Originally written Jul 2026

There was a meeting where I realised the decisions had already been made. The roadmap was set. Engineering had been briefed. The stakeholders were aligned. I was being brought in to make the screens look right – not to shape the thinking, not to challenge the direction. To dress for work that had already happened.

I've seen this pattern often enough to know it isn't always bad intent. Organisations don't always know how to use design. They slot designers into a support role because that's what the structure allows, and the people at the top of design are often too far from the work to fix it. That's when I started asking the wrong question. I'd been thinking, how do I get more influence from a head of position? The right question was, 'What kind of work do I actually want to be doing?'

The support function problem

Design leadership in many organisations is advocacy work – making the case for design's value to people who don't instinctively see it. At its best, that's important. At its worst, it's a full-time job that has nothing to do with designing.

I'd spent enough time in that position to recognise the shape of it. By the time design was involved in the decisions that mattered, the fundamental questions had already been answered: what to build, who for, and what success looked like. Design got to decide what the button looked like.

Climbing higher in that structure meant more influence in theory, more distance from the work in practice, and more time explaining why design should have been in the room earlier. I didn't want more influence over the wrong work. I wanted to be in the right room from the start.

Why UX is the wrong word

Part of the problem is in the name. "User experience" positions designers as advocates for the user, which sounds right until you realise it also positions them as a check on other people's decisions rather than makers of their own. UX teams review features. Product teams build them.

"Product design" is different. It names the thing being made, not the constituency being served. A product designer isn't there to validate or critique – they're there to make the product. That distinction matters for how organisations think about the role, which matters for how much authority they give it.

The industry is already moving this way. The job listings at the companies I want to work in say Product Designer, not UX Designer. The framing is cleaner, and the expectations are different. I'd rather build toward the role the industry is moving toward than the one it's moving away from.

The AI argument

The third reason is the most urgent. The pace at which AI is changing the practice of product design is unlike anything I've seen in seventeen years. Not just the tools – the fundamental shape of the work. What a designer produces, how quickly, what the role of craft judgement is when generation is near-instant, how to evaluate AI output and when to override it – these aren't questions you can answer from a management position.

I started noticing a gap. The designers I respected who stayed close to the tools were developing a fluency I was losing. Not because I wasn't interested – I was building AI features and running research on AI products – but because management's distance from daily making is real, and it compounds. A head of role had been widening that gap every month. Getting hands-on wasn't nostalgia for earlier career stages.

It was a recognition that the most important period to be close to the tools is when the tools are changing fastest.

Decisions made in this window will shape how designers work for the next decade. I didn't want to manage that moment from a distance.

What I'm actually looking for

This isn't a step back. It's a deliberate choice about where to put seventeen years.

The systems thinking, the stakeholder management, and the cross-functional fluency that management builds – those make a senior IC better at work. Knowing how decisions get made, how to move things through an organisation, and how to talk about trade-offs in terms that engineering will act on. None of that goes away.

What changes is the locus. Hands-on work, inside the decisions, making the product rather than governing the process of making it. Senior Product Designer at a company where design is a function, not a service, and where proximity to the product is the point. That's what the Head was supposed to lead to. Turns out it leads away from it.

A note on titles

Titles are partly incentive structures. They tell you what the organisation values and what it will reward you for. The head of design tells organisations you'll build a design practice. The senior product designer tells them you'll make the product.

Both are legitimate things to want. I've done both. The question is which one matches what you actually want to spend your days doing – not in the abstract, but in the next five years, when the work is changing this fast.

I know what I want to be doing. That's what the title is for.

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