Product Design in 2025 FAQ
Round 3. Digging into designer burnout, career direction and IC career progression.
Back for round 3 of the FAQ posts, I enjoy this format, so it’s here to stay for a little while.
TL;DR of the article:
For Designers who feel they are being left behind with AI tooling, what advice would you have?
What is causing designers to burnout?
Is the IC path still viable for long-term career growth, or do I need to move into management to stay competitive?
Which types of companies are still hiring designers in this climate? Any data on salaries for product design in 2025?
What does great product design talent actually mean to the top design teams?
How important is a strong portfolio in 2025?
Why can the hiring process so long and inconsistent in 2025?
Where am I seeing most people fall down in interviews?
Is the title UX Designer becoming obsolete?
For Designers who feel they are being left behind with AI tooling, what advice would you have?
Not everyone is working for a forward thinking company and they do not want to be left behind, which is fair enough.
Tactical advice here would be:
Explore your curiosity with it. Start changing behaviours. For example instead of having the Google Chrome app at the bottom of your phone have ChatGPT as the default. AI is here to stay, it’s obvious. It’s moving fast, so everyone should be at least be curious enough to explore tools around their day job.
Start thinking about your career and make a considered plan on where you want to end up and if the company you’re working for is going to hinder your progress or excel you there.
Level up day and night. Courses like Maven are a good start.
Get a mentor and someone who can keep you accountable.
Forward-thinking companies are actively looking for designers who can thrive in times of ambiguity because a lot of what they are facing is new, so they need designers who are starting to understand where the design industry is changing.
Things you need to start to understand in my opinion as a designer in 2025:
What the top design teams are doing to ship products.
A plan to develop your career in an AI era.
What effect is AI having on design processes, how companies are viewing design and how you can thrive with these changes.
For example here is a post I saw on someone writing about attending a talk from the Head of Design at Perplexity on design challenges with AI.
Lastly, understand why you got into design. AI cannot replace taste, creativity and your empathy. AI is not replacing you. Internalise that.
Just get curious, but keep in mind your career and ensure the company you work for is going to enable you to keep progressing. If not, it might be time to look for a new role.
What is causing designers to burnout?
Here’s some themes I’ve summarised from a LinkedIn post I did on Lenny’s burnout report:
Natural empathy can work against you
“Everyone is a designer”
Expectations of designers is greater than it has been before
Under resourced - Designers feel they are often overreaching and working extra just to keep up.
Design is often an afterthought.
Design is under appreciated - You can’t always quantify design, so often designers feel they are not appreciated.
Poor leadership. Not focused on protecting the creative energy of the team.
The pressure to “do more with AI” adds anxiety, especially when AI tools are misunderstood or misused.
Weak understanding of the power design can bring - i.e design is an afterthought.
Is the IC path still viable for long-term career growth, or do I need to move into management to stay competitive?
No. As more companies flatline and the need arises for more people “to do the work” we're only seeing more need for ICs and with that comes different career paths.
I’d point you to an article I collaborated on recently with Garron Engstrom who is a IC Design Director at Meta. In the article he said this about what companies can do to ensure ICs are set up for a clear career path:
Define the IC career progression: The obvious one is that companies can allow designers to continue to grow in their career without moving into management. This is what is called “parallel tracks”. Meaning a certain level IC correlates to a certain level of management and moving between them is not a promotion or demotion but rather a lateral move.
Set clear expectations for each IC level: Next they can create clear performance and scope expectations for each level. For managers it’s somewhat understood what gets you to the next level: your team grows, you hire more managers under you to support the growth. Eventually you move into a senior manager role, then director and eventually VP. This type of career progression is much less defined for Super ICs. Having clear expectations is what allows designers to feel in control, grow in their career, and get promoted.
Pay ICs the same as managers at the same level: This one is pretty self-explanatory. Each IC level should correlate to a management track level. At each level the ICs and Managers should have the same compensation ranges.
Are companies still hiring designers at scale in 2025?
As you can see from the data from TrueUp the amount of design roles is levelled out from the 2021-22 madness to steady growth.
This is a fascinating graph because it goes to show there is entry-mid roles, but hardly any VP level jobs.
What does great product design talent actually mean to the top design teams?
It’s subjective, of course. But the general rule of thumb is you will be assessed on:
It’s easier to teach processes, than taste. These companies pay a lot of attention to judgement, taste and how you’ve developed that in your career.
Character traits are under-rated.
Taste and craft
Product impact
Behavioural traits (low-ego, natural gravitas, confidence and courage)
Design and UX fundamentals
AI fluency
Storytelling (this is key, more to follow on this)
Companies want designers who have shipped highly-crafted products, designed across multiple platforms and can tell a compelling story.
In a portfolio they want to see:
Shipped work
A nice story demonstrating outputs, not just post it notes of you around a whiteboard.
Your best crafted work. Visuals matter.
A portfolio should be 95% focused on the work. No fluff.
More detailed article here on portfolios.
How important is a strong portfolio in 2025?
