Dylan Trow

What’s really happening in the design job market? I recently shared these stats on stage — just think about it — 400,000 designers COMPETE for only 30,000 openings each year in the US. No comments. Moreover: – UX/UI postings have dropped ~70% since early ’22 – Hiring cycles now stretch 4–6 months (vs 2–3 in 2019) – Interview rounds jumped from ~2.5 to 3–7+ (plus take-home tasks) – Only 7–9% of interviewed candidates receive offers (vs 15–20% pre-COVID) Even senior designers are finding it harder to land new projects — and juniors don’t stand a chance in this bottlenecked market. If you’re feeling stuck (or just want clarity on your next move), let’s talk career strategy. We can cover: – Why cold applications no longer work (and what does) – How to map a 5-year plan that lands you the projects (and titles) you want – How to make your CV & portfolio stand out – Your top questions 👉 Book your session on ADPList with me and check out the amazing reviews: https://lnkd.in/dvvpTAGQ See you!

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We’ve laid off too many junior designers and focused hiring too much on seniors. You can understand why: seniors are efficient, autonomous, and high-output. But there’s an insidious problem: when you don’t train junior designers mentorship collapses and the pipeline dries up. In 10 years there will be no one left ready to fill those senior seats. Short-term optimization = Long-term pain. You can read more from my recent newsletter article: https://lnkd.in/g-DgFMau

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Design Leaders: If you are not talking about team capacity You are not managing product risk We must communicate and advocate for our team's health. Capacity is a critical dimension. Everyone is being asked to do more with less. Are we advocating for our discipline? Or, Are we advocating together for our cross-functional team? When we communicate clear capacity signals to our cross-functional partners and business leaders, we enable better decisions. What is the team’s health? What support do we need? What trade-offs should we make? What is the capacity status by discipline? What is the overall capacity status for the team? It is about visibility. Here is a simple framework: Strategic Priorities x Functional Areas, rated by capacity 🟢 Green – Fully Staffed: Focused and Operating at a sustainable pace 🟡 Yellow – Partially Staffed: Stretched, Signals of Risk 🔴 Red – No Staff: Capacity, Quality, Morale at Risk The cross-functional team capacity is determined by the function with the lowest rating functional area. If one functional area is RED, the entire team’s health is RED. Team health is an indicator of velocity, quality, and trust. We can go alone and alienate our partners. We can go together and strengthen our business case. What frameworks do you use? How do you say "NO," with data, to additional programs? #Design #Leadership #TeamHealth #Capacity #DesignOps #ProductOps #UX #Product

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GV (Google Ventures) have a long history of hiring former designers and design leaders to support their portfolio companies. Folks like Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Kate Aronowitz, Daniel Burka, Braden Kowitz, Vanessa Cho, and Tom Hulme. In my latests podcast interview, Kate Aronowitz explains why this is, and what designers bring to the table. Interestingly it's not about craft, but rather the way they see the world with a beginners mind.

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The great thing about developers leveraging agentic coding tools, is that a lot of the same design best-practices for communicating with humans, are also really helpful context for LLMs. I hope this article is a helpful starting point for designers to set developers up for success, especially those using Figma's Dev Mode MCP server. https://lnkd.in/gNi92tmH

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Imagine an agency deploys a $3.5M real-time prediction system. Predictions are accurate to within 90 seconds. Riders can finally trust the arrival times on their phones, and for most trips, that's a genuine improvement. But when service gets disrupted, the prediction system keeps running. It tells riders their bus is 4 minutes away right up until operations cancels the trip. The alert system lives on a different platform, managed by a different team, pulling from a different data source. By the time the alert publishes, riders are already standing at the stop. The technology worked. The rider's job failed. And no one was accountable for what happened at the seam between the two. This pattern shows up at agencies everywhere. The problem isn't bad technology decisions. It's that every decision gets made inside an organizational boundary that doesn't match how riders actually experience transit. Riders don't experience channels. They experience jobs: getting somewhere reliably, recovering from a disruption, navigating an unfamiliar route with confidence. That's the wall transit keeps hitting, and it's not a technology problem. It's a management problem. In my latest post, I introduce a jobs-to-be-done framework for transit leaders: a structured way to map which systems need to work together and where the next investment will actually move the needle for riders. https://lnkd.in/eVcB-Xze

