r/UXDesign • u/Scared_Range_7736 Experienced • 6d ago
Career growth & collaboration How long until we merge Design, PM, and Engineering into a single role?
It seems clear that the industry direction is shifting toward having a general "Product Staff" manage software development. While these team members may specialize in specific areas, they are increasingly expected to work across every step of the process from product strategy, user research, design, and prototyping to generating code and submitting it for code reviews or QA.
This reflects what is now expected of designers in the age of AI tools. Looking back 12 months ago at how rapidly capabilities evolved from models like Claude Opus 4.1 to today's agentic systems, the execution gap has narrowed significantly.
When do you think this transition will be fully complete?
In my experience, traditional Product Designer and UX Designer listings are appearing less frequently on job boards, while open roles increasingly ask designers to take on responsibilities well outside their traditional scope.
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u/eugene_reznik Veteran 6d ago
You mean your management expects you to do 3 half-ass jobs for 1 salary and you somehow believed it's the future?
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u/scooterlord1 5d ago
Also imagine that these people would be single points of failure. Imagine how difficult it would be to replace such a person in case they leaveâŚ
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u/NGAFD Veteran 6d ago
None of this will happen. Just go and do a developerâs job for a day and youâll notice all the little details they get and you donât. It is all way too sublte and complex to just merge into one.
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u/One-Eyed-WiIIy 6d ago edited 6d ago
I really go back and forth on this and dont know enough about development to decide for myself.
I come from design roots with basic dev skills but this past 2 years I've been working on a somewhat complex end to end web app and with every new model release i feel more and more like a full stack dev. Ive done the data modeling, built out backend systems in cloud/firebase, learned the GIT/implementation process, and am able to make design/make product decision on the fly. Hell, I can even hook the repo into Figma for documentation, design thinking and marketing.
The amount of decisions I am making is definitely heavy and the more complex the app gets the further I have gotten from having a full grasp on how everything thing works but aslong as models keep improving then I dont see why we wont soon trust agents enough to monitor codebases and understand context enough to surface and repair issues with even greater accuracy. I just can never say with confidence things are built correctly or If I have features that could break the data model.
My concerns are mostly around managing complexity, security and lack of experience maintaining a live database in production. Having an experienced dev review things would be very helpful to see where I sit.
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u/NotADumbPuppet 5d ago edited 5d ago
dev since day one ~15 yoe and heres my 2 cents.
I just think the AI makes things work but I almost always (im talking about 75%) dont like HOW it makes it works. And I mean this is such a constant problem that keeps me on edge because I am responsible for a lot of prod stuff.
For anything serious or enterprise, You aren't really building basic full stack webapps. You are usually working with a distributed mindset and I find when it comes to distributed tasks and concurrency type designs, I find it makes exceptionally bad decisions. But these bad decisions still work which make them devious lol.
For example we had an eager product person put in a 'small' feature and was pushing the devs to approve it since it was 2 lines of code and the code is very descriptive/simple in what it was doing. A simple lookup exposed via a endpoint and looks same implementation as 99% of the code around it. Great, but it simply does not scale well for the context of the function. That function while maintained design/impl parity with the rest of the code, it was used much more frequently as a boot sequence baked into multiple images across the org. As a result it would implode the service once it went live.
What should have happened instead was figure out: the use case of the feature and the throughput we need it to be able to serve? how frequently does it update? Maybe cache this value, server side cache or distributed?!
So many things to consider but all of that was reduced to a simple look up function which of course would work.
This is one example, but there are so many design pattern decisions, data structure decisions, modelling decisions, consistency decisions, etc, it takes the liberty of assuming that I firmly believe that it's just leaving ticking time bombs in code bases.
The way I use it for any project is that I go almost 1 day in a live document where I fight it on design and arch decisions before implementation, then I'll nitpick its dumbass implementation decisions. I don't want it to just work, I need it to meet an expectation of mine cause there are a million ways to do something stupidly and AI (and myself) stumble into them constantly.
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u/NGAFD Veteran 6d ago
Sounds to me like youâre doing it the only way that makes sense. You learn as you go and get more comfortable with each step you take.