Very important. Here’s why:
Your work does the talking - The design job market is competitive. Companies have the pick of the market right now as I write this so they can be selective in who they hire and from where i.e “no one from agency” or “only SaaS experience”. But the portfolio gives you an opportunity to show through the work what you are capable of to show what you could bring to a company.
Some companies just want to hire from FAANG - so if you’re a designer from a lesser known company, you need to put even more emphasis on your portfolio. Sometimes designers are bound by ugly design systems and topics which are out of your control and shouldn’t reflect what you can do as a designer so your portfolio is an opportunity to showcase what you can do. Some designers get a break in a company which have high craft, so if you are not one of them, your portfolio is even more important.
Helps you structure your thoughts - The more I hear how certain C-Suite executives overlook design, I'm starting to understand why they do. The problem some designers have is they cannot articulate what exactly their value is. When challenged to provide strategic guidance, they fall back on the comfortable tactical aspects of design or process vagueness. A lot designers can hardly justify the existence of a proper design practice beyond the idea that engineering needs design support to build the right products. We need to understand how design links into business goals to get the attention of other disciplines in companies. By taking the time to write your work out, understand what went wrong, what went right, it will help you when talking about your work to companies.
As for leaders I think it’s just as important to have a portfolio. Here is an article I wrote on that.
Why can the hiring process so long and inconsistent in 2025?
Companies don’t know what they want - Many companies don’t do effective benchmarking and calibration so they interview people to understand what they want, which is the wrong way of doing it.
Overthinking it - Teams can get stuck in the “glamour search” where they try to find the perfect candidate with the perfect experience out of the fear of making a wrong hire. But if you’re aligned on type of person you’re looking for and allow yourself to hire through the quality of work and potential you shouldn’t have to rely on a set of companies to poach from.
Don’t know how to interview designers - Design can’t always be quantified. Yet some product and engineering folks interview designers like you’re interviewing an engineer or product/business person. It’s different.
They don’t have budget signed off internally - What I see a lot is hiring managers trying to hire certain designers who are over internal bandings for the roles. This can cause many delays in getting the right person hired. This is why before going out to the market, it’s important to be aligned on the total comp and what you can flex to if needed.
Too many people making a decision - To hire an IC you don’t need a hiring committee, you just need a hiring manager to make a call yes or no. Yet, some companies go through huge processes of having debriefs for an IC role. It causes delays to get people in a room where other companies are moving quicker to secure the talent you want.
Where am I seeing most people fall down in interviews?
Storytelling and communication by far.
For anyone this is a key skill to sell ideas, influence stakeholders and push for clarity on what you’re trying to do to get buy-in.
In an interview scenario this is vital, especially senior roles.
To get an interview companies are looking for what I mentioned above craft, taste, outcomes, shipped work etc.
In the interview, I think it’s vital you think about telling a compelling story of how you got to certain outcomes. Things like:
Why you were on the project
Main challenges you faced
Who was in the team. What was your role.
Who were the main stakeholders and what did they care about
How you went about solving the challenge with an emphasis on bias to action
What was the outcome (quant/qual data, references etc)
What would you have done differently?
You need to tailor this who you’re speaking to for example a CTO/CPO will likely drill further into business impact than a Lead Designer for example. For executives/leaders focus on outcomes and impact. If you’re speaking to another design who can be more nuanced and talk through processes in more detail.
An executive will likely not care how you got to an outcome, only that you got to the right one.
Is the title UX Designer becoming obsolete?
No. But as we’ve seen a reduction of size of teams and an emphasis across many companies to hire fewer designers but ones who are more “swiss army knives” with a specialist area UX is now often expected with a design role as well as visual design so it doesn’t make sense to be called UX, but rather product design.
The title UX can be seen by people as a narrow scope and people want a more strategic ownership of a product, prefer the title product design.
This is a thread on Reddit where the VP at Duolingo talks about this and how it communicates an old way of thinking.
When I see UX Designer, I am instantly thinking this person is not thinking about the future. This likely my inherit bias as I am working with newer modern way of thinking about product design with AI first companies.
I can’t remember the last I worked on a UX role.
Until next time!
I've seen more designers around me quietly opting out of the management track,not because they lack ambition, but because they want to stay close to the craft and outcomes. But without transparent IC levels or proper compensation parity, many feel like they’re stalling in place.
The burnout section also hit home. The “everyone is a designer” dynamic creates this odd tension where we’re expected to lead strategically but also defend our value constantly, especially when leadership sees AI as a cost-saving tool instead of a creative collaborator.
One thing I’d add: a lot of mid-career designers are also grappling with the lack of design literacy at the executive level. It’s not just about taste or outcomes, it’s about whether the org understands design as a long-term investment versus a tactical fix. That gap, more than tooling, is what’s making people question whether they’re in the right room.
I’ve noticed that even for mid-level roles, storytelling and communication often become key differentiator, particularly in the final rounds. It seems to be what shifts someone from being considered to a strong yes. I'm curious to hear if that aligns with what you’re seeing?