Design Quick Fire Round - Job Titles, Email Design, and Why AI Made Us Less Proud Of Our Work
Watch & Listen:
Nick's biggest newsletter open rate was fifty percent when his list was small. Now that it's grown, he's happy with thirty, and neither of them can fully explain why.
In this quick-fire episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick answer a stack of rapid questions on product design and careers, each in under five minutes. They cover why email and newsletter design remains such an underrated skill, why designers keep leaving the field entirely to open restaurants and ninja warrior gyms, and how AI has shifted the job from pushing pixels to writing planning documents and doing discovery work.
They also debate the statement "AI has made me faster but less proud of what I create," argue over whether job titles actually matter, and swap their favorite misconceptions people have about product design, before Tyler explains why he's stopped justifying his design decisions to stakeholders altogether.
Key takeaways
"The problem solving and idea creation part is it's really core to what we do, and that you should be proud of. Like, the output shouldn't just be the consequence of you pushing pixels around. It's like the thought, the problem solving, the empathy for the users, the growing the business revenue, that part is hard too and should be valuable."
"The problem solving and idea creation part is really core to what we do, and that you should be proud of—the output shouldn't just be the consequence of pushing pixels around. It's the thought, the problem solving, the empathy for the users, the growing the business revenue, that part is hard too and should be valuable."
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.
