 The golden age of UX design is over. Let's talk about that. UX design has been around for a while and things are changing. New job titles are coming up every week and every month, and companies are starting to look for more and more specific types of designers. In this excerpt, in this little snippet from a podcast called the Product Breakfast Club, this is the AJ & Smart Podcast, I'm going to tell you all about how to future-proof your design career for the next few years. Now, this is not really a video, so it's just going to be an audio file, so you can kind of turn it on and play it in the background. Everything here is coming from the Product Breakfast Club podcast. We're posting a couple of the most interesting bits of it on YouTube here. Okay, I don't want to waste any more of your time. I hope you enjoy this. So, basically, I'm basing this on an article I wrote a few months back called The Golden Age of UX is Over, and I know that's a pretty clickbaity title. I am the absolute master of clickbait titles, and people get super pissed with me about it, but I enjoy it. I have fun with that. When I started off as a designer back in about 2009, the whole concept about UX, the whole concept of UI, the whole thing about like mobile apps, all of this kind of thing was just in its absolute infancy. So, it was really not something well known. The demand was low, the supply was extremely low. There wasn't a lot of people looking for UX designers. There also wasn't really a lot of people who were considered to be UX designers. There were, at that point, web designers or graphic designers. When I started AJ & Smart, the company that I run, in 2011, we called ourselves a UX design agency, and this was more like a fluke. Myself and my co-founder had started calling ourselves UX designers a couple of months prior to that, but to be honest, we had no idea if this whole UX thing was going to be like a trend, or whether it was going to be something that would actually help us out, and we kind of hit gold. Basically, the whole UX thing exploded thanks to basically the mobile revolution, and the whole, basically, thank you, Apple and Google for kicking that whole thing off. The supply remained pretty low. There weren't a lot of UX designers, and the demand was crazy. We were getting work everywhere. We were able to charge pretty ludicrous prices because of the high demand. The way I would think about it, we would just walk into the room, and we were kind of like the kings of the product team, the kings and the queens of the product team. We would just walk into the room and it's like, hey, everybody, what's up? If you're having a conversation about conversion rate, does it matter? I'm the UX designer. Something about the user, and everyone would have to shut up, and we kind of own the place, which is kind of funny, and it was good fun, and I'm really glad I got to experience that. We had way too much power. Let me just tell you that, way too much power for people in a role that didn't really understand the bigger picture of making products. And as a UX designer, our focus, especially if I just talk from my perspective, the focus was really on the user, the user experience. How do we make this as beautiful and seamless and frictionless as possible for the user? So we really, really focused in on that. And I'm calling this era, so from about 2010 to about 2017, you could even say today maybe, I'm just calling this era the golden age of UX. And this was the time where you could be a UX designer, you could pretty much do anything you want, no one was checking anything. As long as you could finish any sentence with the user, you pretty much, people listen to you and people did what you wanted, and not a lot was being measured. Problem is, it's now six years later, and high quality UX and UI design are commodities. Every company in the world has like this table stakes level of UX design. These big companies that we had to convince before the UX was important, they don't need to be convinced anymore. They understand that they need a good baseline. Now, I know a couple of you listening will be working at really, really old companies and just roll your eyes and say, excuse me, I still have this problem at my company, but I'm talking about most, right? I'm not trying to get every edge case here. The main stream view is that UX is important and that having a good user experience is good for the business. So we no longer have to explain this to clients, right? We don't have to have this conversation anymore. So your clients and companies and customers and superiors in your company, they kind of get it. The problem with that is they also expect a base level of goodness when it comes to UX design. And it's really, really getting easier than ever to reach that baseline. So this good enough is easier than ever to achieve. If I think about a UX designer today coming out of college, compared to what I was like when I came out of college, I would say the UX designer today coming out of college, if they came out of college seven years ago, with the knowledge that they had now, they would immediately be a senior. So if I think when I was a senior, I was a senior maybe like six, seven years ago already, yeah. I didn't know as much as the people coming out of college today because they also have access to some amazing tools, amazing patterns, amazing libraries and information and YouTube. And I mean, even this podcast, hey, hey, hey. So if I really think about it, like the juniors of today, they do have the skills of the seniors of, you know, about 10 years ago, which is very interesting for the market. So it's absolutely easier than ever to reach this good enough level. Any UX designer coming out today can build