I'm a Senior Product Designer at a Fortune 200 company (Aerospace)

I've survived multiple rounds of layoffs in four years, reorganizations, leadership, etc.

We used to have seven product designers. Four were laid off, two quit. They never hired any replacements.

Here's how my past 5 months have gone:

Project #1: Brought in halfway through development. I create components, suggest improvements, and establish a visual direction. Engineering: "Yeah, we're probably not implementing that."

Project #2: I recommend using an established design system I built for three other projects. Overseas engineer: "Nope. But cool you think it's cool bro...and BTW...the only the PM is working with the stakeholders...so kick rocks."

Project #3: Product Manager discover Figma Make and apparently decides she's a product designer now. I reach out offering to help, since I built the components. Completely ghosted.

Project #4: I embrace AI myself, exploring Claude Code, GitHub, and functional prototypes. Engineering says: "We don't want your code. Just design in standard Figma and we'll do the rest."

So PM's can use AI to do design, but when the actual designer wants to use AI to do something beyond moving rectangles around Figma, suddenly we're respecting professional boundaries? Explain this to me.

I don't hate AI. I'm actively trying to embrace it. I just figured being the last surviving designer would mean having more influence over design decisions, not less. I'm going to have a heart to heart with my boss next week and ask him to actually define this role for me for 2027.

And at this point, I'm not worried about AI replacing me. I'm worried I'll survive another six rounds of layoffs only to discover my entire job is approving the border radius on something a product manager generated during lunch (if that).

I would love your feedback as I am currently building this product. My sister who is a designer encounters this problem when trying to do research. Mobbin tells you what worked, but not how to solve your problems.

After finishing my UX/UI master, i have spent 4 months looking for junior UX/UI designer roles all over europe. I have applied to more jobs than i can count, and having reddit posts from this sub in my feed made me feel anxious as job hunting has been a nightmate. this week I managed to get a paid remote internship (something that doesn't normally happen in my country). turns out the market is not as horrible as i thought, i am hoping this was the hardest part and i can't wait to start! keep on searching juniors, it will happen eventually <3

I know this could apply to any field, but I feel like there is a specific type of Queen Bee syndrome archetype in tech that likes to bully female subordinates to prove their 'competence', and I wonder who else has experienced this and if so, any survival strategies.

I work for a healthcare b2b saas software company and when I got this job, I was so happy to have a branch to cling to, to stay in the industry since it's so rough right now. I downtitled and did the best I could while learning my new role.

When I started, people were friendly enough, including my boss, who I got along great with. There was one senior member of the team who was fairly wretched toward me and iced me out no matter how nice I was, and no matter how much I tried to ask her about her weekend, her son, her hobbies like photography—it's like pulling teeth to have a conversation with her about anything.

Well this member was recently promoted to manager, and I now report to her. While I pretended to be excited about the transition, deep down I was horrified at the decision.

She is condescending and treats me like a junior designer even though I've been in the industry longer than her. She will pick random line items from a one-off design for an acquired product that we rarely do work for, has pre-established, decided upon conventions, was already accepted by the PO, (who had already told me he thought it was "great" and what they needed) and pull it back out to ask 'why' they do it this way, why they want it this way, are all these things necessary, it's not ready for handoff, etc.

I was just pitching in for another designer who was overwhelmed and it was kind of a 'hey can you do this busywork for me, I'm slammed today' type of thing. It was not intended as a redesign or overhaul of their product (which my manager knows absolutely nothing about.)

Another example is she told me to break with our design pattern library and use a custom form layout with no containers for the individual sections. I did so, and the margins looked tight because the text and inputs were so close to the side of the drawer they were in. I brought it to a group review, she said nothing, waited until I presented it again with our higher ups present, and started lecturing me on how the margins were "too tight". I told her I agreed, but the margins were the same width they always were, they just looked closer because she made me remove the container I had originally.

She goes through and nitpicks things that don't affect the design (like the dummy data being the same in each example, when the patterns are exactly the same.) and she will often voluntell me to bring something to review while she refuses to ever present anything herself.

I could give a whole host of other reasons, but you get the idea. She nitpicks and leaves a flurry of 12 questions in my file about trivial things. I tried at first to just "become a better designer" and truly absorb all the things she was saying, trying to do it her way. This did not work because even if I'm right, she moves the goalpost and will ask "why" about some random attribute to performatively look like she's trying to 'get to the bottom' of a problem, but really it's a pissing contest and a way to try and make herself look superior and me in need of her guidance.

I've tried asking her questions early about designs, asking for her opinion, (many times yielding "well what do YOU think?" Like she's Teacher and I'm 5 year old.) She constantly keeps score and I really feel like she is building a case against me to undermine my credibility.

