News Flash: You don’t need the title of Product Manager (PM) to shape the product. What you need are clarity, courage, and meaningful conversations.
If you aspire to become a senior designer in 2025, or if you are already in that position, you should recognize that times are changing. With the rapid advancement of AI, our careers are evolving quickly.
Do you know what changes you need to make in your work or daily life to become irreplaceable? While it’s true that everyone is technically replaceable, humans come with an expiry date.
Traditionally, many designers have only executed what their PMs or leadership instruct them to do. Often, they are understaffed, which leads to their roles becoming limited to mere “pixel pushers” within their organizations.
This is acceptable for junior or entry-level designers. However, if you are a mid-level or senior designer, it’s time to bring your A-game.
It’s 2025, and in just five months, AI has advanced more than it did in the entirety of last year. The growth is expected to continue at an even more exponential rate. Soon, many AI tools will expand their capabilities and may threaten to take our jobs.
So, what can a designer do to avoid becoming obsolete? As AI progresses, companies will likely cut costs and overload existing staff with work.
While this approach may seem cost-effective in the short term, in the long run, it can lead to disaster. Eventually, organizations will realize that one person with 100 tools cannot perform the jobs of 100 people. Remaining staff may experience burnout and loss of creativity.
At that point, those who have been let go might start their own businesses, agencies, or freelance contracts—and they won’t be as affordable to hire as full-time in-house designers.
This is my theory about the future of design, and I firmly believe in it. It may not come to pass immediately, but I envision this scenario in a decade: fractional designers, fractional product managers, and fractional leaders.
Employees will likely work for multiple companies, as no single employer can guarantee job security. Every organization might rely more on freelancers than on in-house employees, preferring a flexible workforce to reduce overhead costs such as severance and benefits like healthcare.
But the essential question we must ask now is: Has AI truly made any tech worker obsolete? Or are we too quick to assume our redundancy? I believe the latter is more accurate at this moment.
Setting aside fears of AI for the moment, let’s focus on what senior product designers can do to take ownership of the product roadmap without replacing a product manager or becoming one!
1. Understanding Strategy from a Designer’s Perspective
Define a product strategy that integrates user needs, business goals, and market context. Use your unique insights from user research, systems thinking, and design thinking to challenge the misconception that strategy is the sole domain of executives or PMs.
2. From User Insights to Strategic Leverage
As a designer, you possess a unique skill that no one else in the company has: user research. You can define and conduct user research using various methodologies, refine your questions, and identify opportunities that turn user pain points into product features. Create artifacts that PMs and executives will value in their planning processes. Position yourself as a strategic partner rather than just an executor.
3. Speak the Language of Product and Business
When you communicate in business terms, others will recognize the value of design through return on investment (ROI), results, and impact. Frame your design goals in relation to revenue, retention, and risk. Ask better questions during roadmap planning and stakeholder meetings, and include data to substantiate your ideas.
4. Influence Without Owning the Roadmap
You don’t need to own the roadmap to influence it. The key is to be present during decision-making processes. Focus on the previous three points: embed yourself in early discovery, co-create briefs, delve into product requirement documents, and discuss trade-offs. You’ll also need to develop diplomacy to handle feedback from PMs, executives, or other stakeholders.
5. Cross-Functional Alignment as a Strategic Act
Build trust with PMs, developers, sales, customer support, and other teams within your organization. Engaging them early in your process can foster collaboration. Ask developers about the technical limitations of features and inquire with sales teams about features they have marketed to clients—some of which may exist only on paper. This approach will provide valuable insights into future product developments.
6. Design Vision: Beyond Just Screens!
This is by far the most important point—focus on design vision rather than just creating screens. Develop future state journeys and experience blueprints.
By collaborating with your sales and customer support teams, you can begin to visualize how the product will look and function a year from now. Create simple feature mockups that give everyone in the company a glimpse of what design can deliver.
Use prototypes as storytelling tools; stories are memorable and impactful! If necessary, maintain a design vision document and share it with your colleagues.
7. Measure What Matters: Demonstrate Strategic Impact
This topic has been discussed extensively, but it bears repeating: measure what matters and demonstrate the impact of design. A comparative analysis is especially valuable!
Visualize how a feature performed before and after a redesign, and share the story of the increased user satisfaction following the launch of a new feature. Use quantifiable data so that other departments can grasp the impact. Speak in business terms, emphasizing revenue, churn, retention, and ROI.
To grow from a designer to a ‘design strategist,’ you need to shift your mindset. Position yourself as someone who can create a broader impact on the organization, rather than just as an executor or pixel-pusher.
A challenge for you is to start small and bring a strategic perspective to your next design critique or sprint kickoff. Identify where you’re already making an impact and explore how you can expand that influence.