an app that's going to be relatively easy to use if they are good enough, right? The problem is now that the supply has reached the level of the demand pretty much, it's good enough, it's so easy to achieve that good enough is not enough if you want to be a designer with a career that's going to span longer than, I don't know, a few months or if you don't want to be commoditized. The thing is it's not enough to understand the user anymore. You actually need to understand the business, the business behind the product that you're working on or the business behind the design that you're doing. So during the golden age of UX, designers were given a free pass on understanding how businesses worked and they didn't really need to know it, right? They could just get away with anything because the user because the user was all important and anything that got in the way of having the best user experience was considered to be detrimental to the success of the product. That was just from the designer's perspective. But now that usability, beautiful UI, lovely animations are already expected. It's really easy for the UX designer who had their amazing run over the last few years. It's going to happen that they get pushed down into a more production role if they're only focused on the basics of UX. Now, when I say UX designer, you could just as easily change that with product designer, which seems to be what the name is changing to right now in Silicon Valley. So UX designer, product designer, you could almost say those are interchangeable right now. But essentially the problem here is that if you are a designer and if you are focusing heavily on the user side of the story, you've got a couple of blind spots. And I think that what I want to tell you for the rest of this episode are a couple of things that you can do. And if you're hiring, by the way, these are a couple of things you should be looking for. Or if you already have designers, these are a couple of things you could be telling them or talking to them about. So there's a couple of things that I think you need to understand. So number one is understanding product strategy. So how does the product you're working on connect with the other products and services within your company? Why is your company even building it? Like why does your company want to make this product? Is it just a data collector? Is it even important to the core business? Is it a side project? Is it something just to make people within the current team you're working on look good to a stakeholder? What is the strategy behind building the product you're working on? And what's also the big picture? And I think that it's really extremely important to understand product strategy. When you're making your design decisions, it is good to know why it is the company wants to even build this product in the first place. Now, I'm not going to go into all the intricacies of product strategy and how to actually get good at that. I'm just going to give you a couple of recommendations on what to read and what to check out. So the first thing I would read would be a thing called what the fuck is strategy by a guy called Vince Law. This is a nine minute read on medium. It breaks down product strategy every single step possible, really easy to understand and uses Tesla as an example. I think it's a great read. It's a primer to strategy in layman's terms. You definitely should check this one out. Now, I would follow that up with a couple of case studies. And the case studies I would look at are all written by the same guy, a guy called MG Siegler. He also used to work at GV with Jake. And he wrote three articles, the Leviathan, the Squid, and the Whale. And that looks at big picture strategies for Tesla, Netflix, and Amazon. I would definitely read into those because I think understanding product strategy and understanding general strategy is an absolute competitive advantage to any designer, especially because the point is you want to be able to speak the language of the people you're working for, right? You don't want to be the guy talking about personas, talking about user flows, talking about all of this stuff when they're trying to talk about something maybe related to the big picture strategy and you're getting too specific. So understanding the strategy, understanding what product strategy is and how to talk about it is a fantastic way to speak the language of the people you're working for and, in general, just make yourself more valuable in the company. And you can say that about everything else I'm going to tell you here. So it's three things. And the first is understanding strategy, especially understanding product strategy. The next thing, and it's extremely important, is understanding growth. I think it really doesn't really matter what you're working on. Growth is going to be a core metric for every single thing pretty much every company makes. Just understanding it, growth is a metric. It could be anything from activation, engagement, re-engagement. These are things that your customers or your product managers, when they're building a product, they're going to be heavily thinking about growth metrics and how to measure them. If you don't understand how growth works and what growth means for companies, and if you don't understand a couple of case studies about growth, especially from a product perspective, you've really got a blind spot. It's extremely useful to understand what growth means in terms of building digital products, if you're building digital products. It's important to know what growth means in terms of how companies run, because growth is a core metric for almost every product. If you look at Facebook, if you look at Google, it really doesn't matter everything