The future of the designer’s job

In November 2025, I flew to San Francisco to shoot my first documentary, on how Silicon Valley startups build products with AI.

It landed much harder than I expected.

Messages came in for weeks, from Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, from people I had never met and who had never heard of me.

So a few weeks later we did it again. Same question, different city: Barcelona, one of the biggest tech hubs in Europe (watch it here).

And Barcelona showed me something else.

Inside a product team, some roles set off far more argument about AI than others.

Design sits right at the top.

Then the Figma team reached out. They asked whether I wanted to come to Config 2026 in San Francisco.

After a few exchanges, the idea landed on its own: why not filming a new documentary. This one entirely about what AI is doing to the designer’s job.

The preparation

The prep started on LinkedIn.

I asked product people what they wanted to know about the designer’s job in 2026 and got over 200 replies. Most of them from designers.

Then I put the same question to our Stellar collective, 40+ CPOs and CTOs who see these teams from the inside every week.

The plan had two halves. Get the two people who decide what millions of designers use every morning. Then stop as many strangers as possible in the corridors.

For the floor interviews we printed a card and handed it to people a minute before rolling:

• NOW — What part of your job has changed the most since AI showed up?
• NEVER — What’s the one thing you think AI will never take from designers?
• NEXT — In three years, the best designers will be the ones who ___.

At the bottom of the card: no right answers, we just want the honest version.

We approached around 50 designers that day. 14 sat down with us on camera (the others got scared haha). Add Figma’s VP Product and VP Design and that makes 16 interviews.

A moment I’ll never forget

One day before the conference opened, Figma had invited us to a closed session for media.

We walked into a space with about 15 chairs. And we had the opportunity to talk with Dylan Field (CEO), Paige Costello (VP of Product) and Noah Levin (VP of Design).

They took us through everything they were announcing, then answered whatever we wanted to ask.

We were under embargo for a couple of hours. The 10,000 designers in the keynote hall would find out the next morning. We already knew. We spent that evening rewriting every interview question with the announcements in our pocket. And that’s the only reason the conversations in the documentary get past the small talk.

On the way out, we got a photo with Dylan.

What you will learn

This documentary is titled How AI Is Changing the Designer's Job and it's packed with answers from people who are living the change rather than commenting on it.

You’ll learn how:

• Designers get access to the codebase and ship to production
• The lines between design, product and engineering keep blurring
• Prototyping collapses from three months to three days
• Large companies adopt AI one team at a time
• Designers draw the line on what they refuse to hand over
• The shift lands differently for design teams in Europe

Watch the full documentary

You can watch the full documentary on YouTube here:

Watch the documentary

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