5 Signs You're About to Be Replaced as a Designer
Watch & Listen:
Your manager asks you to build a design system. It feels like you're in demand and people appreciate your product design skills. Right?! Maybe. Or maybe it's the first step toward a company that thinks it doesn't need you anymore. Lots of product designers have that uneasy feeling that they're next... towards the exit.
In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick talk about the signs that you're about to be replaced at work, whether by AI, another designer, or someone in a completely different role who thinks they can 'do the UX' themselves. Like always, they skip social media drama and base everything on their combined 25 years of working experience.
For example, Nick makes the case that a design system can work against you at a low UX maturity company, because once every rule is written down, your higher-ups starts wondering if AI or a developer could just design the UI instead of you. Tyler pushes back with a practical piece of advice: ship new components inside real features, test them there, and only then promote them to the system, instead of maintaining a Figma library that's only partially built in code.
From there they get into visibility. Tyler shares advice his mentor gave him; that half the job is doing the work while the other half is being your own cheerleader. You have to be visible and vocal! There's something on saying "we" so you can share wins without sounding like you're bragging, too.
They also talk about moments where they themselves missed the signes. Nick was once denied a promotion for not having enough internal visibility, and Tyler tells the story of spotting meetings with local design agencies on his manager's Google Calendar while he was still on the team.
Key takeaways
"You want people to come to you. When you're new at the company, nobody knows you exist and they don't know what you do, but once you give them a little bit of value, at some point people will be talking in Slack saying, 'we should ask Tyler for this' — you have to build that name for yourself where people just know you're the design guy, which makes you much harder to replace."
"It's always about overly communicating your value, especially if you're working remotely—bring with you the receipts, the decisions that deliverable is wrapped in, not just handing over a screen to be built."
Watch it on YouTube
Hosts
Tyler White
Tyler White is a Principal Product Designer with 15 years of experience in B2B SaaS and fintech, helping teams scope, frame, and connect design work to real business outcomes.
Nick Groeneveld
Nick Groeneveld is a freelance UX and product designers from the Netherlands. He started his design career in 2015 and has since then worked for startups, government agencies, and corporations.
