designers and PMs: are these roles merging?

AI created a standoff between everyone on the product team 🤺 / here's what's actually happening and why I think it's mostly good news.

Author

Ioana from AI Goodies
April 23, 2026

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OK so I've been thinking about this a lot.

Marc Andreessen recently described what's happening on product teams as a standoff. His take: every role now believes it can absorb the other two thanks to AI. PMs think they can design and code. Engineers think they don't need PMs or designers. And designers think they can do everything because, well, we kind of can now?

and like / he's not wrong about the vibes. I see it everywhere. In companies I consult for, in my community, in DMs, on LinkedIn. There's this energy of "wait, if I can vibe code a prototype in two hours, why do I need to wait three weeks for engineering?" and it's coming from all sides simultaneously.

but I don't think it's a standoff / I think it's something more interesting than that. 👀

the numbers first

Lenny Rachitsky recently dropped his State of the Product Job Market for early 2026 based on TrueUp data from 9,000+ companies. And the picture is, uhm, telling.

PM openings are at their highest since 2022 / over 7,300 globally, up 20% since January. Engineering is booming / 67,000+ openings. Aaaand design roles plateaued. Since early 2023. Uhm, not exactly crashing, but flat, while everything around them grows (🤬)

everyone has opinions, but the big question floating around is: is AI making designers obsolete, or is it making design more embedded in other roles?

my take: it's the second one > and I have thoughts about why that's both uncomfortable and kind of exciting.

what I'm actually seeing

so here’s what I think is happening on the ground (no, not theory or think pieces, but) in real teams I've observed and worked with.

PMs are building things, sure, actual things > functional prototypes. I've heard that some PM interview loops at companies like Google and Stripe now include live vibe coding rounds. That was unthinkable two years ago. PMs who used to write requirements are now shipping first drafts of the product themselves.

and designers are doing more strategy than ever. The most interesting design work I've done in recent years / at Miro, in consulting, in my own projects / was not about pixels; my focus was defining what should exist and why: framing the problem, setting the constraints, owning the outcome. And if you think about it, that's PM territory (or at least it used to be).

just a conceptual visual metaphor for blurring

also the big one: everyone is building. The cost of going from idea to working thing has dropped so dramatically that the old handoff chain (PM writes spec → designer makes mockup → engineer codes it) just feels slow. In AI-native companies, these things happen almost simultaneously, sometimes by the same person 🌪️🤪

73% of product professionals now expect PM roles to become more hybrid. The walls between product, design, and engineering aren't gone / but they're getting very thin.💡 

so how (tf) is this good for us?

OK so here's where I want to be real with you:

On one hand, this is literally what we've wanted for years: a seat at the strategy table. Influence over what gets built, not just how it looks or “sprinkling some UX’’ at the end of every important design decision taken by committee. We've been fighting for this. And now, partly because AI handles so much of the execution, the strategic thinking and taste and judgment we bring are becoming the most valuable parts of our contribution.

On the other hand / and this is the part that causes angst and anxiety / convergence also means the boundaries that protected "designer" as a distinct role are eroding.

When a PM can vibe code a prototype that's 80% there, the question "why do we need a dedicated designer?" gets asked more often. So now the answer requires a much sharper articulation of what design uniquely contributes.

And I think a lot of us haven't done that articulation yet. We've relied on the craft being self-evidently necessary. Buuuut, in a world where everyone can produce artifacts,
self-evident is not enough anymore. 😐


where I think this is heading

I don't think the designer role disappears. I think the execution-only designer role disappears. The designer whose primary value was producing polished mockups and handing them to engineering / yes, that version of the job is under real pressure.

What's emerging is more like a spectrum of product builders. On one end: deeply technical people who can ship full-stack features. On the other: deeply strategic people who shape what gets built + how it behaves + why it matters. Most of the people thriving right now live somewhere in the middle: combining skills that used to belong to separate job descriptions.

a conceptual visual metaphor for connections and emergence

The designer who understands business metrics > incredibly valuable. The PM who has taste and can evaluate design quality > equally valuable. The engineer who thinks about user experience > always in demand.

What's dying is the idea that you can be excellent at one narrow thing and that's enough. What's being born is a more fluid model where your value comes from the combination of things you bring (so sorry about those fancy specific titles on Linkedin, but multidisciplinary wins today).

I wrote about this on my IG a while back: the designers who will struggle are the ones who defined themselves by the making. The ones who will thrive defined themselves by the deciding > and I think that applies here too: the merge isn't threatening if you already think beyond your lane. 🗺️

so what do you actually do with this

If you're a designer wondering whether to learn product strategy / yes, learn it: the most impactful design work in 2026 requires understanding the business deeply. You can't design protocols for AI behavior without understanding the constraints those protocols serve.

If you're a PM wondering whether to develop your design sensibility / absolutely. When you're vibe coding prototypes, taste becomes your competitive advantage. The PMs who will be doing well in the new world are the ones who can judge quality; gone are the days when managing a backlog was the (whole) thing.

If you're anyone on a product team / learn to build. The gap between having an idea and testing it has collapsed. The people who can close that gap fast / insight to artifact to learning in days (hours even?) / are the ones shaping everything right now.

more connections and neural networks aesthetic

And if all of this feels threatening / that's super valid: convergence means uncertainty. It means your job description might not exist in two years. But it also means the ceiling for what you can do + influence + create has never been higher. The roles are merging because AI is making each of us more capable. 💪


it's not a standoff / it's a dance 💃

Andreessen called it a standoff, I'd call it a dance: everyone is learning new moves, stepping on each other's toes, sometimes colliding / but also discovering that together they can do things none of them could do alone.

The triad is fusing, and it might be the biggest expansion of design’s influence since we got a seat at the table in the first place.

so maybe asking if our roles are merging was the wrong question to begin with.

maybe a much better question would be: what do you uniquely bring to the merge?

more metaphors for merging


*if you want to empower yourself in the new age of tech roles,

take my course on AI for Designers with The Interaction Design Foundation. 👇

We have the coolest audience that you can get yourself in front of. Reach out at [email protected] if interested 💋

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This article’s bibliography: 

👉🏼 Lenny Rachitsky / TrueUp — State of the product job market in early 2026

👉🏼 Marc Andreessen's "Mexican standoff" framing — AI workforce strategy: Marc Andreessen on tasks, skills, careers

👉🏼 Product Led Alliance — The future of product management is generalist?

thanks + AI & Design Love,

hugs hugs,

Ioana 🪩