata@HinataMotivates
Steve Jobs: Talking about Pixar and storytelling.
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The main camera on smartphones has gotten so good in bright light that the differences between generations are subtle and only in subjective domains like color processing and tone. But as it gets darker the differences are more clear. In very dark conditions anything before iPhone 11 would have been an RGB 0 rectangle.
Marques Brownlee@MKBHD
iPhone 1 thru iPhone 17 vs LOW light
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This is exactly right. The verb is “selection” or, I prefer, “editing”. Taste is a noun, so it fails to fully communicate the work needed to be done. AI is an incredible collaborator, but you need to still own the ideas with clarity and conviction.
Soleio@soleio
Taste is selection. Even the act of generating and creating sits downstream of selection process: the tools that survive the Darwinian process, the words and forms we first inherit then deem most resonant, the editorial scrutiny we apply to our own work.
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The value of this iteration isn’t just in improving the design, it’s also a way to understand if you can clearly and concisely articulate the problem and your proposed solution. A cyclical perspective on this is that you’re iterating on superfluous internal marketing material. A wiser perspective is that ultimately if you can’t explain internally why this work is significant, you’ll probably struggle even more when it comes to explaining it externally.
Dasha Anderson@DashaAnderson_
The pattern described by former Apple designers was: show rough work, get feedback fast, improve it, show it again, and repeat. They compared it to an SNL-style cycle: early ideas, midweek critique, late-week rehearsal, then executive review.
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Yes. On the one hand, natural language is a difficult way to explain visual and interactive experiences; for example, imagine trying to describe the Mona Lisa with only words. But natural language paired with this speed of output is a magical experience… you’re creating things with just your thoughts
Julien Barbier 🙃❤️🏴☠️ 七転び八起き@jbarbier
Using Claude Code has a weird side effect: You don't just get more productive, you actually want to work more. There's something addictive about watching a product being born in real time in front of your eyes. "One last feature" after "one last feature" and it's already past 3am.
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This lesson from 2000 is just as relevant today. (From "In the Plex" by Steven Levy, published 2011)
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@Celesteamadon Are you opening a physical space across from Mixt on Fillmore or is that just a placeholder while the owner finds someone to lease it?
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Hi my name is celeste and I'm on a mission to help sf people find love (and hopefully ppl nationwide soon too)
I left stanford to build Known which is an app that plays matchmaker for you and sets you up on dates without swiping. We have set up a ton of people in sf and hopefully you're next ;)
While I'm busy building, I'd love to make new friends in sf or have you join our events. DMs are open!
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I’ve felt firsthand how AI speeds up design and engineering, but if your customer is a human being then you will have diminishing returns on jamming option after option, and feature after feature, into your product. This acceleration of development makes it harder than ever to edit ideas and distill options to only the essentials, but the successful products won’t confuse volume of output with product success.
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Reading this reminded me that some designers would mistakenly assume that Jony cared primarily about aesthetics. They would lead a presentation with how things looked. Those presentations rarely went well in my opinion. He mostly cared about ideas. If you went in with research that lead to interesting insights--unique points of view that others had missed--you didn't even need to give those ideas concrete form. You could present them abstractly, and those meetings were far more interesting and productive.
letters.stevejobsarchive.com/jony-ive
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