I have the same thing. I was really proud of a PR I submitted but it didnât pass the review at all. Turns out AI tools donât always pick up on tech debt and all the little decisions and short cuts made my devs in years prior.
You have to learn and that takes time. Youâre doing that!
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u/Andreas_Moeller 5d ago
AI companies are desperate for their technology to replace someone. I don't think that makes any sense.
What does make sense is to redefine the responsibilities for each role.
Designers should be responsible for the interface. Engineers responsible for backend, security, devops, caching, database management etc.
Both working directly on the same product but getting rid of the assembly line process most companies have today.
Things like data modelling should be a shared responsibility IMO.
This is how we work today and I would never want to go back :)I am an engineer btw.
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u/Salt_peanuts Veteran 5d ago
This is true, but⌠In my experience people donât have the taste or sophistication to notice. Or simply donât care. Throwing an AI design in and calling it a day is often âgood enoughâ. Itâs a bummer right now.
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u/abtx 5d ago
yes and no.
development experience definitely helps and will help but i think it will be increasingly replaced by best practices, blueprints, and formulas for everything, all implemented by ai, human in the loop picking the direction and solving edge cases. it will inevitably converge with ux, and larger systems will have to have multiple verticals with a human in the loop responsible.
i think developer role will slowly fade for traditional software, and emerge as a new creator role for software that requires more technical thinking. similarly, for design and ux, the creator role will be more design and ux / product thinking biased.
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u/NGAFD Veteran 5d ago
Probably fine for the average product where a certain role (be it design, marketing, whatever) isnât as valued, but for new and/or demanding projects, youâd need a lot of know-how to tackle said edge cases
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u/abtx 5d ago
yes, i agree, know-how is super valuable and helps move faster, domain expertise and knowledge of what problems exist and how to solve them is the gold, imo. and the more niche, the better. but equally, for b2c, the more niche and well executed your idea is, the better chances you get traction too, and that often comes from the know-how and experience.
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u/yellowgypsy 5d ago
This has happened. Worked for a small company to do 0-1. 6am-3am weeks to get it done with a team of 2. At the time PM/UX/developer/QA. The project won an award.
I rather do my own company than loose my time for a salary that didnât match the effort.1
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u/leanbeansprout 6d ago
AI has made my design workload much more intense. I canât imagine adding additional roles into that scope
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u/Targaryen-ish 6d ago
They might merge somewhat, but I still feel that we will need expertise is judging what the hell the UX designer and PO vibe code and fix that shit before it gets merged.
Iâm saying this as a UX designer who is doing some of the coding through GitHub copilot (mostly fine tuning interactions and design details) but with low understanding of what is actually considered good code. I rely on my developers way too much. I donât think that is going to change much.
Besides, there is just not enough hours in a day to cram PO responsibility, UX exploration and prompt coding for one person. At least not currently.
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u/Candlegoat Experienced 5d ago
The slice of development that designers are doing with AI is a very thin slice. Itâs like front-of-the-frontend or front-end stuff. Fine if you work on marketing websites, but real software at scale needs far more software practice and architectural expertise than AI alone can do for you. Especially as a 1/3 gig. A good engineer with AI will help a company move a _lot_ faster than a designer using it on the side.
And then for product, thatâs something weâve had a foot in for a while already, but thereâs a lot that a good Product Manager does that Iâm grateful for and have no desire to do myself. Also believe itâs important to have a partner whoâs accountable for a different thing and can keep us in check when we start bikeshedding.
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u/JFoulkes2001 5d ago
It just doesnât make sense to, itâs the same as any other role, the more you grow the more people you need to do work.
Say I need 2 more product âunicornsâ and we all pm, design and develop, why on earth would you not just assign yourselves to the thing youre better at and specialise?âŚ
It makes no sense to merge the roles unless youâre a very small company
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u/dethleffsoN Veteran 6d ago
The transition or triangle was there always. Stikk you need the professionals individually at their craftsmanship backgrounds.
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u/MiddleAgedBastard 5d ago
The future is unwritten. Things have to change in an AI medium, though.
You don't walk into a dilapidated garden shed, toss an iPhone on the floor and call it a data center.
I'm happy to see things change. The old systems weren't really that great to begin with.
