After the Great Layoffs, I’ve been seeing too many people declaring the death of design leadership and with the rise of AI, the death of the digital design industry as well. but I find that it’s a badly informed take and no offence, but according to me, written by outsiders or written about a specific industry/region/designer. In fact, there are a lot of highly priced leadership training courses out there these days.
Over my career of 10 odd years, I’ve had the honour of being an observer in the product design industry of 2 countries; India and Indonesia. My perspective comes from my vantage point of living in the Silicon Valley of India and professionally, from being part of the growth stage of the well funded startups.
For this article(rant?), I will use Startups vs Big Tech for sake of categorisation. Big tech would have the minimum expectation of being a listed company operating across more than 1 geographical region. Meta and the other MAANG companies would fall into big tech but do remember that they are the new entrants in a space already filled by CISCO, Intuit, Adobe.
Post the dot-com bust, we saw the slow rise of today’s modern digital startups. First in the Silicon Valley and then in the rest of the world. This was mainly fuelled by the VC funding and still is. This lead us to look up to the Silicon Valley companies and the folks there as thought leaders for design. And rightly so since they were working on products we admired and used half a world away. That scale and magnitude is definitely something to be proud of. They encountered and solved problems at scale, establishing standards, registering patents and forming user behaviours that we take for granted today
But in our part of the world, even today, digital product design is still attempting to break out of its UI and UX tags. When I started out in 2014, UI/UX was the predominant way of describing designers in big tech, and even startups. Of course there were exceptions, but I will ignore them as outliers. The startup I worked at back then, was one of the first in India to adopt Facebook’s popular convention to start using the term ‘Product Designer’. Back then, the Indian digital design industry was so small. You were separated by 1-2 degrees from everyone and arguably, it’s still that small. The VC funding however gave rise to a notion that tech startups are a lucrative career compared to the dominant IT/ITES industry. This led to a gold rush fuelled by opportunistic bootcamps and certification courses, most of which churned out low skill designers. However, unlike the West, few companies thrived and hardly any have scaled and now we have a supply-demand problem at hand.
This leads us to where we are today:
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Local companies are not getting ‘Big’ enough or if they are, once they get listed, they need to justify costs and respond to the market. It’s quite easy for decision makers to take that call and cut a few roles to keep costs in check. Easier than getting out of your software license contracts to cut costs. Also much easier to do this when others in the industry are also doing layoffs. Smaller companies imply that there are fewer senior roles to be filled especially when most teams out there are feature factories who know what to build next.
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In my experience, Design leaders in startups have always been expected to play a dual role of designer + manager. Infact the designer aspect is valued a lot more while the manager title is granted to keep designers happy. That said, Most companies do not know what to do with the design leaders that they hire. So often, what you encounter is the Design Leader who is a figurehead to appease the junior designers with almost 0 influence on business outcomes or worst case, to be head of design of a design team of 1. This explains the short tenures because those roles are just not fulfilling.
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This may anger a few, but in the current state of the industry, design progression ladders don’t need an IC track beyond the level of a senior designer of 5-6 years of experience. If you are not a Meta/Google, I don’t expect there to be scope or complexity that needs Staff Designers. So where have these senior designers been going? Well some of them move into “Manager” roles without the skills to operate in them while others tend to move out of the country to join companies which may have grown to a larger size or worst case at least they get to experience a new culture.
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The skills you need as a manager are different from the ones you polished as an IC designer. Being good at Figma can only take you so far, if you don’t have an affinity for bureaucracy, then being a manager is a bad fit. On the other extreme are the managers and heads of design, usually from a background in older big tech companies, who were at positions where their job was to pontificate about design and innovation. These folk tend to be disconnected from the day-to-day work and that’s bad for the team as well. Both of these are highly replaceable roles.
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And finally, we have not moved away from the worker productivity categorisation of industrialisation. Bell curves are common, business wants to keep control and budgets are paramount. I would like to argue that Design never got a seat at the table. The “Design Thinking” hype that got thrown around by IBM, McKinsey, IDEO was for their own PR and has run its due course. Everyone likes an optimistic story but rarely would you find actual organisation leaders(CXOs) believing in the value that Design brings to the business and actually investing into Design. That is as true today, as it was a decade ago and hence good fulfilling design jobs are few and far between.
This does not paint a very rosy picture of today's design industry but after all these years, this is my honest take on the state of affairs. Perhaps we've been swayyed by all the positive marketing around design, perhaps we've believed design in tech can save the world, but in reality, designers find themselves in a dystopia that they don't want to acknowledge. The old folks of the industry who have survived, will continue to do so but if you are a beginner, If you want to stick to design in tech, I recommend that you choose a discipline like engineering or product instead and leave your empathy at the door.