For a long time, design was treated, or wanted to be treated, like a strategic advantage on its own. It had its own language, its own leaders, its own frameworks, its own internal myth. Better design meant better products. Better design leadership meant better decisions. Entire teams, tools, and industries were built around that idea. Design makes everything better. And for a while, it did.
I think that story is losing ground.
Not because design is useless. Not because craft does not matter. And not because products suddenly build themselves. But because the role design used to play in digital product work has changed, and a lot of people are still talking like it has not.
The truth is simpler than the narrative.
Design is becoming a commodity. Design leadership is dissolving into product leadership. And a lot of the old language around design’s strategic importance is still being kept alive by the people who benefit from that framing.
That does not mean design disappears. It means its position changes.
Design is becoming a commodity
We are no longer in a place where UI or UX is rare by default. We are no longer in a place where every interface needs to be deeply crafted from scratch. Most of what gets built today comes from patterns, systems, libraries, references, and components. Teams are not inventing the interface every time. They are assembling from a shared logic that already exists.
And to be honest, most digital products and services look alike.
AI accelerates that even more.
You can generate layouts. You can clone flows. You can reproduce familiar structures in seconds. You can duplicate entire products. You can get to good enough much faster than before. That matters because in most companies, good enough is already enough to ship.
That is the real shift.
The uniqueness that used to define design has weakened. Not fully, not in every case, but enough that design is no longer scarce in the same way. The floor has gone up. More teams can produce competent work. More products can look polished. More people can imitate what used to require deeper specialization.
And that means UI and UX design has matured, which is what design leaders wanted.
So when people talk about design as if it still holds the same rarity and authority it had before, I think they are overstating it. People say design’s superpower is taste. But taste gets copied too.
Exceptional design still exists. Great designers still exist. But the average product team is not competing on exceptional craft. They probably do not even care. They are competing on speed, clarity, product decisions, distribution, and execution. In that environment, design is still necessary, but it is less differentiated than it used to be.
> That is what commoditization looks like.
Design leadership is dissolving into product leadership
This is the part people still resist the most.
For years, design leadership had a clearer independent identity. It could claim ownership over experience, user empathy, quality, coherence, and that strategic layer sitting between users and the business. That made sense when design had more scarcity, more insulation, and more symbolic weight inside digital teams.
But now a lot of that territory lives inside product.
The real decisions are no longer just about screens, flows, or visual consistency. They are about what gets built, why it gets built, what tradeoffs matter, what user problem is worth solving, what friction is acceptable, what speed is required, what can be simplified, what can be postponed, and what actually creates value.
Those are product decisions.
And once those decisions define the experience, the old boundary between design leadership and product leadership starts to collapse. The person shaping the product is already shaping the experience. The product itself defines the experience more than a separate design voice does.
That is why I do not think design leadership holds the same standalone position it used to.
In many teams, it is not that design leadership vanished. It is that it got absorbed. Product became the wider container, and design now operates inside it.
You can call that evolution. You can call it semantics. Either way, it is a structural shift.
And honestly, it makes sense.
If design wants strategic influence, it cannot rely only on taste, craft, or sensitivity. It has to operate at the level of product logic. It has to shape priorities, tradeoffs, value creation, and delivery. Once it does that, it starts looking a lot like product leadership anyway.
So the question is no longer whether design should have a seat at the table. The question is who is actually making the decisions that define the product. In many cases, that is product leadership, even when the language around design still sounds elevated.
The old narrative survives because it still serves people
Even with all this, the public narrative around design has not fully changed.
You still hear that design is central. That design is critical. That design leadership is a strategic pillar. That companies win because of design. That design should lead transformation.
Sometimes that is true. Often it is not.
A lot of that story survives because there are still people and companies that benefit from it. Toolmakers benefit from design being seen as a powerful standalone discipline. Platforms benefit from sustaining the idea that design is the center of modern digital work. Design leaders benefit from framing their role as indispensable. The broader design industry benefits from preserving the old prestige.
Figma is a good example of the shift. It started by serving designers, then expanded toward developers, product people, and now basically everyone involved in building software. That alone says something. The center of gravity moved from design as a discipline to product delivery as a system.
That does not mean anyone is lying. It means incentives shape language.
And when you look at how products are actually being built, the reality feels more grounded than the narrative. Design is usually one part of shipping. Important, yes. But integrated. Not sovereign. Not the main driver on its own.
That is the gap I keep noticing.
The story still sells design as a primary engine. The work itself increasingly treats design as one capability among others inside a product system.
That is not a small difference. That is the whole point.
This does not mean design is dead
To be clear, I am not arguing that design no longer matters.
Design still matters because products still need clarity. They still need usability. They still need good judgment. They still need coherence. They still need people who can see where friction lives and where experience breaks down.
But that is different from saying design still leads in the way it once claimed to.
That is the distinction I care about.
Design still matters. It is just not holding the same institutional position anymore. It is less of a separate strategic center of gravity and more of an integrated part of how products get made.
For some people, that will sound like decline. For me, it sounds more like normalization.
A discipline becomes powerful, then widespread, then operationalized. Once that happens, it either expands its scope or it becomes infrastructure.
> I think that is where design is now.
What happens next
If this is true, then design leaders have a choice.
They can keep defending the old narrative and keep speaking as if design still occupies a distinct and elevated strategic role on its own.
Or they can adapt to what the work has become.
That means thinking beyond design as a protected function. It means operating through product logic, business logic, prioritization, and delivery. It means accepting that craft alone is not enough to justify authority anymore. It means understanding that being close to the experience is not the same as owning the most important decisions.
> The future is not less design. Design should build.
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P.S. If the future is not less design, and design should build, then this is part of my answer to that shift. I’m building Product Management + AI for leaders, a practical program for people who want to move from design thinking alone into product logic, decision-making, and building with AI.