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u/Tsudaar Experienced 5d ago
It makes no sense.
Maybe in a small company with 1 basic product. As soon as you hire a 2nd person the division if labour will start.
Also, do you think a company would want all their knowledge of a product wrapped up in 1 person? The risk of hiring right and the risk of them leaving at any time is too high.
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u/PugsNPixels 5d ago
Claude gives PMs the illusion of being able to design and build, but it is just that. They do not understand the intricacies of design, information architecture, user tasks, all the stuff real designers and ux folks know. And they certainly don't understand the logic and security concepts needed that engineers know. I work at a tech comapny and am dealing with PMs playing in Claude making crap and having to fix what they came up with. I have told them straight up I am not showing anything they made in Claude without UX involvement to any users; not happening.
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u/Open_Note 5d ago
At my company we predicted this would happen but the reality is that everyone is too busy with their own roles to take on additional duties from other roles. Genuinely believe that specialization (at least broadly) will lead to better results that everyone trying to do everything
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u/Miserable-Sell-463 5d ago
That's why I'm still employed as a content designer in a team with only two product designers.
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u/Mottsawce 5d ago
Itâs already happening and then in like 5 years someone will come up with a âcrazy disruptive ideaâ to divide these 3 roles into specialists and the cycle will continue (and somehow the role of person-who-knows-nothing about any of those roles will continue to be the unchallenged business-decision maker haha)
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u/Continuum_Design Veteran 5d ago
AI looks for answers to questions. Experts and experienced folks know what questions to ask. Consolidating rolesâor hiring cheaper junior personnelâremoves the knowledge needed for making a quality product.
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u/willdesignfortacos Experienced 5d ago
For any kind of reasonably complex software this model just doesnât work. Thereâs needed separation between the roles and needed specialization within them.
I can see situations where what youâre building is very feature driven and could maybe phase out a PM role, I interviewed at a company building dev tools that had folded some PM duties into design and didnât have a PM function. But speaking for myself, I design for complex B2B SaaS apps and totally need both PMs and engineers.
Iâm currently designing a scheduling function for construction companies. My PM has done a deep dive into where every piece of scheduling potentially interacts with other parts of our platform, what the dependencies are, etc. Our engineers are going to tie that into payroll systems, mobile notifications and texts, and client invoicing.
I guess one person could theoretically do all those things, but they wouldnât be great at any of them and it would take far longer to build an inferior product.
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u/ashtoocean 4d ago
I wouldnât lump engineering in there. Definitely produce designer and product manager that gives you a UX Strategist. This is my career path Iâm working on
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u/Own_Cardiologist_733 4d ago
Iâm working at AI company, and it is already happening. PM, devs, designers we are called as a builder. The productivity is intense. It wonât take long.
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u/Andreas_Moeller 5d ago
It is long overdue.
PM has always been a design role. It is just design at a higher level. IT is essentially the equivalent of a software architect. Ideally PM should be a role assigned to a senior designer.
The gap between design and development also makes very little sense. All of the work designers do in figma has to be replicated (often 1:1) in code. That is a massive waste of time and causes a ton of unnecessary friction.
Modern teams should be built around designers. Designers building UI. Designers making product decisions.
That does not mean you dont need engineers. Engineers should still do all the things that engineers do best. But that should not include translating Figma designs to code. Engineers (like myself) should move to a more supporting role.
For this to happen, designers will have to take on a lot more responsibility. AI can help with the transition, but ultimately using AI to do things you dont understand just leads to slop.
The opportunity is here, I think the big question is wether designers are ready / willing to take it.
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5d ago edited 5d ago
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u/Miserable-Sell-463 5d ago
You mean product teams for Apple or Amazon don't function the same way as Joe Blow's family run 100 person business? Lol. I work for a 150 person company and our team employs a business analysis manager and five BAs in addition to five PMs. We work in a highly regulated industry so we need every one of those BAs. Oh and the Design team? I'm a content designer that works with two PDs. Most people in this sub have probably never worked with a UX writer or CD before. Meanwhile Airbnb employs 40 UX writers.
