The future of work: a design leader’s perspective

Filippos is Manual's head of product design and the author of a popular product design blog and course, Designary. He shares his thoughts on the future of work for product designers.

There’s a feeling you get when you use well-designed products.

Something clicks. It makes sense. It’s intuitive to the point that a child knows how to work it (remember the first time you saw a baby swiping up on a smartphone?). Companies prioritising this feeling make it look easy, but it’s anything but.

Apple. Airbnb. Linear. These companies think from a user’s perspective and optimise for a feeling of “it just works.” The lingering question is whether AI can create or further elevate this feeling and the resulting implications for product designers.

This week, we speak to Filippos Protogeridis, head of product design at Manual and the author of Designary, a blog and course on product design.

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Sign up for Filippos’ Blog and course, Designary.

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We discuss:

• The bar is higher than ever for product designers

• How hiring changes for better and worse

• The opportunity ahead with AI as an unlock

The bar is higher than ever for product designers.

If you’ve spent time tinkering with v0, Loveable, etc. (tools that turn text prompts into software), you’ll have seen that the barrier to entry for creating a digital product has been drastically lowered. It’s pretty simple to go from a sketch in your notepad to a working product (or at least a prototype) you can put in front of customers.

This is a step change from where we were not too long ago, where taking an idea to a product designer meant explaining your idea in text or drawings (in my case, childlike 😅), hoping they were understood, and then passing them onto an engineer to build a first version. It’s incredible how far (and fast) you can now get independently, but there are downsides too.

With the bar to entry being lowered, the volume of products will dramatically increase. Standing out from the crowd will require effort.

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We’ll have more clutter with tons of websites and micro-businesses/apps popping up. But that also raises the bar. When people started creating websites in the dot-com bubble, they looked terrible. The first websites that had a good UX and solved a problem prevailed. We’re facing a similar reset now. Everything we knew about the design industry is shifting. It’s harder than ever to create something that stands out.

Unsurprisingly, design founders are in vogue. YCombinator has called for design founders, and funds are being launched with the same focus.

The design job of the future will be founder. Designers already have so many of the skills needed to be great. Strong user empathy. A focus on solving problems. A high bar for quality. And taste. A must for any founding team

Aaron Epstein, General Partner, YCombinator

The opportunity is to rethink how we interact with products entirely. Plenty of startups are reimagining what’s possible with voice, for example. These startups don’t just build incrementally on top of existing paradigms; they develop entirely new ones that can delight their users. An LLM cannot look to previous examples for this. It requires creativity, experimentation, and craft.

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Craft will become more important. In a world where everyone can create or copy a product quickly, the products and the teams that prevail are the ones that take something average and turn it into something truly remarkable. That's something that AI won't be able to do by itself, that's where you need human traits: deep passion and empathy. That’s the opportunity.

If craft is the ultimate currency, how do you hire for it?

How hiring changes for better and worse

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There will be fewer roles, and the remaining ones will have a higher bar. The industry is flattening to a great degree. Companies that had an army of designers are probably going to keep half or even a third of them, because too many positions involved repetitive tasks that can now be automated (e.g., putting components in place, creating layouts, or replicating a simple interaction pattern).

This is consistent with what we’ve discussed in this newsletter before. The bar is higher, and jobs of the future will fundamentally change when humans are freed from mundane yet simple tasks. But that also creates an opportunity. For those who excel at their craft and have superior taste, there’s a huge opportunity to scale themselves to a point where the model of employee/employer fundamentally changes.

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There will likely be a new generation of design founders, freelancers, and one-person businesses. I have done this myself before (freelanced and built businesses), and it was hard. With the tools we have now, I would be in a much better position to build a fantastic career working with multiple employers. People will have the opportunity to go out on their own and deliver incredible products/services without many resources.

The rise of the solopreneur and fractional worker is still underappreciated. I wrote about my journey with fractional work and can only see this trend increasing further.

The opportunity ahead with AI as an unlock

I like to finish each interview with a question: “What should I have asked you today that I haven’t?”. Occasionally, it reveals a gem from the interviewee:

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I’ve been thinking about AI a lot recently. The past 6 months have been a learning experience, and even though it sounds scary and overwhelming, change brings opportunity. As an industry, we’ve spent too long focused on design systems and processes for the sake of velocity, and now that we have AI, we don’t need to be so rigid. We can see tools not as an obstacle but as an unlock for creativity.

I have spoken to many people about their careers recently, as a result of this newsletter. I can honestly say I’ve never witnessed a time where there is so much anxiety around the future of work, at the same time as there being so much opportunity.

As with most things, the key is to have a growth mindset and approach new ways of working with genuine curiosity.

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I think we'll see a lot of creativity over the next couple of years. You just need to ride that wave with curiosity and optimism, get out of your comfort zone, and try new tools and approaches.

Wrap up

The only constant in these next couple of years will be change. While it might feel like there’s a lot of uncertainty about the future of work, there is also a lot of opportunity.

AI can create at speed and on a much larger scale than humans ever could.

We can delegate the parts of our work that don’t require creativity or experimentation to AI. As Filippos mentions, our time as humans can be spent pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, using it as an unlock for creativity.

The “feeling” I mention in the beginning is something I believe remains a human endeavour until now. And that’s where we can still raise the bar.