I always thought product designers were stuck in a niche. We held a specific place between PMs and engineers. We could help craft the product conceptually and visually, but that's where our contributions ended. Unless you were partnered with a team, or another dev, all your outputs were limited to the frontend. Sure, you could build prototypes, but that's not a real product. And if the heart of a product designer is housed in a desire to ideate and craft but never construct, there's a natural dissatisfaction that's unavoidable. This changed for me in 2025, but it required a mindset shift first.
When the goal becomes shipping a product, you start focusing on UX and the quality of the MVP. The perfect component or card layout doesn't matter as much, and brand design rightfully takes a backseat. "Good enough" is a great rock to stand on when you're pushing out an MVP. That's the point of them, after all. Getting something real out the door and in front of customers.
If you're never shipping, you're never thinking about the product in a real, hands-on way. You're stuck on the nitty gritty pixels. Shades of gray on the scrollbar track aren't right. This 16px title padding that feels wrong. Why are these badges both squared and pills? Resolving these things add polish, but they don't get the product closer to launch.
On the other side of the fence, there are engineers who are product-minded builders that can't help themselves but create. Some of them don't have a lick of design skill, but it doesn't stop them. They build, they ship, they monetize apps to millions of users with products that would make some designers cry. And the point isn't that design doesn't matter. It's that a solution is a solution. Engineers who ship are often purely focused on the UX, because that's all that's required to ship a product.
In 2025, AI helped me build and ship like an engineer. When I built Sloper and Notionary, I wasn't focused on building the next world-class brand. I was focused on creating something users enjoyed using. Products built with quality, intention, and precision. Bug-free and delightful. The tools that afforded me this opportunity are now a dime a dozen. v0, Lovable, Replit, Rork, I could go on and on, and that's just the starting place.
If I had one piece of advice for product designers: go learn Git, backend structures, edge functions. Learn how to employ agents and MCP servers to your needs. Go build. Build and learn and repeat. Get comfortable being uncomfortable with your newfound capability.
My fear for a lot of designers heading into 2026 is that they're not even aware of these new capabilities. That they can build quite literally anything. I'm a firm believer in the phrase floating around: AI won't replace you, someone using AI will. I think that's true nearly across the board. Jobs will change, some will become obsolete, new ones will be created.
But for product designers, we've been handed a gift. A superpower, to bring to fruition any design we've ever touched. I've shipped two apps end to end, controlling every step of the process. I've become the full-stack product designer. Maybe that's the role I've been unable to articulate until just now.
Product designers are living in a world where they're not only enabled from zero to one, but from 1x to 100x.
A 100x product designer is someone with the ability to execute at any step along the process of shipping a product, and at the same pace as engineers. We can do it all. Yes, there's a learning curve, but any LLM can walk you through it. And the more you do a thing, the easier it gets. There's a reason my first app took me four months, and my second took weeks. The power law here is at play and it's significant.
From what I'm seeing online, a lot of designers are clinging to design as a precious artform, something to defend from the threat of a heartless, training-hungry AI. I understand the instinct, but this isn't something you can stop. Cases will be litigated, hearings will be held, policies will be debated, and it's happening now, but it's not stopping.
The best you can do is embrace these new tools and gain a real perspective on what AI can offer you. Be the designer you want to be in a world where you're enabled to create anything you can dream of.
A final thought on the landscape as a whole: Organizations that haven't touched AI have no idea what's coming. They're still hiring for the same copy-paste Product Designer role, and no one's telling them to look for anything different. Meanwhile, there's a new kind of designer emerging who can take a product from concept to customer. Maybe it's the Full-stack Product Designer or the Product Engineer Designer, but the individuals that possess these skillsets will be some of the most in-demand roles in the next five years. This isn't something companies will want to sleep on.