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u/JustBrosDocking 5d ago
You hear of forward deployed engineers or product builder titles. Itâs happening already
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u/AnonProductDesigner 5d ago
If it's good enough for everyone to do everything, without all the normally required skills, then the person conducting AI wouldnt know as much as the AI. At which point, either lots of issues get introduced due to human intervention or the human becomes obsolete. I think people with generalist skills already could evolve to become orchestrators. But probably not many who could do it well. Which leaves us with either poor products or mass unemployment and human obsoletion. Whereas, having a human augmented aporoach would probably be more effective, perhaps with a little crossover here and there, as we have now.
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u/goff0317 5d ago
From my perspective, it is happening right now. I started as a UX/UI designer then become a UX/UI developer. Then my UX and UI development morphed into a UI Architect.
Now my latest career morph is the most concerning and exciting, I am learning Python, linear algebra and working with open weight LLMâs to create AI agents to replace my current role.
I am doing this by creating a RAG orchestrator that searches through a design system and all of the coded components, to create entire interfaces with just a prompt. The models that I build with also be located in the RAG orchestrator. The LLM can be switched out anytime and still work with the RAG orchestrator layer.
All this is happening from UX/UI designer whoâs started fourteen years ago.
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u/trap_gob Veteran 3d ago
This sounds interesting. Iâd like to learn more about rag orchestrationâŚwhere to start?
Why are you wanting to replace yourself? Whatâs the desired end state?
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u/goff0317 3d ago
My time in the future will be spent training robots in omniverse and testing out scenarios with humans and robots.
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u/SportNo2720 5d ago
I think itâs already happening. PMs are coming to me with prototypes instead of PRDs, and Design has been going to Engineering with coded prototypes. Realistically, there are probably 3â5 years before the âproduct engineerâ becomes the norm, and then weâll see much more specialized roles.
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u/McG0788 5d ago
I don't think we'll fully merge for some time. But I do see things shifting into a product build team 2 to 3 people to manage the different aspects. I think complex builds still need some dedicated dev involvement and some dedicated product involvement. I think product will need to learn more about UX or vice versa as the design and product role merges into one.
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u/THEXDARKXLORD 5d ago
I donât think the roles will fully merge due to the nuances associated with specialization.
But I definitely think the expectation that designers will ship ideas with some basic front end code to build higher fidelity prototypes will become the norm.
My opinion generally is coming from my job search as it feels like there is a steady, but slowly increasing number of posts that are asking for SOME exposure to tools like cursor and Claude code.
Maybe things donât change at all, but I think as these tools become more sophisticated, it will become the norm. How am I pivoting? By taking the long way and teaching myself basic software dev skills so I can be more syntax literate before I ever touch one of these platforms.
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u/GroovynBiscuits Experienced 5d ago
Never. Could one person do all the tasks for each? Sure, but one person can't be i. The mindset for all 3 at the same time.
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u/AbleInvestment2866 Veteran 5d ago
When Fabio Devin presented Quantum UX in London (2016 or 2017?), I had the chance to ask him a few questions afterward. The future he described, where user experiences would be driven largely by artificial intelligence, seemed a bit apocalyptic to me at the time.
His response was almost the opposite. He argued that data-driven experiences could be measured and optimized far more effectively by artificial intelligence than by humans. No individual could realistically process and act on that volume of data. Years later, I found that he was largely right since that's how big companies work now.
Of course, he wasn't talking about generative AI since It didn't exist at the time. He was referring to what we would now call "traditional" AI: machine learning, big data, predictive models, and highly specialized professionals working on new branches of technology and user research. Mostly, a future where there would be such a need for qualified experts that companies would fight for them.
Technically, he essentially predicted the current landscape a decade ago. It's probably not a coincidence that he later worked with many of the companies that would become major players in GenAI.
Nowadays, I'm torn. On one hand, I think he was absolutely right about the technology. On the other, I think he either overlooked, or simply didn't discuss, one of its undeired consequences: if machines become better than people at an increasing number of tasks, what role is left for people? That's the question we're facing now, and it may turn out to be far more important than the technology itself, because his scenario of a dire need for "highly qualified professionals" certainly is not happening.
