{"id":9481,"date":"2026-11-06T18:27:26","date_gmt":"2026-11-06T18:27:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/?p=9481"},"modified":"2026-11-08T12:03:14","modified_gmt":"2026-11-08T12:03:14","slug":"industry-wants-product-designers-to-know-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/industry-wants-product-designers-to-know-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Industry Wants Product Designers to Know AI"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I was planning a workshop session recently for students in a UI design course, I looked up job ads from leading tech companies for product designers. I found three product designer job ads from AKQA, Google, and Notion, representing a big consultancy, a big tech company, and a startup. I was surprised to find that all three ads were explicitly asking designers to know AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Leading tech companies today seem to want designers who can move from concepts to functional prototypes using AI vibe-coding tools such as <em>Figma<\/em>, <em>Cursor<\/em>, and <em>Claude<\/em>. Notion even describes their product as a <em>&#8220;collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents think together&#8221;<\/em>. (See excerpts from the job ads below).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"582\" src=\"https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Screenshot-2026-11-06-at-19.08.01-edited-1024x582.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-9486\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Screenshot-2026-11-06-at-19.08.01-edited-1024x582.png 1024w, https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Screenshot-2026-11-06-at-19.08.01-edited-300x170.png 300w, https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Screenshot-2026-11-06-at-19.08.01-edited-768x436.png 768w, https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Screenshot-2026-11-06-at-19.08.01-edited-1536x872.png 1536w, https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Screenshot-2026-11-06-at-19.08.01-edited-2048x1163.png 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I expected this skill to appear on job ads sooner or later, but I&#8217;m surprised it has already happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If we look more closely at the requirements, it&#8217;s interesting that they ask designers to be able to use vibe coding (AI-assisted coding tools) <em>after<\/em> the concept development phase. They&#8217;re not asking designers to be able to use AI in the design process. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This makes sense because, until the second half of 2026, GenAI tools really weren&#8217;t good enough for UI design, for example. But since the release of Anthropic&#8217;s Opus 5.5 model (which has vision intelligence) in September, and GPT&#8217;s similarly new model, I have, for the first time, witnessed GenAI tools be good enough for UI design prompting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I wouldn&#8217;t be surprised if, 1 year from now, we&#8217;ll be seeing job ads for product designers that ask them to be able to work with GenAI tools <em>during<\/em> the design process as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For me, this confirms my intuition that the future is moving towards <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/the-future-of-ui-design-with-ai-how-to-keep-up-with-ai-as-a-ui-designer\/\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"8280\">designers who can also code<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I was planning a workshop session recently for students in a UI design course, I looked up job ads from leading tech companies for product designers. I found three product designer job ads from AKQA, Google, and Notion, representing a big consultancy, a big tech company, and a startup. I was surprised to find [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9518,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[179,167],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-future-emerging-new-technology","category-product-design","entry","has-media"],"gutentor_comment":0,"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Product-designer-AI-skills.png",1200,630,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Product-designer-AI-skills-150x150.png",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Product-designer-AI-skills-300x158.png",300,158,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Product-designer-AI-skills-768x403.png",768,403,true],"large":["https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Product-designer-AI-skills-1024x538.png",1024,538,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Product-designer-AI-skills.png",1200,630,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Product-designer-AI-skills.png",1200,630,false],"ocean-thumb-m":["https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Product-designer-AI-skills-600x600.png",600,600,true],"ocean-thumb-ml":["https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Product-designer-AI-skills-800x450.png",800,450,true],"ocean-thumb-l":["https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Product-designer-AI-skills.png",1200,630,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"Wendy Zhou","author_link":"https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/author\/wendy1111live-se\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"When I was planning a workshop session recently for students in a UI design course, I looked up job ads from leading tech companies for product designers. I found three product designer job ads from AKQA, Google, and Notion, representing a big consultancy, a big tech company, and a startup. I was surprised to find&hellip;","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9481"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9491,"href":"https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9481\/revisions\/9491"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wendyzhou.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}