The product design talent crisis

Airbnb, the paragon of a “design-led” company, is only hiring a single designer. The job requires more than a decade of experience. There are probably hundreds (possibly thousands) of applicants. The fact that a company known for its design culture is investing only at the top of its org chart is a flashing “check engine” light on the practice of product design.

In the past 5 years, demand for senior product designers has skyrocketed¹, but a troubling gap is in its wake. Today, there are fewer opportunities for designers to gain critical experience and mentorship to develop into the next generation of leaders.² If this trend continues, our practice risks becoming stagnant, overqualified, and obsolete.

This crisis was created by compounding forces. Post-2020 layoffs mean fewer design jobs. The drive toward lean organizations increases demand for senior talent who can “sink or swim” immediately. To meet this demand, a class of “Super ICs” has emerged—the median experience required for product designers is now 8 years, climbing to 15 for some roles. Top designers command salaries rivaling top engineering talent: at Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft, total compensation for senior designers starts around $200,000.

But fewer companies are hiring for junior roles. Job postings for entry-level positions in the US have dropped 43% since 2022.³ In my research of over 600 product design listings, only 1% were for internships, and only 5% required 2 years or less of experience. Designers starting their careers today lack the opportunities that helped the super ICs become so super.

I’ve faced this brewing crisis in my work as a manager, player-coach, advisor, mentor, and leader. I want to show how common feedback loops lead design teams to under-invest in talent, and how the status quo has led us to a crisis.

There’s hope. We can invest in the future of design while raising the bar for today’s best designers with a long-term view on the product design discipline. First, we need to understand why smart, well-intentioned leaders make decisions that hurt the industry. Solutions lie in the feedback loops from other industries; knowing these patterns is key to breaking free.

How logical people make illogical decisions

How did we get here? It’s not down to coordination between hiring managers and org chart designers. The status quo is emergent: millions of decisions by rational people create an undesirable collective outcome.

Researchers have studied emergent phenomena in communities, industries, and ecologies: common pitfalls in group decision-making include the tragedy of the commons and Simpson’s paradox.⁴ The feedback loop happening in design — companies investing in efficiency and raw output, causing a drought of talent and skill, creating a need for more efficiency and raw output — has already occurred across many industries.

In 2001, Nelson Repenning and John Sterman studied the phenomenon. The resulting paper identifies the dynamics that cause smart, experienced managers to inadvertently erode their teams’ capabilities. The incentives and feedback signals they identified perfectly describe how the design industry is shortchanging junior designers at their own peril.

In short, managers kick off a feedback loop by trying to close the gap between their team’s current and desired performance. They have two options: 1) Drive short-term improvements by asking more from senior designers, increasing rewards for top performers, and creating upward pressure through reviews, or 2) Build long-term capability by investing in training, coaching, and career development for junior designers. But the feedback loops between these approaches push companies to prioritize hiring senior talent, as the immediate performance gains outweigh the diffuse returns of capability-building.

The rise of ‘player-coach’ design leadership roles, where managers are expected to design and manage simultaneously, is a symptom of this feedback loop. Player-coaches feel pressure to spend their time producing immediate improvements. This means less time for long-term capability-building, like reviewing and interviewing potential hires, coaching and mentoring peers and reports, or fostering communities of practice. Dwindling capacity from less-experienced designers increases reliance on senior talent for immediate results. And so on, ad infinitum.

How do we counter the negative feedback loop? Can teams invest in capability-building (i.e., train junior designers) while expecting senior designers to raise the bar? To do so, we need to make the junior designer loop more appealing, sustainable, and affordable in time and money.

Models of success

Here are examples of how other disciplines and industries sustain investment in capabilities and talent:

• Associate program manager (APM) programs: Many tech companies have programs to hire and train new product managers. These only admit new graduates and usually involve at least one year of work before the product manager moves on to a dedicated product management role. Associate product managers rotate through teams, learning the breadth of the business, before focusing on a single team or area. Google was the first to run this kind of program, thanks to Marissa Meyer.⁵ Brian Rakowski, the first Google APM, is now its VP of product management. Alumni include Bret Taylor (former Facebook CTO and Salesforce CEO, now OpenAI chairman) and Julia Enthoven (CEO and co-founder of Kapwing).
• German manufacturing mentorships: For decades, Germany’s vocational education system has driven the country’s manufacturing success. In the Duale Ausbildung, apprentices split their time between the classroom and workplace for 3 years. Over 350 occupations follow the same standard program structure, leading to a mobile workforce; companies invest knowing apprentices may leave, because the system creates a reliable pipeline of skilled workers. Thanks to this approach, Germany is the third largest global exporter despite ranking 19th in population.⁶
• Management consulting’s “up or out” model: Firms like McKinsey, Bain, and BCG (the Big Three) hire analysts straight out of college, then give them extensive training, knowing most will leave within 2 years.⁷ Attrition is a strategy: former consultants become future clients. The firms’ reputations as talent developers attract the best candidates, and the flow of junior talent keeps costs manageable while maintaining new perspectives. Because of their reputation for hiring talented graduates, companies seek former consultants at the Big Three when making mid-level hires.

These models succeed beyond mere training. The alignment of incentives across the industries makes their investment in capabilities a clear net positive. In each example, there’s either industry-wide cooperation (German apprenticeships) or clear organizational benefits that offset the risk of talent leaving (consulting firms’ alumni networks, tech companies’ talent brand).