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I was going through McKinsey’s 2025 report - turns out, companies are finding it easier to hire for traditional design roles. As you can see, Design specialists are among the roles with the biggest drop in reported hiring difficulty from 2022 to 2024 (from ~65% to ~50%) This shift suggests something deeper: Hiring for visual/UI roles is stabilizing, while demand is rising for strategic, systems, and AI-integrated designers. This isn’t about AI replacing designers. It’s about redefining what “design” means. In 2025 and beyond, designers will be: 🔹 Building adaptive, AI-native UX 🔹 Acting as brand guardians for AI-generated content 🔹 Designing orchestration flows, not just screens 🔹 Owning trust, explainability, and oversight The old ways - designing static screens, handing off specs are fading. Design now means prompting, refining, and shaping how intelligent systems behave. The next era of design is already here. Are we stepping up to lead it? I am not fully sure. #designleadership #AIUX #visualdesign #productdesign #specialists

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I’ve been noticing a fascinating trend lately. When AI-native founders reach out to me for consult, they aren't treating Design Systems as a "nice-to-have" for later. They are asking for it from day one. They understand something critical that many legacy organizations are still catching up on: In the age of AI, your Design System is your source of truth. Matt from Figma put it perfectly in his recent talk on the future of design systems. It’s not just about UI consistency anymore; it’s about infrastructure for intelligence. https://lnkd.in/gHqX86_8 Design Systems are critical right now: * Context is King for AI: AI models are only as good as the context you give them. If your design rules are scattered across wikis, Figma files, and people's heads, your AI tools will hallucinate. A structured Design System gives AI the "semantic meaning" it needs to build correctly. * Closing the Gap: We are finally closing the "chasm of despair" between design and code. When your design tokens and components align 1:1 with code, LLMs can generate production-ready interfaces that actually work, rather than just pretty pictures. * Automated Governance: Imagine a world where you don't need manual design audits. An AI collaborator can now spot inconsistencies and suggest the correct pattern automatically (like spellcheck for UI). This lets your team focus on innovation rather than pixel-pushing. The future isn't just about using AI to design faster. It’s about building systems that speak the language of AI. #DesignSystems #AI #ProductDesign #Figma #TechTrends

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👀 Earnest went from waiting 2-3 weeks to kick off a study to launching in a single day. Their research team went from reactive to strategic: running studies earlier in the product cycle, influencing roadmaps before PRDs, and giving designers the tools to run their own usability tests. That kind of shift changes everything and is a crucial one to make in the current age of tech. Excited to see the impact Rally is having for teams like Earnest. Check out the full case study 👇 https://lnkd.in/exspW7s8 #UserResearch #ResearchOps #Rally

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The secret to growing as a design leader? Build awareness around your gaps, and then learn by doing. It's part of the process, failing is learning that one method will not work. For me, it was always around influence, and business acumen. I'm fortunate enough to be saying that I'm currently pursuing my MBA, but I know that isn't accessible to everyone. Here's a hack that I've learned from my mentors through the years. 4 easy ways to deliver value - if you're not measuring your success, TAKE NOTES. 1. It makes money. 2. It saves time. 3. It prevents something bad from happening. 4. It makes us look good. What you deliver doesn't have to make money, but it does have to deliver value. Use this framework to build credibility and respect. Be known as the designer who gets it, and gets work done. Deliver with urgency, and customer service (meaning recognize that you are helping people). Influence gets you into the room, business acumen keeps you there.

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