Hiring a founding designer is extremely difficult for a founder right now. It’s not just that it’s hard to find great people (it’s always hard), but this time, there is so much uncertainty about what the right scope should be.
The job is evolving. Coding agents are accelerating development velocity dramatically and are giving new capabilities to designers.
Many designers are already adapting. Many are now adopting Claude Code or Cursor into their workflow, and shipping code.
But here’s the paradox: AI is expanding what designers can do, and they can now be more involved in software development by building prototypes and shipping code, but simultaneously, software teams are 10x faster and need designers to keep up with their velocity. And because coding agents can generate decent UX, the bar for designers is rising even higher.
In short, the role of a designer is simultaneously increasing horizontally in scope (going beyond static designs) and vertically in intensity (designing faster and with more craft).
This won’t last. Here’s what we think happens next:
- The current designers’ jobs will split into two distinct IC tracks:
- The majority will become product builders, blurring the lines with PMs and frontend engineers. Most of their work will happen directly in the codebase, using the same coding tools as engineers, shipping features. They’re already being called design engineers or product engineers.
- A minority will embrace more of a Head of Design role. They will become the guarantors of taste. They’ll shape the whole product, and ship across everything: brand, animation, craft, micro-interaction, videos. Their job will be to set the bar for the company’s aesthetic.
-
New coding tools will emerge for designers. The underlying artifact will still be code. They’ll still generate code behind the scenes, but not directly in the product codebase. Everything they craft will be easily mergeable into the final product. These tools will be optimized for ideation, exploration, iteration, and craft at high velocity and high quality.
-
All designers will touch the product codebase, in different ways. The Head of Design will not build products or new features directly, but will directly perform the final polishing and adjustments without any handoff. We may actually see new visual-first tools built specifically for this polishing workflow.
So how should a pre-seed startup hire right now? It depends on your team. For Quest, we decided to hire for the second path: a Head of Design who can set our aesthetic bar.