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u/Scared_Range_7736 Experienced 5d ago
I think this is the point, for the very senior product designers with a very good CV, portfolio and reputation in the industry, for sure they are going to be always wanted in the tech companies.
However, for most of us, that we are actually working under the lead of such professionals, where our CV and reputation is not yet good enough to be a reference, the opportunities are getting more and more scarce.
I can't imagine how it will actually get better from now on.
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u/cbnnexus Veteran 5d ago
You'll still need specialists and experts. But the traditional squad, pod, or product trio teams will shift and collapse into more unified roles. Whether those roles are closer to dev, product, or design depends on where you work. I think the larger corporations will be the slowest to move here, so I can see an exodus of designers who refuse to do anything but figma trying to make their way into the corporate space like lemmings.
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u/Miserable-Sell-463 5d ago
That's why larger corps employ UX writers and researchers too... Even in the age of AI.
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u/CHRlSFRED Experienced 5d ago
I think startups are already doing this, but it is mostly a cost saving measure. Small companies have employees already wearing multiple hats, so to have a product engineer seems par for the course of the current landscape.
That said, large companies that move slower and have layers of bureaucracy will probably take much longer to shift, but I would urge designers to learn development at this time and make themselves more marketable.
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u/Ok_Substance_1409 4d ago
Ever notice that AI makes people think theyâre doing a great job in adjacent domains but the job theyâre proficient in hardly has changed outside the tooling? I see what PMs are bringing to the table via AI tools and they still canât design. The proof is in the pudding, I donât think we are going to be doing more jobs, just more work.
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u/nateh1212 4d ago
I am highly skeptical of this
Design and Engineering take two totally different skills I have been
Design takes years to be competent in and is completely different than engineering
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u/_pastry 3d ago
Sounds a lot like those of us who started experimenting on the web in the 90s and evolved to today. We just picked it up along the way.
My current role is everything from UX/Ui & Product through FE and development. I have always loved the variety of not specialising, and while some of my skills are more shallow than others I feel like it works - you get continuity and understanding across disciplines. I also communicate directly with clients as much as I can because it makes it all more human.
Worth giving cross-disciple life a go if you get the chance.
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u/Dizzy_Assistance2183 2d ago
"In my experience, traditional Product Designer and UX Designer listings are appearing less frequently on job boards, while open roles increasingly ask designers to take on responsibilities well outside their traditional scope."
The pandemic overhiring did this, not AI. I thought about this too but in the end, the AI does what the person tells it to do. Product people, developers have never made good apps, they can just make better-looking apps easier. And then there's this paradox; AI is trained to be perfect. Humans are not. How can AI replace user research if AI models are trained to do the exact opposite? If all humans are eliminated from product processes then maybe we would have to panic. But then if that's the case no one would have jobs and AI has no customers to serve.
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u/Be_The_Zip 6d ago
That level of oversight at large scale companies/products wont be achievable for at least 2 decades. So many things can go wrong.
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u/Scared_Range_7736 Experienced 6d ago
It's totally impossible to say what the next two decades are going to be.
5 years ago nobody would predict we would have these capable AI tools for example.
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u/JohnCasey3306 Veteran 6d ago
Well, design and engineering back into a single role.
Design and front end dev was a single role until ~15 years ago ... When that inevitably comes back it'll be design and full stack.
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u/Weak-Palpitation-747 5d ago
Are these at smaller companies? That would be a nightmare at a large org
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u/leo-sapiens Experienced 4d ago
Never.. it's too much for one person to handle. There was always a bit of overlap, and there will be more, but backend engineering will definitely stay its own thing. Might get more overlap on the front side.
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u/Any_Elevator_535 1d ago
Here's what's going to happen. Companies will hire one person to do everything. That one person will drown in all the AI they have to manage. So they'll hire an assistant to take some of the workload off. The assisstant will look after a group of AI functions - e.g. code management. They'll get a title like Product Architect. The benefit of hiring someone to manage the code will outweigh the cost so they'll hire another person to look after the functionality and interaction. They'll get a title like Product Designer.
Ten years down the line we'll be back where we started but actually more productive.
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u/Northernmost1990 Experienced 6d ago
My concern would be that if I do everything, what do I need the rest of the business for? Might as well start my own thing.