As the business of “product” became more normalised, the jobs were getting more niche. At first we had UX Designer. Now, if you were trying to hire a “UX Designer,” your applicants could be (at least) a representative of three potential full-time jobs: User Researcher, User Experience Designer, Product Designer. Hell, maybe even UI Architect or Design Architect or UI Strategist or UI Engineer or UX Prototyper or UI Developer. The industry was specialised.
I just watched Jenny Wen:
She said:
I’ve seen this at a few companies now, the expectation that product managers, for example, are vibe-coding or prototyping. This is something that used to just be the designers’ responsibility. … But at the same time, this is also making designers more powerful, too.1 It’s no longer ‘Should designers code?’ but ‘Designers can code?'”
Jenny Wen, Hatch Conference 2026
We have gone so far around the horsehoe, we’re starting to come back around the other side. We were so specialised, but now we’re allowed to professionally drift into other lanes.
- There’s some spin. She says it likes it’s a good thing: The designer can be more powerful! There are plenty of designers who, by the nature of choosing to be a designer, don’t want to be a coder. And the more designers are “empowered,” they’ll be further away from what they love doing. ↩︎