The product designer's paradox

Power of Nature By Ash Wright

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Over the past decade or so, the shift from UX designer to product designer was heralded by many as proof that design was maturing — integrating with business strategy, creating efficiencies, and driving measurable outcomes.

In theory, product designers would balance user needs with business goals, directly shaping strategic direction. The new title promised founders and teams a broader skillset and a more-informed seat at the decision-making table. Design functions would become more-impactful value generation tools.

In practice, many organisations moved the opposite direction. The rebrand that promised evolution delivered marginalisation. Rather than elevating design, they consolidated power within product management.

What was once an even partnership became hierarchical. In most organisations, product now sets direction and design executes.

If design lost its seat at the table, was the product designer rebrand a genuine evolution — or a quiet surrender?

The new reality

The triumvirate of design, product, and engineering has now tilted heavily toward product. Designers and product managers now compete for the same strategic space with different priorities, incentives, and levels of authority. The result is often a lack of clarity, duplicated effort, and blurred ownership.

Product owns the roadmap and metrics. Design discovery has for many narrowed to brief quantitative validation rather than qualitative exploration. User research mostly confirms existing assumptions instead of uncovering new opportunities. The generative research that once revealed unexpected user behaviours and unmet needs has been replaced by A/B tests that optimise within existing paradigms.

Design as a result drifted downstream, increasingly informed rather than consulted. Teams now often expect designers to polish predetermined solutions rather than question whether those solutions address the right problems. The discipline that once championed user needs and fought for quality now struggles to influence even basic product decisions, let alone meaningful outcomes.

The cost of disconnection

When design is disconnected from strategy, products become more measurable but less meaningful. Teams chase conversion rates and engagement spikes at the expense of coherence and long-term value. Features proliferate without purpose, creating bloated products that serve metrics dashboards better than they serve humans.

When empathy and coherence fall out of the equation, startups lose trust and loyalty, and users inevitably disengage.

Businesses see it in rising acquisition costs, lower retention, and weaker differentiation. Users feel it in products that function but fail to connect — efficient yet forgettable at best, victims of enshittification at worst. They navigate interfaces optimised for value extraction rather than experience, where every interaction feels transactional.

This isn't product's fault or responsibility.

As designers retreated into craft and avoided the messy realities of revenue pressures, technical constraints, and organisational politics, Product naturally filled the vacuum. While Designers honed their processes and craft, product managers mastered influence and accountability.

Product managers speak the language of business—OKRs, attribution models, unit economics—while Design struggled to quantify its own value beyond satisfaction scores and usability metrics.

In organisations that valued certainty over costly explorations, its clear which skillsets are more valued, trusted and rewarded.

The next movement

The consolidation under product management probably serves lean startups better.

Technical product managers who can navigate both Figma and finances offer founders immediate measurable value in today's efficiency-focused market. They can ship faster, iterate based on data, and directly connect features to revenue.

But optimisation alone doesn't create lasting differentiation. As markets mature and products commoditise, winners will balance operational excellence with real experiential innovation. The companies that endure create products people choose even when cheaper alternatives exist — products that inspire loyalty through delight, not just utility through features.

The path forward isn't about design reclaiming lost territory or product ceding control. It's about both disciplines evolving toward genuine collaboration: product managers who understand the compounding value of coherent experience and can champion quality even when it's hard to measure; designers who engage with metrics, embrace trade-offs, and can articulate decisions in business terms rather than retreating into theory and pixels.

The next evolution won't come from new job titles or reshuffled responsibilities. It will come from teams that dissolve the artificial boundaries between strategy and execution, between measurable and meaningful, between a business goals and human needs. It requires designers brave enough to own outcomes, not just outputs, and Product Managers secure enough to share the strategic vision.

The question isn't whether designers or product managers should own the strategy — it's whether we're able to properly share it.