What we need more of in design in 2025

14 topics to unpick on what we need more of in design coming into 2025

Designers need to take their destiny into their own hands.

No more victimisation, no more whining articles. We are more than equipped.

The crux of the challenges designers seem to face is they don't feel valued by companies. We must and can change this perception. There's more content, education and courses out there to help designers up-skill design craft, business design and understand how they become better colleagues not just designers and in turn create more value for the business they work for.

Design isn't a "nice to have" it's essential for businesses, who care about making money, creating better customer experiences etc.

So designers are essential. We need to remember that.

With no further ado, let's get into what I think we more of in the design industry coming into 2025:

1) More design founders

We’ve seen a rise a rise in design founders, designers who are taking the leap to start their own company, using design thinking in business context to create beautiful products.

Think of Linear (with a design founder) a beautiful product taking on the likes of Jira which people loathe to use.

As a designer you’re focused on creating a desired outcome, and there is no place better to do that than at the 0-1 stage of a company.

Note: my advice would be to find a co-founder or early stage team-member because being a great designer doesn’t mean you’ll be successful in business. It helps.

The list is endless, here are a few examples:

• Jochem - Founder of TheyDo

• Karri Saarinen - Co-founder of Linear

• Cat Noone - Co-founder at Stark

• James Storer - Co-founder at Jitty

• Des Traynor - Co-founder at Intercom (Was in UX before becoming a co-founder at Intercom) easily one of the best examples of what can happen when you bring design and other disciplines together as co-founders.

• Steven Fabre - Co-founder at Liveblocks

• Charles Burdett - Founder at PipDecks.

There is many more!

Away from design, being able to take your life in your own hands is liberating. It’s not for everyone, but I strongly believe there’s a lot of people out there who have what it takes to build businesses.

2) Designers in HR and Recruitment

I’ve noticed in executive search companies like to use legacy partners because they are trusted and have ex-industry people in search consultant positions.

At Verified I've conducted a searches this year with a design leader alongside me to provide the extra little bit of detail needed to pinpoint what could be a great fit for our clients.

I can’t tell you how valuable this has been. My expertise in search, going to market with a position coupled with their industry leadership experience is a great combination.

When you're not from industry and do not have the seniority in those positions it's natural there will be some things you simply don't think of, yet you still need to blend both.

3) Less ego

Design is not the most important business function.

They are all important.

We need less whiny destructive articles in Fast Company claiming this is the death of design, but rather constructive articles on how we can adapt, ideas, thoughts, community. The design industry (like many) has been through a lot since 2020 in particular, we're going through a new wave of uncertainity with AI and the fear we're going to be replaced.

This is not the time to moan about the past, but reflect, and work to the future.

4) Hiring "designers" for non-design roles

I did a talk about this in NYC, and how I've observed designers moving into People, HR, Engineering, Product roles. Design is one of the only discplines that can benefit the entire organisation and if you can build a deep business acumen there is no reason why you can't move into another role.

For example I see designers doing well in product roles.

There's a real need for design-led product leaders. I believe whoever leads product should index heavily on creative thinking, with an understanding of business, strategy, market and commercial and connect the dots.

The creative part can't be taught. Designers have that in their DNA. Creative people, who embrace failure, ideation, rather than indexing on operational product create better innovation in the market. Operational leaders focus more on shipping features, story points concluded, and revenue. They are all essential, but outcomes of the process.

Customer value = business value = profit.

Good design is good business. The data is clear. Who’s with me?!

5) Less hiring bias

A common problem in design is when a hiring manager builds a team based on their background, image etc. For example if you a hire design leader who is prodomodlitely as visual designer, they tend to hire people who are more visual focused, losing the focus on UX, research etc.

This doesn’t end well.

6) More generalists

A general trend I see coming in to 2025 is teams are doing more with less.

Which means as designers, you need to more with less, you need to be able to offer greater value than your specialism.

Designers I see most in demand are founding designers, 0-1, product designers who can do visual and interaction design to a high degree.

Designers who can:

• handle ambiguity

• Huge growth mindset

• Understand business

• Learn new things/skills.

7) Senior people back on the "tools"

I believe many VPs, SVPs would go back to IC work. More design teams (especially large companies) need VP level ICs. Someone who can/is:

- Identify opportunities across the entire product(s)

- Bring those opportunities to life.

- Help define the future of the organisation

- Being an SME for niche areas of design and the "go-to"

- Evolve the entire architecture, process and ways of working.

- Public speaker or has a strong external brand.

- They are best in-class in craft, product, business etc.

Amongst a lot of other things. I know of only a few companies like IBM who have roles like this. They call it a Distinguished Designer.

8) Better utilisation of designers and leaders.

