The new era of irreplaceable 10x designers

The phrase 10x designer or 10x engineer has been floating around for a few years now, and when most people use it, they mean someone who can close the gap between idea and execution really fast without sacrificing the quality of the work. For a designer, it means someone who can quickly identify the right problem to solve, design a lot of iterations in Figma or any tool in as little time as possible, and collaborate with their engineers and product managers to get the right solution in customers' hands quickly. But they don't just create design solutions that meet the customer's needs and business goals. They also design solutions that feel delightful to use. They help their teams move fast and they are hard to replace. Now, I've been watching something shift over the past year, something that changes almost everything about how you should be thinking about your career as a designer going forward. By the end of this video, you will know exactly what the wave of irreplaceable designers look like, the skills that will define them, and where to start to position yourself if you want to be on the right side of this shift, whether you're 1 year into your career or 10 years in. Like me, there's something for you in this video. If you're new here, my name is Samuel. I've been a designer for 10 years. Currently, I'm a senior product designer at a digital bank called Monzo. I landed my first design role in 2016. Before then, I was a freelance graphic designer for about 5 years. I designed logos, posters, flyers, illustrations. My Behance portfolio is still there. You can find some of my work there. So when I landed my first full-time design role, My dominant skill was visual design because of my graphic design background, which means I was kind of like a UI specialist. I was what you would call an I-shaped designer because I deeply specialized in UI design. This is what the workflow used to look like then. The UX designer would design the user journey, the user flows, information architecture, and wireframes. Then they'll hand over those wireframes to a UI designer. So the UI designer would design all of the visual polish, color, spacing, typography, layout, icons. They'll use a design system. And then when the UI designer is done, they will hand it over to the frontend engineer to transform design, the designs into code. Some mature companies like Google had interaction designers that specialized in prototyping the microinteractions in the experience, like how a page navigates to another one. So what this means is that one person was focused on one area of specialization. Can you already see why this way of working didn't work out for so long? Because it was extremely slow and the more people you have between the idea and the finished product, the higher the chances of losing the idea in the process. So this was an inefficient way to work. So the industry evolved to a new shape of designer, a kind of hybrid shape designer that does both UI and UX design. And it didn't take long before every design job posting moved from UI designer or UX designer to UI/UX designer. And companies like Google stuck to UX designer and companies like Facebook, which is now Meta, and Airbnb called their roles product designer right from the get-go. All of this naming semantics was focused on one thing. And that's setting the expectation that this role is no longer a specialist role. It is now a hybrid role. And now, as I got more senior, the expectations of my role started to change. First, let me give some context. This was how I progressed between 2016 and 2021. I went from junior designer to senior designer to a lead designer, and then a design manager. But then I was in Nigeria, so I was what you describe as a big fish in a small pond. So when I moved to the UK in 2021, I started working at Deliveroo. I became a small fish in a bigger pond. So I stepped down 2 roles, almost like I had to start my career afresh. So when I started climbing up the ladder again, I realized that I was spending less and less time in Figma and I was spending more time talking to users, more time brainstorming with other teams like marketing. I was spending more time getting alignment with leadership and running workshops with my team. And I realized that I started to evolve to a new shape of designer called a T-shaped designer. This means I'm becoming a specialist again, but in a different kind of way, in maybe one or two key areas. And then I'm bringing some broader skill sets on top of my areas of specialty. Visualization. So I brought back my visual design skills from graphic design days to go really deep into visual design and prototyping while I was developing other broad skill sets like workshop facilitation, writing, and product strategy. Another type of T-shaped designer might go deep into interaction design or product strategy and have other broader skills. But the one thing that was common across all these different shapes of all types of designers is that you still needed to know your way around your tools, especially Figma. You need to understand how design systems work. You needed to understand the right shortcuts to use, and you needed to be fast. The reason why our roles as designers has changed so much in the last 10 years is simply the need for speed. Handing work from a UX designer to a UI designer to a frontend engineer was slow. So UX and UI got combined so that companies can move faster. Now history is repeating itself again. The same thing is happening. The same way tech companies realized that you don't need to hand off user flows to a UI designer to make it look beautiful. They're also realizing that a designer doesn't need to hand off a design to an engineer before it is shipped. But this is not happening in just one direction. Some companies are also not waiting on designers to spend days in Figma if a PM or an engineer can design and code using agents. And of course, the results are not going to be the same, but most companies don't even care about that much because if they can move fast and validate an idea, they will just go ahead. Now take a look at the results of this survey showing the state of the job market in early 2026. Engineering and PM roles are up by 400% and design roles are not really trending upwards, like engineering and PM roles. Before 2024, there was more