If the world you're applying for a job in no longer exists... which one does?

One where bigger teams aren't necessary anymore. Their coordination and process overhead has actually become a liability. AI models let one person produce at a high pace and with high quality, which effectively makes everyone a design team of one. That's a very different job than incrementally updating a feature inside a large organization, and a lot of folks coming from that setup are going to struggle with how much capability they suddenly have.

So in this world your value comes from the outcomes you produce, much more than from how neatly you slot into an org chart. When I hire for our startups, I look for three things. First, people who are very hands-on, because there's no playbook yet and someone has to grab the ball and start calling plays. Second, people who can operate at both the top (why this matters strategically) and the bottom (nitty-gritty execution). Third, high craft. I can teach interaction, structure, and systems, but it's really hard to teach taste.

Yes, this feels disorienting, but we've been here before. When I worked at NCSA as the first graphical web browser came out, there was no title of "web designer" and certainly no "user experience designer." A few years later I was a principal designer at eBay. How? By staying curious, playing with everything new, and applying universal design skills (pattern matching, visual integrity, communication) to whatever showed up. Those skills work whether it's a poster, a website, or an AI model.

This also changes how you should present yourself. I push nearly every designer I interview to stop spending their portfolio review on the teams, processes, and workflows they navigated to ship something. Show me how you think about the problem and why. When you have clarity on the problem, you bring in the right tools, AI or not.

Twenty years ago in a Design Futures discussion, the point was made that there's nothing defensible or permanent about your position, your role, or your salary... there is but this: do great work. Still true. And there's always plenty of room at the top.

When you're sizing up an actual opportunity in this new world, use the test I stole from Bill Scott: go somewhere that gives you a race in your heart and a queasiness in your stomach. If you don't feel both, keep looking.