I started this year as a Product Designer. I’m not sure that title describes what I do anymore.

My last contract finished in February 2026.

I was working with Pleo, supporting the design team around AI implementation and some of the internal tools used during customer onboarding, due diligence, KYC and other operational processes.

It was one of those projects where AI wasn’t something you added to make a product sound more interesting, it had an actual job to do. And I think that experience changed something for me.

At the time, I still saw myself very clearly as a Product Designer. An experienced one, yes. I’ve been working in design for more than 25 years and I won a LIONS Cannes a few years ago. I’ve moved through illustration, branding, UX, product, creative direction, startups, Web3 and probably a few other things I’ve forgotten by now.

But still, a designer. Then February happened… My contract ended and I went back into the market, and the market felt very different.

I started having conversations with companies looking for designers with experience in AI. Some wanted AI introduced into their products. Others wanted to understand how their design teams should work with it. Some were creating roles that, at least on paper, sounded incredibly close to what I had already been doing.

I went through several processes and I got several nos.

Of course that is frustrating. I’m not going to pretend that receiving a rejection email makes you immediately think, “Amazing. What a beautiful opportunity for personal growth.” No, it is annoying. Especially when you’ve been doing this for a long time and you know what you can bring to a team.

But after going through a few of these processes, I started thinking that something else was happening.

I don’t think companies are necessarily getting it wrong. I think many of them genuinely don’t know what they need yet, and maybe none of us completely do.

AI is changing the boundaries between jobs much faster than companies can rewrite their organisations around them. A company knows it needs “a designer who understands AI.”

Fine. But what does that actually mean?

Does that person design AI features?

Do they prototype them?

Do they understand models and agents?

Do they work with engineers?

Do they write code?

Do they redesign internal workflows?

Do they decide where AI shouldn’t be used?

Do they help other designers use AI?

Are they still a Product Designer?

Are they something else?

I think we’re currently inventing some of these roles while simultaneously trying to hire people for them and that’s a strange place to be. And somewhere in the middle of all that, I stopped waiting for somebody else to define the role for me.

I had something I hadn’t had in a very long time.

Time…

Not unlimited time, unfortunately. I still have bills to be paid 😂 But enough time to start asking myself a different question.

Instead of “How do I get the next Product Designer role?” I started asking: “How much of a product could I actually build myself now?”

And that question changed my year.

I’ve spent years designing products and working closely with engineering teams. I understand how products behave, how people use them, how systems connect, where things normally break and why a beautiful screen can still be a terrible product. But there was always a line.

I designed this side. Engineering built that side…. AI has made that line incredibly blurry. So I started building, properly building.

My GitHub went from basically zero activity to more than 2,000 commits this year. And yes, I know commits are not some magical measure of engineering ability. That isn’t the point.

For me, that number represents something much more interesting. It represents thousands of moments where I had to figure something out.

Something didn’t work.

Why?

A component broke.

Fix it.

The database isn’t returning what I expected.

Find out why.

The interaction I designed doesn’t make sense once it’s actually running.

Change it.

The AI is behaving in a way I didn’t expect.

Understand it.

Something worked yesterday and today it doesn’t.

Welcome to development, apparently…

For the first time in my career, I haven’t just been designing the idea and explaining how I think it should work. I’m building the thing!

Over this period I’ve worked on three different platforms with my business partner, Pedro.

One is a social/community product connected to one of my existing projects.

Another is a financial product.

And most recently we’ve been building a platform around local businesses and the people who shop with them.

Three very different problems. Three different products. And I’ve been involved across almost everything…

The idea.

The product strategy.

The user experience.

The brand.

The visual identity.

The interface.

The AI.

The code.

The implementation.

The endless small decisions nobody ever sees.

That last part has probably taught me more than anything. Designing something in Figma is one thing. Designing something while knowing you’re going to have to build it yourself afterwards is slightly different…

You become very honest with yourself very quickly. Suddenly that clever interaction you’ve designed looks a lot less clever when you realise what it requires.

You start thinking about systems differently.

You start thinking about states differently.

You understand engineering constraints differently.

And weirdly, I think it has made me a better designer. Not because every designer should become a developer.

I don’t believe that.

Great engineers are still great engineers. I work with one every day. But understanding more of what happens after the design leaves Figma has changed the way I think about the product before I even open Figma.

And AI has accelerated all of this enormously.

I don’t mean using ChatGPT to write some copy or asking it to generate ten ideas for a button. I’m talking about AI becoming part of how I think, design, code, research, test, debug and build.

It has become infrastructure in my workflow. And that’s where I think the conversation around AI and design becomes much more interesting. Because generating something isn’t the difficult part anymore.

Knowing what should exist is.

Knowing whether something is useful is.

Knowing when an interaction feels wrong is.

Knowing what to remove is.

Knowing when the AI is confidently giving you something completely stupid is definitely still important.

Taste matters.

Experience matters.

Understanding people matters.

Product thinking matters.

The tools are becoming ridiculously powerful, but they don’t magically give you judgment. And maybe that is where my 25+ years of design experience suddenly connects with everything I’ve been learning this year.

I don’t feel like I left design behind.

I feel like the radius around design became much bigger.

I can now start with an idea and go much further with it than I could a year ago. That has changed the way I see my own profession. Product Designer still describes a huge part of what I do, but it doesn’t describe all of it anymore.

AI Architect? AI Systems Product Architect?

Designer who apparently spends half his life inside a terminal now?

I don’t know.

And I don’t think I’m particularly interested in forcing the perfect title just yet. The work matters more to me. There is also an irony in all of this that I can’t ignore.

During the same year that I’ve been rejected from roles because I apparently didn’t have exactly the AI experience a company was looking for, I’ve been designing and building complete products using AI almost every day.

That’s funny. A little painful, but mostly funny 😅

And I don’t say that because I think every company that rejected me made a mistake. Hiring is complicated. Teams have different needs. Sometimes somebody else is simply a better fit, that’s normal…

What I do think is that we are in a period where a lot of companies are trying to hire for a future they haven’t completely defined yet, and candidates are trying to explain experience in disciplines that barely had names a couple of years ago.

Everyone is moving. Everyone is learning. The job descriptions are moving too.

The positive side for me is that all of this forced me into a place I probably wouldn’t have reached so quickly if I’d moved directly from one comfortable contract into another.

I had to learn.

I had to test myself.

I had to become uncomfortable again… and after more than 25 years working, becoming a beginner at something again is actually pretty exciting.

I know much more clearly now what I can bring to a team. Design, obviously. Product thinking. Creative direction. Brand. Years of experience building things with other people… But now also AI systems, code, technical thinking and a much deeper understanding of what happens between an idea and something that actually works.

And I still want to work with great teams, very much.

I’m not writing this as some dramatic “I don’t need companies anymore” founder speech.

I love working with smart people.

I love the energy of a strong product team.

I love having engineers, designers, researchers and product people challenging each other’s thinking.

I would genuinely love to join a company trying to understand what an AI-native product organisation should look like. Maybe that’s the biggest difference between February and now.

At the beginning of the year, I was hoping that the right company would see that I could do this kind of work.

Now I already know I can. I’ve spent the year proving it to myself.

Whatever the next title is, we’ll figure that part out later.