But design faces unique challenges that make direct adoption of these models difficult. Unlike product management, we don’t have a clear progression ladder that justifies dedicated training programs. Our industry lacks the regulatory structure and cultural commitment to apprenticeships, unlike German manufacturing. Design teams don’t benefit from the same alumni network effects when junior designers leave for other companies.

The window for action is narrowing. As senior designers age and the pipeline of new talent dries up, we’re heading toward a talent cliff that will be expensive and painful to recover from. There’s good news, though: we can learn from other industries’ approaches while adapting them to design’s context and constraints.

Sustainable talent development

Models from other industries prove sustainable talent development is possible, but it requires deliberate structure and aligned incentives. Here are approaches that design organizations can implement to break out of the senior-heavy cycle:

Structured mentorship programs

At Stripe, we ran a loosely structured design mentorship program. Designers voluntarily signed up as either a mentor or a mentee, and a program director paired participants based on shared goals and compatible experience levels. Formal programs like this create structure and clear expectations and enhance the overall effectiveness of the design org.

The Stripe program had some shortcomings. First, there were more mentors than mentees; many experienced designers wanted to help, but there was nobody to coach. Second, it was volunteer-only; some mentors and mentees saw it as a distraction from their day-to-day work and opted out.

A mentorship program should be part of the job, not an add-on. Mentors need dedicated coaching time, and their performance reviews should include mentorship effectiveness. My time as a mentor has been as valuable as my time as a mentee; helping others grow helps me identify blind spots in my own experience and reconnect with early career lessons.

Associate product designer programs

Inspired by associate product manager programs, associate product design (APD) programs could offer intensive, time-bound opportunities for early-career designers to work on real projects under close supervision. Unlike traditional junior roles, APD programs would emphasize learning over output. Associates might spend 18-24 months rotating through different teams, building broad skills and deep expertise.

You can argue that junior designers aren’t productive enough to justify dedicated programs. But during the learning phase, capability building is the point, not productivity. Medical residencies accept that residents work slower than experienced doctors; design organizations need to separate learning investments from immediate output expectations.

Talent gradients

Instead of stacking a team with senior designers or hiring a single founding designer with 15 years of experience, build a talent gradient, where multiple designers with overlapping experience from junior to senior, staff, and principal + levels. Junior designers create upward pressure, and mentorship accelerates growth for both mentors and mentees.

This approach fosters collaboration between designers, who complement each other’s skills and break through biases. Concentrating teams into smaller numbers of senior designers (and player-coaches) creates homogenous design; a talent gradient is a more diversified and resilient approach to quality.

Work-study partnerships

Some design schools are experimenting with partnerships that blend education and practice. These programs partner with companies to create pathways where students work part-time on real projects while completing their education. Unlike traditional internships, work-study programs extend over longer periods and include structured curriculum development.

The Carnegie Mellon Master of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) program pairs students with companies like NASA, Meta, and Cisco for 7 months to complete real projects with full-time engineers, product managers, and other partners. Partner companies get access to talented designers, and students benefit from challenging work and mentorship from industry peers.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen companies avoid these programs for the same reasons they don’t hire junior designers: it requires time and resources that could otherwise go to doing more work. This creates a feedback loop causing the growing gap between new designers and entry-level expectations.

The challenge is getting enough companies to act simultaneously. Individual organizations have little incentive to train designers who might leave. This is the coordination problem that requires either industry-wide cooperation (like German apprenticeships) or structural changes that make investment worthwhile regardless of turnover.

Addressing the doubters

Pragmatism is a common take: “Junior designers aren’t productive enough to justify the investment.” Yes, they usually require more management, make more mistakes, and take longer to deliver. But this thinking reflects the short-term optimization trap I’ve described. The German manufacturing model proves that industries can absorb training costs when they think systemically rather than project-by-project.

Another argument is that AI will soon eliminate the need for junior roles. Why train designers when AI can handle basic tasks? This overestimates AI’s current (and future) capabilities and underestimates design’s core value. It’s decent at generating websites and apps and can even do some strategic thinking. But it won’t have empathy any time soon. A chatbot can summarize user research, but it can’t proactively identify and follow up on signals contradicting the status quo; those threads lead to the next breakaway products. More importantly, there’s always going to be a skill ceiling for AI: if we don’t train junior designers now, we’ll have no senior designers for the complex work AI can’t do.⁸

Time to take action

Bridging the growing talent gap will take more than a tweak in direction. It’s been five years since the pandemic steered us this way; only years of sustained investment can counter the momentum. Because of to the longer junior designer feedback loop, the returns won’t show up right away.

The cost of inaction is steep: if we continue on this path, we’ll face a talent cliff within a decade. Today’s super ICs will move into leadership roles or leave the industry (this describes my career arc), leaving a patchwork of contractors (like me) and undertrained mid-level designers. More companies will use AI for fundamental design work, while junior talent either gives up on design careers or never enters the field.

Imagine design teams where senior designers spend meaningful time mentoring, junior designers tackle complex problems under thoughtful guidance. What if companies competed, not for top talent, but for reputation as talent-developing powerhouses? The upside is huge, as innovation often comes from new perspectives on old problems. Breakthroughs in design practice could lead to more ethical, useful, and profitable products.

Some argue AI will eliminate entry-level design work, making investment in junior talent pointless. This assumes design is just about creating screens and assets. Even today’s junior designers bring strategic thinking, user advocacy, and collaborative skills that AI lacks. As we’re automating routine tasks, it’s the right time to reinvest those efficiency gains in developing these uniquely human capabilities.

The future belongs to teams that can execute today and build for tomorrow. If product designers are to be essential to tech, we need a short lever and a long measuring stick. We need to start measuring now.