Yunwei Xu

Product designer and builder, with 13 years of cross-disciplinary design experience.

I spent ten years designing buildings before I designed a single screen. What carried over wasn’t the software. It was thinking in systems before details, and designing inside hard constraints.

The role has changed since I moved into it. What’s replacing it isn’t a job title, it’s a set of capabilities that mostly sit outside the screen.

I’m a senior product designer at a financial advisory firm, working on the platform its processes run on. The job is aligning teams and discovering the problems to solve, deciding on the solutions worth building, then building them in collaboration with engineers.

An architecture graduate reached out to me recently asking how to break into product design.

Halfway through the conversation I realised the path I took into this field no longer exists.

When I moved from architecture into Product Design, the role had a relatively clear shape. You owned the visual layer. You ran usability tests and validated solutions. Likewise in architecture, you drew the plans, the builders laid the bricks. The boundaries were uncomfortable at times, but they were legible.

That’s not the role anymore.

The designers I see making real impact today are breaking down boundaries. They’re in discovery, identifying opportunities with the Product Manager instead of working to requirements. They’re building prototypes, and shipping alongside engineers rather than waiting on them.

The lines between Product Designer, Product Manager and Engineer aren’t just blurring, they’re a distraction keeping us from delivering meaningful impact to our users.

What’s replacing them isn’t a new job title. It’s a new set of capabilities that don’t map neatly onto any single role:

• Identifying the right problem, not jumping to a solution
• Being comfortable building solutions, not just sketching them
• Measuring and communicating outcomes, not outputs
• Using AI as a genuine thinking partner, not a shortcut

In the end, I didn’t tell her to pursue product design. I told her to pursue the version of the role that doesn’t exist on most job descriptions yet.

The graduates who thrive in the next five years won’t be the ones who mastered Figma. They’ll be the ones who understood that the tools and team structures around it are being rebuilt from scratch right now.

If “product designer” stopped being a job title tomorrow, what would you actually be?

Because the answer to that question is probably more useful than any portfolio tip I could give.