demand for designers. After 2024, there's been more demand for PMs. And guess what also happened after 2024? AI got better at coding, and PMs and engineers can now move faster than ever. But it seems that designers are not moving at the same pace. Now, the single biggest thing AI is doing to design is not completely replace designers. I think we are far from it if it ever happens. What is happening with AI is that AI is compressing the gap between idea and execution in a way that you could couldn't think of 3 years ago. The main qualities that separated a top 1% or a 10x designer from other designers is speed. How fast can you join a new company and understand the problem space and start influencing the design and product decisions in that team? How fast can you turn around a landing page design for a client that hired you from Upwork while maintaining the quality of the design? The faster you can turn around the designs without sacrificing quality, the more clients appreciate your work and then refer you to other clients. Now, when you put AI in the equation, the speed of execution will no longer be differentiator between designer A and designer B, because it's inevitable already. We'll design on the same canvas with AI agents. We'll interrupt the agent, take over design to fix something, and have the agents continue. This is not happening yet, but this is the inevitable future of how we work as designers. Everyone will use AI and everyone will be able to move fast. And when everyone moves fast, what becomes more important is moving in the right direction. So if you've spent the last few years sharpening your Figma skills, getting faster at moving pixels around on Figma, memorizing shortcuts and mastering components and templates. I want you to really think about what your role means now because the ground is shifting beneath you, literally. The designers adapting fastest are not the ones that are doubling down on execution speed. They are doing something different. They are shifting from being executors to being orchestrators. And let me explain what I mean by that. An executor spends the majority of their time inside the tool. So even as a senior designer, you'd expect to spend maybe 50 to 60% of your time in Figma doing the actual work. And then the other 40% of your time is spent, you know, managing stakeholders, talking to your users, convincing your PM why this is the right problem to solve. But the bulk of your time is spent heads down in Figma. And if you're a junior, you're probably spending 80% of your time in Figma. But an orchestrator works completely differently. Instead of spending most of your time inside the tools, you're directing agents that live inside the tools. You might have one agent that's really strong at writing. You might have one that knows how to code really well. You might have one that designs, and then your job is to give them the right context, direct them well, know when their output is actually good, and make sure the final results actually solve the problem you're going after. Don't be deceived that going to do less work. It's actually more work and a lot of context switching, but this looks like the reality of where we are headed. Now, this role of an orchestrator has actually always existed. It's what your manager work does. It's what the people in leadership actually do. So your manager is not the one that is in Figma executing every day and doing all of those designs, but they are fully accountable for what gets built. And they're the ones persuading leadership about why something should be built or what that thing should be and who should build it. And this is probably why the roles for PMs are surging. So what's changing now is that orchestration used to to be a leadership role. It was something you grew into after years of execution. Now it's becoming the role that every designer will be expected to play, even as an individual contributor, even if you're a junior. So the hard skills that you've acquired over the years, like how fast you are in Figma, how well you navigate a design system, what shortcuts you've memorized, will become less and less relevant. And I know that's uncomfortable to hear because you've spent so much time, you know, building these skills, but that's the hard reality. So if these design skills that we've spent years acquiring is becoming irrelevant, what are the relevant skills? They The soft skills that your manager spends his or her time developing while you've been focused on being an individual contributor. These are the skills that gets them paid and makes them good orchestrators. And without these skills, most designers will struggle in the AI era because these skills are also the hardest skills for AI to acquire. And that's where we have the most edge as humans. The first skill is storytelling. I know you've heard about it so many times that this may sound like a repetition already, but now more than ever, it is so important to know how to tell a story. Every designer who wants to step into a senior role needs to be able to tell a story about why they make decisions that they made, about why a particular problem is worth solving, and about what success actually looks like for the people that are using the product. The need to tell stories shows up in your portfolio, your case studies, in design critiques, in stakeholder presentation, and in every job interview you ever do. But so many designers don't consciously craft a story when they find themselves in scenarios where they need to convince others. Now, storytelling matters even more, and in a direction that may sound kind of surprising to you, because you're not only going to be telling stories to your manager or your team or your client. You're going to be telling stories to the agents that you are orchestrating as well, because the quality of the context that you give an AI directly shapes the quality of what it's going to produce. So you need to be able to clearly describe why you're asking your agent to do what you're asking it to do. And sometimes you may even get better results by telling it what is at stake or the emotional outcome that you're designing for. For example, you will get a different output if you ask an agent to create something that makes people feel happy, and if you tell it to create something that makes people feel sad. Fine, it might be some