I was speaking to a designer at a FAANG company recently. He was hired as a very senior IC, doing mid-level work. What is the point? Why do companies need to hire senior people to do mid-level work?

A lot of designers seem to be top-heavy often because they are working on critical business projects but if we're going to create career pathways for future designers we need to create gaps inside of organisations.

Just because you can hire a senior person, do you need to?

Having fresh, hungry, ambitious early-stage designers is refreshing and give you a different perspective.

Moving onto the leaders:

A lot of design leaders are underutilised. It leads to well paid leaders who are capable of delivering more doing less impactful work.

I see this happening because companies want a “big name”, but the “big name” will challenge, lots of product vs design politics where product often wins.

As a result companies hire leaders, who end up being middle-management resulting in more team admin, politics, ego handling vs true leadership work.

Companies either need to hire less senior people who can grow into the role or hire experienced leaders for 2-3 days a week if they don’t truly have the level and work required for some leaders.

Design leaders in these scenarios are bored, frustrated, disillusioned and ready to leave. We need to remember lots of people took roles 1-2 levels below in 2023-24 because the market was so weak.

When the senior roles come back, they will look to leave if they are not feeling fulfilled. The amount of design leaders not operating to their limits and their edge is staggering.

The happiest leaders I know are the ones where they are pushing boundaries, making C-suite uncomfortable (in a healthy way) with their vision, not order takers.

9) Designers inside business-led communities

There's so many design communities. Some are great, some are not so great. The issue I have with design communities is they only speak to designers. We've highlighted already in this article the need for design across wider business disciplines.

If we're going to enhance the business value of design CEO's, CTO's, CMO's, CPO's, CBO's, CXO's and however other many C's you can think of NEED to understand and know what designers do.

Designers need to be speaking at business conferences.

My friend Silke posted last week at a HR event in Paris, she was the only designer there out of 1000's of people. Designers are needed more than ever in HR!

10) No glamour searches

“They are too agency”

“Not enough start-up experience”

“Their portfolio isn’t polished enough”

Great people are being overlooked daily.

Even more so in this market as companies look to be more "efficient", often they are hiring with a cost-focused mindset not customer-focused or people-focused.

You need both. Because they don’t come from the exact background companies look for. Result is they spend months trying to fill a IC role. To get top talent, go beyond their “CV”.

Look at what they can bring, not just where they’ve been.If you look at the best product design agencies they actually ship product, and some are 10x better than some in-house designers. For example some in-house designers just work on a checkout page for 2 years.

Whereas a studio designer can be part of shipping 10+ products a years. We as recruiters, hiring managers etc need to look deeper into someone’s experience. Go deeper, test this person in an interview, put them into 2-3 hours of working with your team (paid) to see how they flourish. There's a lot we can do here.

Stop with this nonsense glamour search.

11) Seeing your portfolio as a product

Every designer should have a portfolio.Especially in 2024.

Having your own place on the internet where you can showcase your high-level of craft and eye for design, you will stand out above the rest.

It's now so easy to generate mediocre design with new tools. The demand for incredible visual designers with an eye and creativity is going to explode.

When I say portfolio, this could be anything to showcase what you can do.

12) More C-Level appointments.

The most common leadership role I work on are for design leaders to report into a CPO or CMO. They often battling product, marketing or tech to not be dominated by them in business decisions and feel they do not have enough business influence.

If we have more design people at the C-level, we will not have this issue. We will have someone who truly knows and understands how to combine user and business needs with creativity to match that some business functions simply do not have.

13) Creating an environment to ensure great design

This is difficult. I've seen many blockers arise in design teams from culture, process, investment into hiring the best talent and shared understanding of what great design looks like across the team and wider organisation.

The question to ask is “Do we truly believe in the value of highly crafted products?”

Highly crafted work is hard to measure, takes time, and requires long investment cycles. So, if you can’t confidently answer that question with a “yes,” then think twice.

Patrick Collison, the founder of Stripe, said this when talking about his conviction that doubling down on craft is a good idea:

"Part of what's interesting about these aesthetic qualities is they're generally speaking unquantifiable. I don't know if they're intrinsically unquantifiable, maybe you could train a model to do so, but today, they are broadly speaking unquantifiable. And yet they influence people in significant ways. People very demonstrably care about aesthetics. And if they're a company, they care about the aesthetic characteristics of the products that they produce. On an intuitive level, people know that that's true. But it's difficult to manage that at an organisational level, where there isn't a P&L associated with it, and if you're screwing it up, you don't see a neat time series decline."

What I read from this is to create beautifully crafted products you will face push back from executives questioning the value seeing high costs associated and you must have a senior sponsor from somewhere who backs you to push through no matter what i.e hiring the best designers, R&D budget etc.

What would you add?