Did you even have a boss like this? What did you do? I try to 'manage up' and give her reports and summaries early and bombard her before she can hound me for anything, but it doesn't seem to slow her roll. I feel like she might be working up to a PIP which is often the perfect storm when new managers inherit a team they didn't pick, and I might just be cooked. But if not, did you ever manage to change or improve this dynamic? I'd love another job but it was so hard to find this one.

I've been working and living in NY for the past 8 years and working in tech. It's time to leave, just over the city. I do worry however, and not sure if its a valid worry, that my physical location affects my desirability for next roles because companies like that yOu'rE iN NyC oH mY GaWd. Please give me some feedback anyone's who's left and still finding good roles in other cities or states.

Imagine an app that makes subscribing incredibly easy but makes cancelling your subscription unnecessarily complicated.
From a business perspective, this might improve retention metrics.
From a user’s perspective, it’s frustrating and potentially manipulative.
This raises an interesting question about the responsibility of designers.
We’re often asked to improve conversions, reduce drop-offs, and increase engagement. But not every improvement in a business metric represents an improvement in the user’s experience.
Sometimes, the best UX decision for the business isn’t the best decision for the user.
Where do you draw the line between persuasive design and manipulative design?
I’d love to hear different perspectives from designers, especially those working on real-world products.

I'm in a situation where I have to transition into a PM role because my company is cutting off design team, so either that or termination.

People (including my friends outside of the company) have been telling me that the line between design and PM roles is super blurry right now due to AI, so this is destined to happen anyway. Is that true? I'm too scared to leave if that's the reality.

I don't have any experience being a PM, I doubt that my company would give me a proper training. So, if anyone here has transitioned to a PM role already, it'd be helpful to if you can share your experience, and whether you think it was the right choice in hindsight.

Sorry if my post is a mess, I'm still in shock of the news.

Sources say I can't but I don't know what I can't do on iPad than I can on pc it seems doable to me

One thing I find interesting about new AI products is how many are trying to replace traditional search and filters with a conversation. Instead of selecting ten filters and hoping the results are relevant you can explain what you are looking for in plain language and refine the results through follow-up questions but I am not sure chat is always better like If I know exactly what I want a search bar and a few filters are probably faster. Conversation seems more useful when the requirements are unclear,so there are trade-offs to consider or the system needs to understand what someone actually means.

Hiring is a good example like platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed, MeeBoss, Naukri approach candidate and job discovery in different ways with conversational interaction becoming one alternative to relying entirely on profiles, keywords and filters. The tricky technical question seems to be how to turn a conversation into structured and useful results without losing the context behind the user's request. For people building search or AI products how are you deciding when to use chat versus traditional search?

Can anyone share (anonymously) how AI adoption has impacted their design team or company?

I'm interested in real outcomes after adopting AI tools into everyday workflows. There are so many posts about companies cutting design roles, but I'm curious about the actual results.

Speed: Are teams delivering faster? 2x? 5x?

Quality: Has the quality of work improved or declined? Any improvements in CSAT or retention?

Processes: What has actually changed in your workflows?

Business results: Have you seen measurable improvements in productivity, costs, or revenue?

I'd love to hear real experiences, both positive and negative, rather than predictions about AI.

I came across this recently on Plasma iOS when activating my physical card.

When you tap “Activate card,” the card expands and flips over, visually telling you to look at the back of your physical card and enter the last 4 digits.

Instead of using just text instructions, the animation tells where to look and what to do next.

Definitely add to the polish, but does it help in reducing the cognitive load?

Hey everyone,

I started out as a graphic designer and I'm now leading a small team at the same company. After about 3 years it's started to feel pretty repetitive, and I'm craving something with more depth and impact. I've always wanted to get into product design, and now a startup has offered me exactly that. I'm excited, but also a bit lost on where the field is going. From what I've seen, a lot of teams are prototyping with AI tools like Claude Design and barely touching Figma anymore, so I'm not even sure what the workflow looks like these days.

So I'm curious how you'd describe the work now, where you think it's headed in the next few years, and what the process looks like from idea to shipped product. And coming from graphic design, I honestly don't know where to start or what to learn first.

If you're a product designer, especially at a startup or someone who made the switch from visual design, I'd love to hear your take. Advice, resources, or reality checks all welcome.

Thanks.

My question is in the title. Wondering what % higher are you asking once a company offers you the position or are you not negotiating at all? Dealing with this right now with one offer and one other potential offer (reference check done but haven't heard back yet). First offer is 140k and a bit more with bonus (their posted range is around 130k-165k) and the other potential offer is 165k-215k). I'd be the only designer and have a pretty big ownership in terms of deciding product vision & direction and not only solely designing. I also already am well versed in their domain area. I was targetting closer to 155k-165k but I also know 140k isn't a bad salary at all so unsure how to proceed. It is only 5k more than my last role as well so that's why I'm inclined to want to push for higher. Would love your perspectives here.

this is the website https://designband.club/ I can't decide because I am not American so I'm not sure if the jobs will be international enough to spend the money on

I know during Covid there was a huge surge of design jobs in this field and junior level roles were more readily available. Now, I don’t think this is ever going to happen again especially with the invention of AI but I could be wrong.

