The Strategic Role Designers Need to Capture

Plus: How browsers work, another chapter in the Rippling/Deel fiasco, and why Apple and Google aren't taking action against X.

The optimistic case for designers in an AI-driven world is that design becomes strategy. When apps get reduced to APIs and primitives, someone still has to define what the product is. Jeff Veen makes this case directly in his piece on coding agents and the future of design: “An agentic future elevates design into pure strategy, which is what the best designers have wanted all along.”

But are designers actually capturing that strategic role?

Lenny’s Newsletter published survey results from 1,750 tech workers in late December, and the findings by role tell a different story. Designers report the lowest ROI from AI tools—45% positive, compared to 78% of founders. Meanwhile, founders are using AI to think—for decision support, product ideation, and strategy. They treat it as a thought partner, not a production tool.

Here’s the uncomfortable detail: PMs now rank prototyping as their #2 use case for AI, ahead of designers. Figma is teaching PMs to build prototypes instead of PRDs, going from idea to interactive demo without waiting on design. “The PMs who thrive,” Emma Webster writes, “will be those who embrace real-time iteration, moving fluidly across traditional role boundaries.” Traditional role boundaries being design’s territory.

And it’s not just PMs. Claude Code is taking the AI world by storm, and regular people are now building micro apps instead of buying software—fleeting, personal tools assembled by AI for problems that used to require a designer or developer.

So the strategic future is available—but designers aren’t capturing it at the same rate as other roles. Why?

Dolphia’s diagnosis in the craft crisis piece is sobering: “We told designers they didn’t need technical knowledge. Then we eliminated their jobs when they couldn’t influence technical decisions.” The industry spent years telling practitioners they didn’t need to understand implementation. Now those same designers can’t evaluate AI-generated output, can’t participate in architecture discussions, can’t advocate effectively when technical decisions are being made.

When Figma Sites launched, it generated 210 WCAG accessibility violations on demo sites—and designers couldn’t catch it because they didn’t know what to look for. Tools marketed as democratization actually require more technical knowledge, not less.

This connects to the debate Tommy Geoco unpacked in his video on the biggest design debate of 2025—the exchange between Karri Saarinen (designer and cofounder of Linear) and Ryo Lu (Cursor’s head of design) about Cursor’s visual editor. Geoco reframes the question perfectly: “Are you using the new speed to explore more territory, or just arriving at the same destination faster?”

That’s the question every designer should be asking. AI makes iteration cheap, but cheap iteration on the same territory isn’t progress. If you’re using Claude Code to get to obvious ideas faster, you’re missing the point. The value is in exploring territory you couldn’t reach before—and that requires understanding the medium well enough to know what’s possible.

So what is design’s value? Dan Ramsden offers a framework worth considering: abductive thinking. Deduction tells you users are dropping off. Induction tells you why. Abduction imagines new flows to fix it. Design’s contribution is translating intent through increasing fidelity—from sketch to prototype to tested solution—validating along the way. But as Yan Liu argues in his piece on taste, “The real gap won’t be between those who use AI well and those who don’t. It will be between those who already know what ‘good’ looks like before they ever open an AI tool.”

Execution was never design’s real value. But the industry acted like it was. Now that execution is commoditized, the question is whether designers have built the judgment and technical fluency to claim the strategic role that remains.

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What I’m Consuming

How Browsers Work. As a designer, and as mentioned above, you should have an understanding of how browsers work. Here is a short one-pager describing the technical details. (Dmytro Krasun)

The Rippling/Deel corporate spying scandal may have taken another wild turn. The bonkers corporate spying saga, between HR tech companies Rippling and Deel continues. The Department of Justice has reportedly opened a criminal investigation into Deel over allegations that the HR startup hired a corporate spy to steal confidential information from rival Rippling, including sales leads, product roadmaps, and key employee details. The probe follows an ongoing civil lawsuit in which a former Rippling employee admitted in court to spying for Deel, while Deel denies wrongdoing, accuses Rippling of a smear campaign, and both companies continue countersuits and legal maneuvers involving high-profile attorneys. Despite the escalating legal and criminal scrutiny, investors have continued to back both companies at multibillion-dollar valuations. (Julie Bort / TechCrunch)

Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards. Apple and Google have not removed the social media platform X from their app stores, despite Grok’s alleged violations of content policies regarding offensive and exploitative deepfake images. This inaction is linked to concerns about potential backlash from Elon Musk and political implications, suggesting a compromise of their stated content moderation principles. (Elizabeth Lopatto / The Verge)

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