they make. They are measuring a lot of this stuff with growth. Now, if you want to learn about that the fastest way possible, I would recommend reading Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis. This is a fantastic book. And even if you just read the first hour and a half of this book, you're already going to get some amazing case studies, some amazing ideas. And you know what? I'm not joking. This book has helped me become a better product designer just in terms of how Sean talks about creating these experiments. And I think it's just a fantastic way to understand why are products being built, taking that from the strategy as well. But also, how can you as a designer help the teams with their growth metrics? How can you help them also grow? And that's definitely a big one. The third step, and I think maybe the final one for this episode is going to be understanding marketing and awareness, awareness maybe called brand. And this is something that designers often hate. Like if there are two departments that I see fighting all the time, it's product designers and the marketing department because one of the biggest reasons is that they just don't understand each other. So the marketing department is often confused about how to explain what the product does. And the product team is pissed that the marketing team has explained it in that specific way. And one of the reasons there are so many misunderstandings is just because the product designers don't understand how to speak to the marketers, or to the marketers. And just understanding the vocabulary once again is something that can really get rid of this problem. And just also understanding how marketing works on a basic level will also help you, especially if you're thinking about designing a product. What are the entry points to the product in terms of onboarding, in terms of copy? You can give valuable insights into how a product can be marketed if you understand it. Now, I'm not expecting you to become a marketer, but I have a couple of things that you could check out. A lot of product people in Silicon Valley, they check out a thing called Product Marketing for Pirates by Dave McClure. He wrote this. It's basically like a really ugly PowerPoint, which is about three pages long, gives you all the terminology and lingo you need. It also gives you a very simple overview of product marketing, which is probably the marketing you need to understand. But also check out Gary Vaynerchuk. I know a lot of people hate him because he sounds like he's coked up, but just following his Instagram channel or following whatever social media you use, just follow him because you're going to get some really interesting pieces of insight there into how marketing works. And finally, I would say Noah Kagan, he has a great YouTube channel where he goes into marketing strategies. Just again, understanding this, it's super important just to understand it because in the end, as a designer, your real job is to be a creative problem solver. It doesn't matter whether you call yourself a UI designer, UX designer, product designer, I don't care. Your job is a creative problem solver. You're helping the product managers, you're helping the business owners, you're helping them come up with solutions, and you're also helping them, I guess, figure out what the problems are in the first place. So you need to understand the bigger picture of why the product you're working on is being made and where the company thinks it's going. If you don't understand this bigger picture, then you're going to end up being someone more on the production line. And I'm sorry to say that being on the production line is a guaranteed way to have your salary be capped at a certain point or you're also more disposable if you're on the production line because people on the production line are more disposable. If you are, on the other hand, able to give really interesting advice on really interesting solutions, taking into account strategy, growth, and marketing, then you're immediately going to jump to the top of the pile of the normal designer that's on a product team because most designers are really so focused on the user that they end up ignoring the rest of the big picture. Maybe you've heard this in the last few episodes, especially if you listen to the episode with Jason Freed, sometimes it doesn't matter what the user thinks. Sometimes it's about getting something out there and seeing if it has product-market fit, right? Please, as a little bonus, please understand what product-market fit is as well. Being able to off the top of your head talk about that is pretty important as well because if you're building a new product, it needs to have product-market fit, which is it needs to be a must-have for a large addressable audience, a niche market as well. It just needs to be a must-have. Just knowing these things, knowing the lingo, knowing the terminology is super important. And I hope this episode helps a couple of people out, a couple of people who might be wondering how to make themselves more as valuable as a designer. It's too much effort for me to write show notes, so if you want to check all the links for this, just Google the golden age of UX is over. I hope you like this episode and yeah, have a great day. Okay, I hope you enjoyed that little snippet from the podcast. It's from the Product Breakfast Club podcast. You can get it on any podcast app. It's every single Monday morning, myself and Jake Knapp, the author of Sprint. Do let us know in the comments if you have anything to say about it. I really hope you like that. I hope you like this little experiment we're doing with just putting some of that podcast audio on YouTube. Thanks so much. Have a good one.