Evan Karageorgos

If you’re leading a scale-up and design isn’t embedded early, you’re already paying for it. Just not where you think. Delayed launches. Expensive last-minute rework. A product that “functions” but fails to land with users. Internal chaos between teams. This is what happens when design is treated as a wrapper, not a driver. It’s rarely a process issue. It’s a sequencing issue. Design done late means scope creep, missed signals, and siloed decision-making. Design done early leads to faster decisions, clear priorities, better collaboration, and products that meet real needs the first time around. If you’re running product or tech at a scale-up, the question isn’t if design is costing you. The question is where it’s leaking the most value. So, when do you bring design into the conversation: at kickoff, or once things start breaking? 🔃If you found this post helpful, repost it with your network. Follow Joe Woodham for weekly insights on design leadership, business fluency, and influence that lasts.

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Which career track offers designers more opportunities: individual contributor or management? I did a quick research and looked at the numbers. Here is the summary (more details on my Substack): - Preference: 2x more designers want to stay ICs and not manage people - Supply: The talent pool of ICs is 1.7x larger than that of managers - Demand: There are 3x more design job openings for ICs than for managers What does this tell us? 1. Short-term: better to stay an IC At the first step after senior (staff/lead vs. manager), the IC path has significantly less competition—13 ICs per job opening vs. 23 managers. 2. Long-term: management may have more opportunities At higher levels—Sr. Staff/Principal vs. Director/VP—management roles become more common than IC ones. For example, there are 13x more Directors than Principals on the same level that are employed today (see the graph, thanks Pave for that data).

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🐌 Design handoff is slow and broken. And Figma knows it. After years of macgyvering with handoff tools for specs like Abstract or Zeplin (I used both, and also Plant back in the day), we've finally admitted the obvious: devs need actual design context, not screenshots, notations and guesswork. So, why not integrate directly with their AI coding assistants? Figma just launched a Dev Mode MCP server (yeah, the name’s a mouthful, but it's basically a USB-C standard for AIs to communicate). The point it, it lets tools like Microsoft Copilot and Cursor read your Figma files like a dev would, but much faster and hopefully with more accuracy and attention to detail. Not just attaching a screenshot — actual design intent through code parameters used by Figma to render UIs. And more than just layout like the import from Figma present in bolt.new, Lovable, and Vercel v0, this connection will pass actual components, tokens, variables, styles, etc. Basically: your design system now talks directly to your codebase via AI. No more “uhh what variant is this?” or “is this padding 4px or 8px?” What this changes for design handoff: - Faster handoffs with less back-and-forth - Code that sticks to the design system - Less translating, more shipping It’s still in beta, but the direction is clear: we’re heading toward a world where design-to-code isn’t just possible—it’s efficient. But the question remains, do you know what MCP stands for? #productdesign #figma #devmode #uxengineering #designsystems #copilot #handoff

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I've been asked to write a "Product Design Process" for an #opensource project. Happy to do so. Not a big deal. However... I'm a bit surprised we, as the #ux community, don't just have this as boilerplate by now. It's not rocket science. I know, I know, every project is a bit different but can't we have something basic that we can use as a starting point? Why is this seen as a type of "secret sauce"? It's the exact opposite! Notice I'm not saying "how to design the pixels", I'm talking about the bridge process: types of research, problem statement, team cohesion, finding focus, early prototyping, etc. To be sure, not every project can do all of that but that's the point of a starting document: lay out the basic flow and then decide what you can do. I think the answer is that no one wants to admit it's not that complicated. It takes away the mystique of the genius designer. This is totally flawed thinking as doing the process well is actually quite hard, describing it isn't giving anything away.

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The senior plateau is real. A lot of designers hit senior and think, “What now?” The path forward gets murky. Promotions slow down. The feedback gets more vague. Some jump to management just to feel momentum again. I did. But the real question isn’t “Should I manage?” It’s “Am I growing in impact?” The Super IC track is about hitting that plateau and redefining how you have impact.

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UX jobs are disappearing 3.6x faster than engineering roles. Budgets are shrinking. Teams are smaller. And AI just made “slow research” a career risk. On Oct 15 at World Usability Congress, I’ll share what 150,000+ unmoderated usability studies reveal about surviving (and thriving) in this new reality. 👇 AI has helped design and dev ship 10x faster… but research is still taking weeks. Here’s the hard truth: If your work is seen as a bottleneck, your job is at risk. The only way forward? Research at the speed of product. At my talk, I’ll cover: ✅ How non-UX folks can run user tests without killing quality ✅ Using AI (carefully) to flip research from “slow event” to “fast insight engine” ✅ The 80/20 methods that get you the most insights with minimal effort This isn’t just about keeping your job. It’s about making user testing so fast, effortless, and impactful… …that no one can imagine shipping without it. 📅 The Future of Usability Testing: Insights from 150,000+ Unmoderated Studies 🗓 Wed, Oct 15 • 11:30–12:10 📍 Hall 2, WUC 2025 If you’ll be there, come say hi.

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Here's what's costing Series A/B companies millions in missed opportunities: The persistent treatment of design as a final polish layer. When your design team is asked to "make it pretty" after engineering decisions are locked, you've fundamentally misunderstood design's function. At scale, this approach creates: • Escalating design debt across features • Fragmented user experiences that damage retention • Slower velocity as teams rebuild what could have been designed correctly initially What advanced teams understand: design decisions are business decisions. Every interaction pattern is behavioral psychology in action: → Your information hierarchy directly impacts feature adoption rates → Your visual consistency affects cognitive load and churn → Your interaction patterns become embedded mental models The solution isn't hiring more designers. It's elevating design from implementation to strategy. High-performing tech companies integrate design thinking at three critical points: 1. Pre-product planning (not post-development) 2. Cross-functional decision frameworks (not siloed design reviews) 3. Continuous evolution based on behavioral data (not periodic redesigns) Because at scale, your design system isn't just organizing visuals. It's encoding business strategy into every interaction.

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