kind of, you know, some kind of algorithm or some kind of pattern matching, but it can definitely create something that evokes some kind of emotion in somebody else. Now, the second skill is judgment. Judgment is closely related to what so many people call taste. When an agent presents you with 4 design directions or 3 ways to frame a problem or 2 different approaches for a user flow, your judgment is what tells you which one is actually right, not just which one looks better on the surface, which one actually moves the needle for the person that is going to be using it, which one helps the business meet its goals. Again, if you think about your manager, one of the main reasons why they get paid is their judgment. When they hired you, they made a judgment on your skill as a designer and your character as a person. This is why you were hired, and this is how they get paid. When it costs almost nothing to generate hundreds of ideas, and when everyone can generate ideas really, really fast, the value shifts entirely to selecting the right idea. And the quality of your judgment is what helps you select the right idea. It becomes what you get paid for. So the question then becomes, how do you develop your commitments. I'll get to that in a moment, but before I do, let's talk about skill number 3, which is high agency. I feel so strongly about this one because I believe it's the one skill that I've been developing on a personal level for a very long time. For example, I started this channel by exercising agency, even though there are so many design channels on YouTube already. I started anyway 3 years ago, I think 4 years ago, because I genuinely believe I have a different and personal perspective to share. A few months ago, I started building a startup while working a full-time 9-to-5 because I believe that creators who share their knowledge online like I do need new ways to interact with their audience so that their audience can ask personal questions about their content anytime without needing to book a one-to-one. So I started building a digital twin for creators. Now the product is live, and in fact, you can ask my digital twin any personal questions you have about this video by using the link in the description. A few years ago, I would have talked myself out of that idea because I would have listed out all the reasons why I can't do it. I-agency is simply your ability to act on what you believe is right without waiting for anyone's permission. It's recognizing that the bottlenecks that used to slow you down, like needing an engineer to build an idea you want to explore, or needing a researcher to frame your survey questions, or needing a data analyst to help you pull the numbers. These bottlenecks don't have to stop you anymore. Before, you might have had a genuinely great idea and then waited weeks for engineering capacity to help you build it so that you can validate the idea. Now you can get yourself a testable prototype in a day, and the designers who understand this right now and the ones that are acting on it are the ones that are moving really fast in the right direction. I'm not saying you don't need this, your teammates that you work with. I'm not saying you don't need engineers. I'm not saying you don't need researchers or data analysts. These people are still very valuable to you, but you can now get yourself from 0 to 1, and the people you collaborate with as a team can get you from 1 to 100. And that simple mindset is what changes everything about how you operate in this era. The 4th one is more than a skill. It's a way of thinking that ensures you never run out of great ideas. Ideas with or without AI. You need to train your mind to create new ideas, new interaction patterns, and new ways of making an experience feel joyful and effortless. And how do you actually develop this way of thinking? It starts with developing taste. And taste is built by deliberately and consciously creating and collecting things that you think look good, things that look good to you, things that make you feel something, and making sure that you have a place where you save these things so that you can go back and learn from them to understand Why does this thing look good? Why did it move me? Why does it work like this? And it's also important to create things that are outside your field. Don't just collect landing pages and screenshots of apps that you like. Go outside and study buildings, study typography, study print, study arts, because you never know what may spark your next best idea. Now you might be thinking, but it takes years to develop all of these skills. Yeah, that's true. And if you've been designing for 7 or 8 years, you've probably been Picking up these skills without even realizing it. But what if you're just starting your career? What if you're fresh out of university, still looking for your first job, or a junior designer trying to figure out what to actually focus on right now? What skills should you focus on? I'll be honest with you, I don't have a definitive answer because nobody actually does. Everybody's figuring out things in real time. This is genuinely new territory for everyone. But if I had to tell you one skill to start with, just one right now today, It's high agency. So pick something you've always wanted to do. Pick something you've always wanted to build and something that matters to you personally and just start. Don't wait until you have all of the right tools or the right moment. Use what you have right now and start going. Because when you exercise high agency, everything else starts to fall in place. Because when you're moving fast and trying to build something on your own, you figure out how to talk about it, why it matters, why you're doing it. And that's how you develop your storytelling skills. While you're building, you have to make small and big decisions along the way about what's good and what isn't. And that's how you are developing your skill of judgment. And if you've been seeing so much LinkedIn and X posts about people designing and coding with different AI tools and you don't know where to start because everything feels overwhelming, you're not alone. I've been in that exact same spot, and that's why I made this video that gives you a clear roadmap so you can exercise agency and build one of your ideas with AI in one weekend. I'll see you in that video.