Review: Hiring designers in 2025
What I am seeing across the industry, what companies who "get it" are doing and who designers really want to work for.
A lot has changed in 2025 for me hiring designers. We’ve seen a huge shift and urgency to re-shape teams, hire more generalist-type designers.
Getting a design job for many people is tough, whereas some people are fielding 5 offers when they look. What is happening?
I’ve summarised in one post what I have seen this year, what’s emerging, and what the best companies are doing differently.
AI is flooding the industry with slop, it’s so easy to build average software. Craft and taste are the new leverage. It’s wild how in-demand design is from a 5-person start-up caring about brand pre-launch through to corporate companies investing in design like never before.
The bar keeps rising. Good enough is not enough.
What I’m Seeing Across the Industry
The rise of the “Super IC” — You don’t need to move into people leadership anymore. There’s a collapse of middle management as more companies want “do-ers.”
A huge juxtaposition in design hiring — Many designers are looking for work, yet companies still struggle to hire. Why? They’re competing for the same design talent — the ones strong across deep technical problems, UX, product architecture, and visual craft. They think in systems (architecture, flows, scalability) and pixels (taste and polish). They connect design decisions to product, engineering, and business outcomes — their work stands out from the bland AI products that are so easy to ship now.
Default to being IC — Everyone is expected to have direct product impact. Directors+ are still expected to design, prototype, or code. The “handoff” era is over.
AI fluency is becoming baseline — Designers are expected to be AI-native: using AI to prototype, analyze data, and ship faster.
Design, engineering, and product are merging — Marketing is getting more technical. It’s wild. You’re seeing more designers and leaders move into product roles.
Smaller, leaner teams — They get clarity a lot quicker.
The design role is moving towards being a curator — AI handles execution, so the designer’s value lies in judgment — knowing what to keep and what to cut. Raw taste, creativity, and judgment can’t be replaced by AI. Taste is becoming the moat.
What Companies That “Get It” Are Doing
They are betting on craft — they see it as a true differentiator.
Ripping up playbooks from yesteryear — empowering designers to own the frontend. The best design teams use AI tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Figma Make to create near-production prototypes that feel real. Impact now comes from tangible product output, not facilitation. Those who can turn ideas into live experiments quickly have the most influence.
Emphasis on being a builder — In a recent article, Emmet Connolly (SVP, Design) and Thom Rimmer (VP, Design) at Intercom explain designers are using tools like Cursor to hunt down these problems in the codebase and fix them directly. Designers have their own local dev environment, and their fix gets shipped straight to production after an Engineer has approved a quick code review.
Hands-on is the new default — They want to hire people who are all-in on AI, constantly exploring new tools, and who want to be judged by product impact.
They protect deep work — Meeting-light cultures and async rituals give designers time to focus.
They build environments of trust — Feedback is open, fast, and safe. Crits are collaborative, not performative. Everyone uses the product, so feedback is grounded in reality.
They double down on writing — How well you write is how well you build. How clearly you think is how clearly the machine understands you. Great writing leads to better outcomes. You can now start with prompts to quickly prototype an idea and it all starts with writing.
High-agency is the new standard — No passengers. Everyone experiments, questions, and builds with conviction.
Where Designers Want to Work
Companies who are all in on AI — Playbooks that worked five years ago are gone. AI fluency is the standard across design, engineering, HR, marketing, people ops, and finance.
Designers have ownership — You don’t just hand off designs. You start owning more of the frontend. For example, at Intercom: “Designers are now taking on more and more complex front-end coding challenges. And we’re starting to build highly convincing prototypes, which are increasingly built using our internal Design System’s React components.”
Good enough is not good enough — “Good enough” isn’t accepted. You push for the final 1% of excellence.
Small teams — Fewer layers, fewer people, more focus.
You’re setting industry standards — You experiment with new tools and share what you learn internally and externally.
You feel inspired by the people around you.
You’re building something that matters — The work genuinely shapes how people interact with technology and each other.
Leadership are in the details — How can people lead you if they don’t know what they’re leading?
The company oozes taste in everything it puts out.
Mindshare is seen as critical strategy — in competitive categories, it’s one of the top priorities in the org.
The industry has changed. The best designers are becoming Super ICs. The best companies are empowering them to build and the gap between those who adapt and those who don’t is only getting wider.
Taste, technical depth, and judgment are now real differentiators.
2026 is shaping up to be even crazier. And I am here for it!
Love this shift to the super-IC, as someone who's always enjoyed ownership and end-to-end design. It was an uncommon niche a few years ago, but so much has changed, and that's tablestakes now.
amazing stuff!