So what does this mean for companies? Are only mid, senior and director level designers going to be at companies? If so, what was the benefit of having junior level designers to begin with?

A few months ago I helped another team with UX, mockups, a simple design system, and dev handoff. The team and users loved it. I checked in with the devs several times offering to answer any questions or QA, but they kept saying "not yet."

Today they sent the site for testing and it's a disaster. So many issues, but the biggest is that they didn't implement the design system at all.

My main project is winding down, so I'm thinking of pitching a pivot into design engineering to fix this. They're on Angular with the DevExpress component library.

I've done this before, themed an existing library (shadcn) to match a design system, built out Storybook (this team has none), and implemented it. But this is much bigger project, with multiple sites.

Has anyone done this at scale? Any advice on approaching it, and on framing it to get it greenlit?

Say a participant can't complete a task in an unmoderated test. Watching the recording, you realize your instructions could reasonably mean two different things.

There's still useful behavior on video, but calling it a failed task could make the interface look worse because of the instructions.

Do you leave that attempt out of the completion rate and rerun the task with someone new? Or keep it in and explain what happened?

Company wants to start sending heatmap data into Adobe Analytics. I've never used Adobe Analytics before, not sure what exactly to expect. Do you use it? For what?

Reaching 3 years in my company as a lead. I'm not performing anywhere near the level I did when I got hired. My brain feels like constant mush.

I started as the de facto lead and due to a buyout, our company was integrated into a larger structure where I'm under new management (instead of a product team, I'm now part of a larger UX team with a product person assigned to each branch of the larger structure). The transition and adaptation to new processes is hard.

All my PMs do wireframes in Claude now, which should make my task easier but in reality forces me to make constant back and forths between their 90% rendition and the specs whereas before I took 2 or 3 days to ingest the spec and could work from there. We are expected to work faster and... I just can't follow. I feel burnt out.

Any advice appreciated. Thanks.

My design process has changed a lot in the last year. Most of my concepts and even explorations now live in code. I still use Figma, but mostly for refinement or to draft ideas that are harder to explain with a prompt.

Working with Codex or Claude is improving my workflow, but I am finding it hard to keep my work organized.

I switch context a lot and I see myself spending a lot of time trying to find past prototypes or design explorations.

I am trying to improve my operational workflow and have some simple method to keep track of what I’ve made and revisit previous ideas.

Does anyone have a tried and tested system for organising their vibe coded work?

My workplace has a Figma account managed by the company. For those of you who have been working in the field for a while now, what would you suggest is the best way to share the work you've done safely/without getting in trouble? For example, if I were to copy my designs over from my work account to my personal account, is that a common practice?

I have been doing some amazing UX work that I want to document in my portfolio but don't want to jeopardize my job as everything is monitored on my work computer. Thanks.

I'm currently in the process of revamping my company's website and alongside the desktop version, I obviously need to make sure the mobile experience is just as good.

I'm fairly new to web design and UX, so I'd love to hear from people who have been through this process before.

What are the key things I should absolutely not overlook when designing for mobile?

For example, should everything that's available on desktop also be accessible on mobile? Or are there cases where it makes sense to simplify or remove certain elements?

I'm particularly interested in the less obvious things that beginners tend to miss, or mistakes you only realize you've made after launching.

Any advice, personal experiences, mistakes, or lessons learned would be hugely appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

After being unable to get a job for the last 7 months, I started looking elsewhere. I found an AI healthtech startup through a friend. Their MVP looked terrible, had a ton of churn, no AI strategy, critical security flaws. I re aligned everything and had them scale back on features to get a solid MVP, then delivered a new onboarding while educating them on how to build everything and maintain it. I really enjoyed the process. Now they are in Silicon valley all the way from Tokyo directly because of my work. I'm wondering the best way to position myself here, what business model I should focus on, which companies or founders I should look for etc. If anyone has experience please let me know. Thanks!

For the past few weeks I've been building a personal site, on my own, with themes related to the Graeco-Roman world. I have no one to talk about it, so if anyone out here is into the theme, feel free to reach out! :)

Just to be clear, and to avoid having my post deleted: I’m not looking for testers in this subreddit specifically.
I’m currently working on a case study for a movie app, and my first thought was to find people who could help me test it through movie-related subreddits. However, all my posts have been removed.
Are there any websites or platforms where I could find people willing to make a few tasks for me, or perhaps a subreddit that allows this kind of post?
I’d really appreciate any suggestions!